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December 11, 1997 |
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Philadelphia City
Paper |
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The wondrous interior worlds of Haruki Murakami.
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"People were no more than dolls set on tabletops, the springs
in their backs wound up tight, dolls set to move in ways they
could not choose? Most of them died, plunging over the edge
of the table."
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We are wind-up toys. We know as much about ourselves as we
do soup cans without labels, regarding ourselves from the
outside, guessing at our own contents. We are moments away
from monsters in the subway and strange, subterranean realms.
Welcome to Haruki Murakami's existential universe.
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Murakami's works are filled with all of the problems that
the post-Cartesian world brings with it. Identity is not in
the body, nor does it reside in consciousness. Both his new
novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and his 1991 Hard-Boiled
Wonderland and the End of the World bend and stretch the constraints
of how we are who we are, taking more or less normal people
and thrusting them into weird, dark underworlds and realities
that fold in on themselves.
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The constellation of Murakami's characters include different
people sharing the same body, a man becoming a living organism
within television, and a woman who believes she is the third
incarnation of herself in the same lifetime, like Fausto Maijstral
in Thomas Pynchon's V. A cat and a person share the same name,
people go by acknowledged pseudonyms, and unrelated characters
all named Noboru Watanabe show up in several of the stories
collected in 1993's The Elephant Vanishes.
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continue reading at |
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http://citypaper.net/articles/121197/bq.murakami.shtml |
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