Why Bad Things Are Good For Us and What Murakami Never Told Us

Why do we tell and listen to stories in which bad things happen?

In fiction as in life, when Bad Things happen to people, it reveals their true character.  St. George would not have stood out as particularly brave minus a dragon to fight; we could not have known for sure that Romeo and Juliet loved one another more than life itself, had their escape plan succeeded.  Conversely, Jack from Lord of the Flies probably would have felt obliged to keep his nastier impulses a bit more under wraps, had he and his classmates remained safely cossetted in the lap of civilization.

Furthermore, Bad Things shape character.  They can either strengthen or damage the people they impact; either instill them with compassion, or in some way stunt their ability to experience emotion.  Tragedy and trauma breed introspection, introduce dark and conflicted feelings, craft nuanced and therefore more fascinating personalities.  Someone to whom nothing much has ever happened is someone who has little to talk about.

Finally, Bad Things are necessary in this world in order to make us fully appreciate Good Things.  Another writing class that I’m taking assigned us the prompt of designing a utopia with a single fatal flaw.  My utopia’s flaw was quite simple: one could never leave, and thus never experience anything other than Utopia.  What I described was a free, prosperous, rather hedonistic sort of place—gifted with extraordinary beauty in terms of both landscape and population—which no normal person would have any desire to leave.  Its perfection was, however, utterly wasted on my native-born narrator due to the fact that he lacked any standard by which to recognize it.  Only immigrants to that land, who had witnessed the poverty and disease and decay and boredom and tyranny and ugliness of other comparatively wretched lands, could be absolutely happy there. 

Regarding literature specifically, Bad Things keep us reading either because we crave assurance that our favorite characters manage to avert catastrophe, or because it has already struck and we need to find out how the characters will handle it.  We take a vicious satisfaction in the downfall of the ones whom we hate; our love for others keeps us by their sides through their worst ordeals, and our intimate knowledge of those ordeals immeasurably enhances the vicarious thrill which we take in their subsequent triumphs.  Also, we hope to learn through fictional characters how to deal with our own crises.  A character who has exclusively benign experiences has nothing to teach, and clearly doesn’t require any looking after by an anxious reader.

How does mystery drive Murakami’s story?

“UFO in Kushiro” derives virtually all of its momentum from mystery.  Initially it attracts the reader’s curiosity with the questions of why Komura’s wife should be so deeply affected by the earthquake, why she really chose to leave him, and whether the two events were in any way related.  Then there is, of course, the mysterious package entrusted to Komura, which he accepts oddly unquestioningly.  Even Murakami’s physical descriptions of his characters raise some unnerving suspicions: Keiko’s “smooth, mechanical” gait evokes a robot or perhaps, based on Komura’s “strange impression that he was witnessing some moment from the past, shoved with random suddenness into the present”—a ghost.  And it is the final ambiguity which makes the story linger: did Komura truly relinquish his soul to Keiko when he gave her the package, or was that idea no more in truth than a creepy joke on Shimao’s part?  To spell out either answer would have made the story easy to dismiss.