ufo in kushiro

1. In general, why do we tell and listen to stories in which bad things happen?

Bad things are absolutely necessary for a story to be a story.  Bad things are the stuff of conflicts, so I suppose what I mean is that conflict is necessary for stories.  Stories are traditionally (and usually non-traditionally) driven by conflict.  Something is wrong.  The protagonist comes up against some kind of struggle and must overcome it, or at least address it.  I'm thinking of screenplays.  Something has to upset the status quo, and often times this inciting incident is a bad thing.  Then the protagonist has to embark on some journey to fix the problem.  And the story continues because things keep getting worse.  More and more bad things happen.  This raises the stakes.  This raises the tension.  This makes the story more dramatic, more engaging, more worth paying attention to.  (I'm not sure I agree with all of these statements, but this is the argument I want to make right now.)

2. How does mystery drive this Murakami story?

The Murakami story hooks the reader first by making Komura's wife disappear and then by introducing the story of the empty box and also by bringing in the details of the earthquake.  It's intriguing.  It's ominous.  He uses a genre convention to unsettle us, to make us question what's going on and whether it ought to be going on.  In a way the empty box becomes something like a ticking time bomb, even though it never literally explodes.  We expect Komura to suffer some kind of consequences for accepting the box.  At first it seems likely that the box is a con, that Komura is transporting drugs and will be apprehended, and his apprehension at the airport seems so likely that we automatically wonder what his relationship with Sasaki is, such that Sasaki would want to sabotage him.  My point is that Murakami drops details that decenter us, and as a result we feel tense, and this tension is part of what drives the story.  This story would be quite different if it were not riddled with elements of mystery, if it were more sentimentally about a man finding and losing what's inside of him.  Its mystery puts us on guard and forces us to approach this story of Komura from an altogether different perspective, one in which we are actively watching for signs and somewhat distanced from the dynamics of interpersonal struggle.