The lonely reader

 Something that seems obvious now but I hadn’t really thought about before reading “Sleep,” was just how truly alone practically every Murakami character is. Even when they find love or a family, there’s always something preventing full connection or something that takes it away. In “Sleep,” this comes in the form of the wife’s desire for independence and escape from the monotony of her house life. But in other stories, the characters’ loneliness comes from a force outside their control, or at least one more unclear to them. 

This made me wonder what role we as the audience play. It often feels like the narrators are directly telling someone the events from the future or as they happen. So does this make us an unwilling confidant? Their conscience working through the logic of their choices? In “Sleep,” it feels like the latter. At the end of the story, she tells herself, “Just calm down and think, then everything will be okay. Think. Just think. Slowly. Carefully. Something is wrong” (109). Our ability to understand the situation becomes incapacitated by the narrator’s panic. The sentences and descriptions become short, fragmented as the perception of reality for the character changes. This, in Murakami’s other stories, leads to the incomplete, dreamlike descriptions of locations and people. If the characters’ mental state perceives a situation one way, that’s the only way we get to see it. 

This must be why Murakami liked Metamorphosis so much. The narrative forces the character into the mind of something they could never fully understand which allows Kafka to create a version of the world familiar but altogether separate from our own. By inverting the setup of the story, Murakami is able to do the same but show us how, even as a human, we can feel alienated from the world around us. Samsa experiences our emotions, embarrassment, love, physical attraction, but does not ascribe the same meanings or logic to them. Murakami doesn’t use first person for this story, forcing us to simply observe and increasing the sense of alienation. 

• joe