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Poetry

Short Stories of Haruki Murakami

October 18, 2021 by Essay Writer

Haruki Murakami is a Japanese storyteller that allegedly allows the reader to become very aware of the story but if not the actual meaning. Murakami short stories convey many overwhelming themes that affect the characters in drastic ways. He also uses distraction as a way for the characters to not notice the world around them. In his short stories where I’m using two-tone with animals to show that we distract ourselves from the outside world to cope with the presence of loneliness.

In man eating cats, a man has to deal with cheating on his wife and not having feelings for the other person. Then he ends up running away from his previous life and realizes that he can’t deal with his overwhelming fear of loneliness and deal with his inner turmoil. “Suddenly Izumi ’s voice came out of nowhere. The real you has been eaten by cats. While you’ve been standing here, those hungry cats have devoured you eating you all up”( 95). The cats represent the feelings of the man he is having around him. He felt like he was being devoured by the feeling that he was so prone to having. He runs away from all of his emotional problems never facing them. He was really frightened when he started to lose himself and those around him.

During the Year of Spaghetti, you are greeted with a man that does everything after spaghetti. It is the most important thing in his life, so he compares it to a German Shepherd. “Big enough to bathe a German Shepherd in”(1). “I’d gather up the trampled-down shadows of time, knead them into the shape of a German Shepherd, toss them into rolling water, and sprinkle them with salt”(4). A German shepherd is naturally a protection dog. They are even used in the police force. The dog is showing the man’s views on the world, so he compares the spaghetti to the dog to show how much he cares for it. It even blinds him to his nonexistent views on the real world. The German Shepherd is protecting his view on the world but also taking away from his natural experiences that he was supposed to gain without relying so much on the spaghetti.

In Town of cats, a relationship develops between a father, and his son is not the healthiest way. The son then proceeds to find a book called the town of cats about a boy being in a place different from his own world but he doesn’t realize it until many cats appear. The town that the boy has traveled to is filled with cats that can do the same things that humans do. When the cats come out, he realizes that he was not supposed to be there. The story of the Town of Cats was representing him and his father’s relationship with each other. They were always there just never being noticed. The son was more like the boy because he was entering the town of cats and realizing that it was like another world and that he wasn’t supposed to be there. In the end, he finally had a real conversation with his father, and they end up better understanding each other. It was like how the boy on the trip to the town noticing it was supposed to stay another world and away never to have anyone enter it again.

In Murakami’s collection of stories, he uses the tone of the animals to show that there is some form of loneliness. In Kino, a man opens a bar after discovering that his wife was cheating on him. Then he starts to have a relationship with another woman and ultimately deciding to close his bar. “It wasn’t a person who first discovered what a comfortable place Kino was but a stray cat”(69). When the cat first appears its when Kino discovered the perfect place for his bar. It was stated that the cat brought him good luck which was a great help to him seeing as though he was losing everything.

In Kino at the end of the story, you see the gray cat disappear, and a snake suddenly becomes present allowing you to think about the difference between a cat and a snake. “Around the time that the cat disappeared, Kino started to notice snakes outside near the building”(74). The Snakes represent a change in Kino’s life; it’s like how the cats let him to the bar within the cats disappeared in his bar starts to feel surrounded by snakes. The snakes represent a place that he found was no longer the same place something had changed drastically. In New York Mining Disaster is a story about a man telling a story about his friend that goes to the zoo during really bad storms. Many animals were mentioned in the story from the zoo animals such as gorillas, tigers, and many other animals you see at the zoo. His friend is so attached to the zoo that every typhoon he can be found at the zoo. He goes because the animals act differently during the typhoon then people do. The animals show that he cares more about their reaction than the people around him. Since everybody around him just keeps on dying and he has to go to so many funerals. Man-eating cats start with a story about a woman being eaten by cats in her home after she has died. Then it goes right into a toxic relationship that causes the man to cheat on his wife. When his wife finds out he decides to leave everything behind him and run off with the other woman to Greece. When they are on the plane, he starts to feel the overwhelming urge of fear and loneliness that he has a panic attack on the plane and the only thing that can calm him down was the other women. This reminded me of how the cats that were stuck in the house felt and that the only thing that they could do to survive was to eat the flesh of the old women that had died.

In the Town of Cats, the main character and his father do not have the best relationship with each other. His father expects so much for him that he never has an actual relationship with him. This only becomes clear when he discovers that he wants to have a better relationship with his father after realizing that he didn’t turn out as though his father wanted him to be. That’s when he undoubtedly discovers a book on a train a Town filled with cats “It is the place where he is meant to be lost. It is another world…”(47).He finally realized that the story was basically describing him and his father’s current relationship. And only reading this story was he able to finally able to connect with his father. The cats in the story changed his point of view on his father. In conclusion, the Japanese culture will always be very open but also very closed off. It is culturally acceptable to deal with social problems on your own and in almost every story the protagonist had to solve their situations the best way they knew how which resulted in being blind to the views of the outside world and ultimately still being lonely.

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