ufo in kushiro

First of all, I think people write stories about bad things because it’s cathartic. When you’re forced to write a cohesive narrative about something negative, it forces you to derive meaning from—or at least make sense of—the bad thing that happened. Second of all, I think stories about bad things are told and read because realism requires negativity. No real event is ever purely happy, and for that reason the stories we write can’t be purely happy either if we want them to be believable. For me, the number one reason I put a book down is because it’s not believable. If a story totally lacked conflict or unhappiness I think it would lose its credibility as a “true” story.

Finally, I think that happiness in its purest form requires unhappiness. There’s a yin-yang relationship between the two; the person who’s never experienced pain has also never experienced true joy. I think the stories that make us the happiest are when happiness is derived from hardship or tragedy. A narrative about a man who finds his soul mate after experiencing the death of his best friend is so much more moving than one about a man who finds his soul mate.

Mystery drives “ufo in kushiro” in multiple ways. First of all, the many small mysteries throughout the story accelerate the narrative at rapid speed as the reader plows forward in anticipation of the question being answered. We want to know why Komura’s wife is so fixated on the media coverage of the earthquakes. We wonder why she leaves him. We question what’s in the small box. We wonder why Sasaki wants Komura to hand-deliver the small box. We want to know how Keiko Sasaki and Shimao recognize Komura even though he’s not carrying the box. We question if Komura’s wife’s mysterious disappearance is related to that of the woman who saw the UFO.

As readers, these small questions spark our curiosity and make the story a literal page-turner. Still, they do more than that. By layering on these tiny, bizarre mysteries, Murakami creates an overall surreal, even supernatural, feeling. Even though it’s completely irrational and nonsensical to think that Komura’s wife’s disappearance could be linked to that of the woman who saw the UFO, I found myself pondering this potential connection intensely. Even though the story is realistic, it nonetheless pushes at the boundaries of what’s normal. It reminded me of magical realism in the sense that things happen that are clearly bizarre, and yet the reader buys into this weirdness because it’s so consistent throughout the story. At the end of the story I was left feeling very strange because I had so thoroughly immersed myself in Murakami’s bizarre world. Thus while the actual mysteries themselves drive the narrative because it’s human nature to want questions answered, the cumulative effect of the many mini-mysteries is to create a surreal tone to the story that makes it all the more compelling.