First, the cat was gone. But it was not just the cat. Soon everything else in Toru Okada’s life pulled away the same way a star in the galaxy loses its life; the very center of the star – the core – collapses, crushing together every proton and electron. Reality was like an ironed pale white t-shirt, before it was layered beneath other cluttered and colorful fabrics that made it no longer visible. One single event managed to radically change the neat, clean and monotonous life of Okada, revealing his powerlessness over his life, existence, and identity. Like the star, Okada’s real, core identity was long gone by the end of the book. His inner self was corrupted and rotted by even the closest people around him, and he was no longer able to separate his own self from their own world. His own independence, and his own freedom, was trapped inside others’ reality, and before he realized, he was descending into a labyrinth of their evil and ruin. Japanese author Haruki Murakami is known for his magical realism and bizarre imagination that sets his characters off on a journey…
Drawing Parallelisms in Literature: Japan, Egypt and the Existential Society
July 28, 2022
