I often read what someone else is reading, or if the title seems interesting. In fact I was drawn to the latest book I am reading because its cover glows in the dark. Clearly I don’t really go by the “don’t judge a book by its cover” philosophy.
A couple of days back someone’s Facebook status talked of short stories by Haruki Murakami. I remember hearing this name in some random conversation that avid readers were having. I remembered the strangeness of the name- Ha-ru-ki –Mu-ra-ka-mi, what a strange collection of sounds!
And that’s where it all started. With the strangeness of his name, rather than the reviews of his work, that I decided I should read something he had written. I started with Scheherazade, dived into to Samsa in Love and Yesterday, glided onto the‘Town of Cats, U.F.O in Kushiro and finally The Folklore of Our Times.
Not that the stories are very long, or even filled with twists that you can’t put them down. In fact to be honest, his stories are rather mundane. About people buying groceries, going through sex like it’s a series of motions and having coffees.
Then what is it that kept me going back to one story after another?
I think it was precisely this mundaneess, these average regular motions and the adjectives. The adjectives kept me going back for more. The stories don’t really have a drastic ending to them, they just sort of end. Without any real declaration, or anticipation. They just end. Abruptly. And yet somehow they never seem incomplete. It almost feels like they have completed their purpose.
They are not long stories either, but I could not read more than one in a day, two was a best case scenario. In their mundaneness, the stories were so absolutely potent that I needed time to digest them. They just left me wondering. The conversations in the stories were real, words simple, the underlying currents rather strong.
I don’t think I am qualified enough to review a book or critique a writer. However I will say this much about writing, if there ever was a time when I felt the words in my bones, this was it.
And that is what writing is about. Feeling all of life. And turning it into ink. Murakami knows how to do that.
Zahra Husain likes to live and think in ways she is not supposed to and she blogs at http://www.zahrasays.com