And this from "Samsa in Love," a riff on Kafka's classic narrator in "The Metamorphosis":The woman took his hand and guided it to the scars, making him touch each one in turn. There were scars on her breasts, and beside her vagina. She guided his hand as he traced those dark, hard marks, as if he were using a pencil to connect the dots. The marks seemed to form a shape that reminded him of something, but in the end led nowhere. They had sex on the tatami floor.
The tempo is nearly comical in the way the sentences snap us back to the current moment. Murakami employs this contrast between the mundane and mysterious to create a sense of the uncanny, something at once mysterious and homey. What's truly remarkable throughout these stories and much of Murakami's work is how these memories can be transferrable from character to character and to us, the readers. Of course, this could be said in some way about all great works of literature—good prose writing, after all, conveys the thoughts and feelings of its author to its audience—but in Murakami's work, this effect is made explicit: Often we encounter stories within stories, relayed dreams that blur the lines between memories and imaginings. In "Yesterday," the main character hears a girl tell him about her dream—a dream of her sitting with her boyfriend watching an ice-moon half submerged in the sea. The character adopts her memory as his own and, in turn, so does the reader. The novelist Richard Powers has written that Murakami creates a shared consciousness with his readers in much the way mirror neurons respond to another hand picking up a cup of coffee as though moving our own limbs. "In the looping, shared circuitry of mirror neurons," Powers writes that we can find a roadmap to "communal, subterranean truths, the truths that Murakami's mirrorscape of symbols brings into existence as we read him."It is this sense of shared consciousness, this promise of intimacy that is also the promise of finding home, that creates devotees of Murakami's readers (far more than his rock-star literary status). Ultimately, looking for answers in Murakami's work can seem like a fool's errand. A better way, perhaps, is to embrace it as you would a benevolent guest: someone whose arrival changes us and whose eventual disappearance leaves us to understand that relationship only by its absence.Follow Tana Wojczuk on Twitter.Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami is available in bookstores and online from Knopf.The pungent fragrance recalled something to him. It did not come directly, however; it arrived in stages. It was a strange feeling, as if he were recollecting the present from the future. As if time had somehow been split in two, so that memory and experience revolved within a closed cycle, each following the other. He poured a liberal amount of cream into his coffee, stirred it with his finger, and drank.