UFO in Kushiro

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

I think people write and listen to sad stories not because we're all avid masochists (although there's nothing wrong with some good old fashioned BDSM), but because these stories are the only stories worth telling. Stories work in the framework of the lives that we experience; if life is filled with struggles and challenges, then the stories working in this framework, if they are to be believable, must also have some kind of conflict, even if it is subtle or not readily apparent. Without this conflict, the reader is not challenged by the story, and therefore does not feel anything. I hate to be that guy who quoted Checkhov in his blog post, but Chekhov, when giving advice to writers, said, "Be more cold." It is the cold stories, the stories that make us shiver, that move us. As far as I'm concerned, a story in which nothing bad happens is a story in which nothing at all happens, and it is for this reason that stories need have more bad than good.

2) How does mystery drive this Murikami story?

I'm not sure it would be right to say, "This is exactly how this story functions," about a story so open-ended and ambiguous. With that in mind, I'm just going to focus on what mystery did to me personally while I was reading "UFO in Kushiro."

In terms of how the arc of the story worked as a result of mystery, I think Murakami threw a bunch of unknowns at the reader from the very start, and spent the rest of the novel dispersing just enough information for the reader to, by the end of the story, attempt to draw their own, probably very vague conclusion. Having been presented with all of these frustrating unknowns, I got to a point in the story where I hated myself for not being able to read faster. "What the hell is in the box," and "Where the hell did the wife go," and "What the hell is so funny about the bear," and "Who the hell are these girls"; these, among various other colorful obscenities, were the thoughts running through my head throughout most of the story.

It wasn't so much that I cared all that much what happened, then – I just needed to know what happened. So, while I'm not quite sure how mystery drove the story itself forward, I can say that it drove me, the reader, forward. It kept me flipping pages, and I couldn't help but feel that Murikami, through mystery, was manipulating my mind, leading me down a trail that really had no end.