Why? Why Not?

                In Eden, there are no stories. That is to say, narrative is only necessary in a “fallen world,” one in which language does not correspond perfectly to the world it describes. For every abstraction (and every word is an abstraction), e.g. “bird”, there are outliers that question the validity of that abstraction, e.g. “ostriches” (do all birds fly?); analogously, every narrative depicts an effort to resolve a situation into neat conceptual contours, and the inevitable failure thereof. 

                We use stories to reason counterfactually, to imagine “what if” about something that is not the case. We wouldn’t need to do that if everything that was possible was actual—we can always imagine things being better than they are, or worse. Happy stories in which the Disney princess marries Prince Charming are boring to us because they follow a predictable trajectory, exactly the one we’d want ideally, even though we know it’s impossible. For those of us who have experience with the imperfections of the world, happy stories insult our intelligence. I think we read stories about “bad things” happening because we want to engage that imaginative faculty, force ourselves to think about what went wrong in the situation, how it could have been better (or maybe more importantly, how we wanted it to be better). Suffering and imperfection being inherent conditions of life, we compulsively try to recreate these conditions in fiction, in the hope that recreating the causal chain will allow us to understand it. But since language never perfectly represents its corresponding referents, our fictions are, as Borges said, “only adding to the world, not reflecting it.” So why would we want to add anything “good” or perfect to our fallen world? Why not add more metaphysical puzzles—maybe, if they’re our own puzzles, we can solve them.

                This brings me to answering how mystery drives Murakami’s story. It’s full of unanswered questions, and they’re questions that seem to have a logical explanation. Why is Komura’s wife obsessed with the earthquake? What the hell is in the box? How did they recognize him at the airport? Why was Sasaki’s sister so sure his wife was dead? The story reads like a detective story, leading us to expect a resolution, but it never comes. The mysteries draw us in because we empathize with Komura. We want to know the answers to our own mysteries, because our uncertainties cause us anxiety, so it’s easy to imagine how Komura must feel in these situations. Oddly enough, it’s the lack of that emotional reaction (maybe it’s implicit, but Komura seems pretty stoic) that makes Komura such a strange, aloof character. Komura simply wonders, but never seems to follow up on any questions. Maybe that’s what makes him so empty—he lacks any drive to make sense of the world. Even if we can’t make sense of our lives, we should still try: it won’t give us security, but we’ll end up with substance.