Sad Stories, UFO in Kushiro

Nobody wants to read a story where everything goes right. It would be boring, and it would be “cheesy.” We certainly want everything to go right in our own lives, however, and if it is that part of the reason we enjoy stories is because we relate to the characters, why do we enjoy reading about bad things happening to them? 

I believe that reading sad stories has a slightly preparatory purpose. Reading about something that will likely not happen in our own lives allows us to experience more and to understand life more richly. Stories can present us with surprising or unfamiliar emotions, and by living vicariously through them, we adapt ourselves for an unpredictable world. But this is a very dry and clinical explanation, and I believe the real reason to read a sad story has much more to do with your own emotions. 

Some have suggested that part of the reason we like sad stories is because they make us feel better about our own circumstances. As a reader, though, I do not feel myself responding to tragedy in a narrative by comparing the situations of the characters to my own and thus reevaluating and appreciating my life. Readers care too much about their characters to do this. Instead, I believe that stories can help us to deal with our own emotions, in two ways. First, sad stories can act as a method of catharsis to help us cope with emotions like sadness. Society teaches us that to express too much emotion is inappropriate, and that we are supposed to use the more civilized parts of ourselves to regulate what we feel. Thus, art can be used as an outlet for your emotions, so that they do not bottle up inside of you and drive you crazy. Art is also a more useful expression of emotion than temper tantrums. By turning your own sadness into a third person version of sadness, as in a story, you can slightly detach yourself from your feelings and thus find a way to explain them to yourself. 

The second way that stories help us to deal with our emotions, however, does not involve detachment. Instead, I believe that we sometimes seek sad stories in order to dwell on or amplify negative emotions. When I am sad, I don’t want to listen to “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” I want to listen to “Knocking On Heaven’s Door.” These sad songs or sad stories do not make us feel better. They actually make us feel worse. But emotions are part of the human experience, and they are part of who we are, driving almost all of our behavior. Thus, literature as an amplifier of our emotions is just simply good for us. Really feeling the full force of emotion helps us be human. 

Mystery drives Haruki Murakami’s “UFO in Kushiro” because it is the only part of the story that seems fully alive. The world that Murakami creates is very slow and almost dull. Disaster has struck Kobe, but for Komura, this danger and tragedy seems to be very much somewhere else. The sex that Komura and Shimao try unsuccessfully to have is without any flavor of passion. Komura’s whole world seems to be lacking the richness that our world has.

Komura is also very mechanical. He really does feel like the “chunk of air” his wife accuses him of being. He is strangely passive, and nothing that happens in the story is a result of his own actions. When Sasaki asks him to travel to Hokkaido during his time off to deliver a package, Komura accepts the idea without any real consideration, only realizing when he gets there that he has no idea how he is going to spend his time. Even when his wife leaves him, Komura’s only response is to call her once and then decide that he has little power to change her mind. 

For these reasons, a craving to understand the situations outside of Komura drives the reader. We want to know why his wife left. She seems to have moved on to a more exciting life, one that is somehow tied to the earthquakes in Kobe. At least she carries a sense of agency. We want to know what is inside the mysterious box. It will certainly be surprising, more surprising than anything Komura has done. We simply want Murakami to give us the sense of life, of excitement and spontaneity, that exists in our own world. These surprises, however, are never delivered. Murakami ends the story with strings untied. We as readers are forced to be Komura. We are forced to accept the story as it is, with no explanation, as Komura does with his life. We are forced to experience shallowness, rather than richness, as Komura’s world exists. In this way, Murakami’s mystery tricks us into staying around long enough to have our own agency stolen from us.