UFO in Kushiro

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

According to the Epicureans, complete happiness is a state of no unfulfilled desires. The most troubling conclusion of this theory is that a perfectly happy people are revealed to be rather strange creatures. By definition, they are without hopes, and therefore have no reason to act. They also seem to lack thoughts, since a thought involves moving from one statement to another—to an explanation, a conclusion, any idea provoked by association. Of course, no such person really exists, but the portrait remains enlightening: what causes human behaviour, internal and external, is always a lack, and we do not become Epicurean zombies because of the inexhaustible human desire to want something else. Having returned to Ithaca, Tennyson’s Ulysses detests his savage home, resolving to sail beyond the sunset. Murakami similarly illustrates this capacity: perhaps Komura’s wife leaves him because being over satisfied is the same as being dead. Similarly, the vague sense of wonder and oppression that seems to affect Komura, building to his feeling of having come a very long way, also seems to preserve him and render him more human than Shimao, who seems to know what he has no access to. The variety of human behaviour, of human stories, arises because of the unimaginable number of things we could lack, in as many situations, each requiring a different chain of thoughts and actions towards the aim. In contrast, all perfectly ‘happy’ people seem oddly similar, equally inert irrespective of social situation. This is perhaps what Tolstoy meant in the famous ‘all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

2) How does mystery drive the story forward?

From the outset, the explicit mysteries created by story make us continue to read. To begin with, why is Komura’s wife obsessed with the earthquake report if she isn’t personally affected? We hope that the story will provide this ‘why:’ perhaps she does have a hidden connection to Kobe, or perhaps the destruction of the earthquake mirrors something in her own life, such as the breakdown of her marriage. We soon realise, however, that these questions will not be answered and, instead, we then have Komura wonder why the plane is empty. Despite this awareness, the story manages to preserve our interest, which is quite an accomplishment. In my opinion, the story works because its mysteries do not become a series of coincidences that drive the plot forward; in fact, paradoxically, events such as the earthquake are dead ends, denying rather than opening the possibility of human initiative. Instead, the mysteries gradually grow until they become a sense, making the details of the tragedy ‘oddly lacking in depth,’ and eventually changing his sense of his own being: ‘I wonder,’ Komura lazily says, ‘I feel kind of hungry and kind of not.’