Haruki Murakami and Music

Haruki Murakami’s life could not escape the music, his pen is his instrument to jam and to create the same tune into his words, the ink became his note, he is like a pianist, when he pressed the key, something happened, same wave but sounded different, he writes his novels,  like a jazz player, he improvises, he floats, he is Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk. Whiskey and coffee mixed with insomnia, classical music and cat dancing to the Beatles, pin ball machine and the lost sheep riding in a bar, the scenes of alienation, icy scenes, the fictional world  flooded into his coffee shop, the wall is moving with the music, the sound of rock, we are in his  1Q48, everything is unsure but real. His novels are like the track of time with melancholy, tripped the light of the complex emotions. We follow him and let him take us to Norwegian Wood at South of the Border, West of the Sun, we witness an elephant trying to build a dream house on the shore with Kafka after dark, we hear the Wind Sing and then vanish.

In Murakami’s novels, the main character never understands the world and trying to maintain a certain distance, exhausted to figure it out  but wants to pursuit a mysterious goal. He can not stop looking for something, like a man in a fog has to continue to go on, it’s strange but that is why his novels are charming and stylish to us. In his world we are lost and confused , everything he wrote is familiar to us, we know the music and the places he described, we have been there.

We refuse to grow up, refused to make sense of  reality, he provoked perhaps the most stubborn subconscious, a  logical subconscious that we are trying to protect but at the same time we are connected and deeply moved by it and we don’t know why, the mini person walked  out from a TV, a sheep man, The Bird-Catcher,  Johnnie Walker and Fuka-Eri.

Everything is so freakish attractive and we all accepted it. Murakami speaks to our mind and skips the rejection of our defence conscious, we can not resist, we are like the character in wild sheep chase. We understand the life, the fantasy and dreams that he created. We are confused by the description, the attitude and the unrealistic world but the sandwiches, the whiskey , the coffee, Mozart’s magic flute, Miles Davis ,Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, Marvin Gaye, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan are so real to us.  Murakami is using music to contact our soul, using it as a weapon to invade our heart. No matter what happens. When we read his words we hear the same music and all of the sudden we see the same vision as Watanabe or Aomame,  we see his characters are suffering  and being tested, we want to help them, to save them from difficulties and struggling, we want them back to live in their simple life, we hear the music, we know how they feel when they are  listen to Nat king Coles, it felt like déjà vu and we just can’t escape the music and Murakami, we are surrounded and we’ re  just dance, dance , dance with John Greenwood in Hard-boiled Wonderland.