Previously: how to tell if you are in an Iris Murdoch novel.
An elephant mysteriously vanishes. A giant frog is waiting in your apartment. Your cat mysteriously vanishes. Two moons hang in the sky. Your wife mysteriously vanishes. A strange man comes to you and asks you to find a sheep, or a woman calls and asks for ten minutes of your time. You might be the protagonist in a novel or short story by acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Look around you. If any of these things sound familiar, you might want to get a new collar for your cat:
1. You drink your coffee black.
2. You have a deep and abiding love for old jazz records.
3. You find it easy to have emotionless sex with strangers. If you were to describe the sex to a friend you would use the most abstract language possible, but you never do because you have no friends.
4. You worship the 1960s and the simple comforts in life: black coffee, old jazz records, emotionless afternoon sex. If, however, you are actually living in the 1960s, you mostly just keep to yourself.
5. You find yourself constantly thinking that things would be better if we just went back to how they used to be. You spend days thinking about how only you are living the only real way to live; everyone around you is unrefined, uncouth, and unworthy of your attention.
6. You have a friend who is your complete opposite. If you are quiet and insightful, they are bold and brash. You are unquestioningly good friends, even though you both uncharitably compare yourselves to each other all the time.
7. You are incredibly good at describing any room you are currently in. Every detail is outlined, with strict attention paid to the seemingly non-essential items that fill in the gaps of a careful description. To hear you describe a room is to be able to imagine every single object with perfect clarity, down to how smoothly the paint lies on the walls. You do not know how to describe emotions.
8. The highest compliment you can pay a woman is to not sleep with her.
9. There is a single person you are destined to be with. Your relationship with this person is not just of love, but of total and complete being. The universe was created solely so that you and this person could meet. Be careful: this may also be a sign you are in a Banana Yoshimoto short story.
10. You are forced to leave your home and journey in search of something, you know not what. You go to five-star hotels, small towns, seedy motel rooms, a psychiatric ward in the hills, an island off the coast of Greece. You wait there for something to happen. You wait for a long time, but it is not until you return home that the thing you were waiting for actually happens. It surprises you, yet afterward you still feel unresolved. No matter what you do, you always are left feeling unresolved, catharsis always just out of reach.
Note: This applies to men only. If you are a woman in a Murakami novel, you have probably already disappeared.
Tags: alice lee, haruki murakami, novels, quizzes
If you’re a teenage girl, though, you’re uncomfortably precocious and wear a lot of black.
You probably have amazing ears.
You eat spaghetti constantly.
Don’t forget your intense love of cooking and eating spaghetti. Also probably watch yourself around wells, just in case.
I made one of the spaghettis once. It was delicious!
You cook meals for one that are simultaneously very simple and very complicated, and eat them alone.
One time I accidentally bought a novel from a guy called Ryu Murakami, Almost Transparent Blue, which is about a bunch of young Japanese people in the 1970s doing every possible drug and having sex with everyone and everything. If you’ve already read, say, two of Haruki’s novels, you should probably skip the rest and just read that.
hahah almost transparent blue creeped me out so badly. i might have just been super young (like maturity-level) when i read it, but i remember being TERIFIED by it.
I’m with you there. I don’t know if it’s because I was expecting a HARUKI Murakami novel but I definitely put it down a few times, and I’m not normally a squeamish reader.
(Also don’t judge me people, there was no first name on the cover.)
ETA: Also THIS is the sort of awesome literary experience that Amazon has DESTROYED so THANKS TECHNOLOGY
While waiting for a mysterious, vaguely malignant entity to arrive and tell you what to do, you clean your apartment and make sandwiches. If there is beer in the fridge, you drink it. If not, you reminisce about handjobs.
I have only read ONE Murakami novel, but yes, this was basically it. But if you’re a woman in a Murakami novel, you’ve probably disappeared, but not after fucking the protagonist for no real reason I can discern, because he is the worst. And not even GOOD at sex.
I don’t know if people get skinned alive in more than one Murakami novel, but then again one’s really enough.
You have strange experiences in elevators.
You regularly slip between parallel channels of time.
http://www.incidentalcomics.com/2012/06/haruki-mu…
Goes well with this.
oh gosh, now i want to read his books. unsure if this is good/bad
IRVINE WELSH NEXT PLEASE!
I read his 1Q84. It was so good. I am now a fan.
How to tell you are in a Murakami novel:
1) You are a man.
2) You are a jerk and you know it.
3) You drink only black coffee and eat only spaghetti.
4) You only listen to jazz.
5) You are unfazed by all of the following: drug trips, hijacked dreams, animal violence, people violence, insults from your only friend, talking animals, people in animal costumes, parking your car in the middle of a busy street, disappearances of women.
The protagonist cleans every inch of the apartment to keep down the stress or when bored
*Looks around* Seems like I’m still here… Phew.
*Looks around* Seems like I'm still here… Phew.
I would add protagonist is an avid reader to that list.
If you are a wife, you come prepared with duck tape, rope, and ski masks in the glove compartment of your car.
Loved it. And, all these things would be why I tried and failed (twice!) to read wind-up bird. This particular dude writer is just not for me.
Loved it. And, all these things would be why I tried and failed (twice!) to read wind-up bird. This particular dude writer is just not for me.
You're neither scared of a man dessed up in a sheep costume nor in a 2m frog waiting for you in your apartment.
Not so fast, count the moons!
You forgot about how every woman you meet is an embodiment of a color, or an emotion, or named after an object, and is generally such a thinly-veiled metaphor that she’s hardly even a person, which is why is speaks so strangely.
Have read every novel – loved loved loved…want more more more