I was supposed to go up to the city tonight to hang out with Vidya and see a comedy show, but I was exhausted from the events of the past month and so decided to stay home. I left work with grand plans to start cleaning my apartment from top to bottom and perhaps make dinner; instead, I nuked a single-serving bag of popcorn and read 'A Wild Sheep Chase' from start to finish. 'A Wild Sheep Chase' was my first introduction to Haruki Murakami, whose books I have gone on to read obsessively over the past six years.
Strangely, when I first read it, I thought it was hilarious--I remember reading parts of it in the garden outside the Kingscote Apartments on Stanford campus, where John and I had gone to study (the book was for a Japanese pop culture class that we were both taking) and thinking that it was the most entertaining book ever. Reading it tonight, however, I can't see what I thought was funny about it - instead, I just felt overwhelmingly sad.
Perhaps reading it again just brought back too many memories of that spring; reading the book, I briefly fell asleep near the end, during the chapters in which the protagonist is waiting for the Rat to show up, and I had the strangest sense of deja vu that I had fallen asleep while reading the same scenes before. But my initial experience with the book was the springtime after my grandfather died, a time that seems hazy now but that I remember was a wild oscillation between feigned euphoria and serious, overwhelming heartbreak. I spent most of that spring ignoring my classes, reading books, and sleeping in the grass outside the library, wishing that everything would just go back to normal.
But I digress. Murakami's books are so heartbreaking, for me at least, because they tend to involved unnamed, bland protagonists confronting unrealistic, fantastic situations - but the situations are never the point of the stories. Rather, through the absurdities of the plots, the protagonists inevitably seem to draw deep, sad conclusions about their own mortality and their lack of meaning and connection; but, these conclusions are muted, as though they've been submerged in a deep well, because the protagonists are so incapable of connecting with others that they can't even express their disconnection because of the barriers that surround them.
In this book called 'The Secret Universe of Names', I read that the sounds of my name imply that I am, on one hand, multi-talented and caring, but on the other hand, I am pessimistic, sarcastic, and stubborn. Accurate, eh? I don't want to be pessimistic, but reading 'A Wild Sheep Chase' tonight made me consider again what life is supposed to be - and it lured me towards the edge of that abyss where all the dangerous thoughts about the meaning and purpose of life lurk. Perhaps I'm doubting the purpose of life right now because, if *this* is my purpose, I'm v. disappointed. Or, perhaps I'm doubting the purpose of life because I don't want to acknowledge that I need to make some serious changes, and those changes will require a commensurate amount of effort. Either way, there has to be more to life than this - I refuse to accept that life is just a string of meetings and emails followed by a quick and unexpected (or slow and painful) death.
We shall see - perhaps a year or two from now, I will look back at this post and laugh. Tonight, though, I should go to bed.
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