Sadness and Mysteries

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

I feel we tell stories that end badly for two reasons: the first being so that we can experience such a loss or pain ourselves without the feeling being permanent or affecting people we know. We read stories to learn about world we might never experience ourselves - a sort of a way to live vicariously through a fictional character. We enjoy this because it makes us feel something we haven’t experienced before. The second reason sad stories exist is because we want our lives to be filled with happiness and in order to balance that we need to experience sadness. Neither can exist without referencing the other. If a story was only about good things, what would we learn from it? There is no question about the human condition, no dramatic change that someone learned; essentially, nothing happens in the story and there is no major character development that we can relate to. Good things don’t happen all the time, that is the unfortunate truth about reality, and if something bad doesn’t happen a story just becomes unbelievable. The rules of the world appear broken and the story itself becomes “bad.”

2) How does mystery drive this Murakami story?

Mystery drives this story because we want to know all the things Komura doesn’t know. Why did his wife leave? What’s in the package? What’s with the ending line? There are a lot of questions thrown out and (what I personally find disappointing) we don’t learn what the answers are. We experience the mystery at the same time Komura does and we can’t help but be curious to what he has inadvertently gotten himself into. We read for answers and we are eventually rewarded with some answers. Personally, I always get a little disappointed when I read this story because there are so many unanswered questions by the end. So for me, the mystery doesn’t quite fulfill itself and leaves me wanting more from the story, and not in a positive way.