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Web of Stories Part 2: A Sonata for Murakami
Spring was late, and so was I.
Synopsis: A young Tokyo record store clerk falls in love in a chance encounter
The beautiful thing about Ghostwritten is that you can read every chapter as a short story. And honestly, not much of the meaning of each episode is lost thinking about the book in this way. But together they become some giant version of Haruki Murakami’s “Chance Traveller”, with events in one story triggering vital events in the next. These character’s lives are literally being ghostwritten by one another.
And in this section, Mitchell proves that he too can ghostwrite. This reads almost exactly like a Murakami short story. The constant references to jazz music. The Bildungsroman of the narrator, Satoru. The sheer Japaneseness of the writing. And while Mitchell will go on to develop this style into a full novel in number9dream, inserting a love letter to his favorite author is not a reason enough for this to be here. I think I have some ideas
The Human World is Made of Stories
If the Okinawa section is a story about a man struggling to define his hatred, this a story about a man struggling to define love and belonging. In Japan, these two seemingly contrasting ideas are fundamentally intertwined. The mild disgust that even Satoru shows…
