Why?

Why do we listen to stories where bad things happen? How does mystery drive that UFO story? Well these questions are best answered in, more or less, 500 words.

Stories with bad things are interesting. And entertaining. Seeing someone's life fall apart is quite entertaining, or at least gripping. You will continue reading whether to discover even more horrible things that happen or in the hopes of finding a cure to all the tragedy. I'm going to speak generally for a moment, so forgive me for an offense, but I think there aren't a lot of bad things in most of our lives. At least not in the same way in stories. So therefore the novel (the different) is interesting to us. We turn to literature for things that lack in our own lives. Middle aged-women with unappreciative husbands (those bastards!) turn to romance novels, kids in boring suburbia seek out Harry Potter and fantasy, and a lot of us look for tragedy and bad things.

Stories where bad things happen are also better told than other stories. More narrative devices exist around bad events. Some of the best, most beautiful words in the English language are negative, 'bad' words. I can't really attest to other languages, but of the little Spanish I know, I love using 'muerte' and 'sangre' and other awful, awful words. Tragedy unlocks a certain spell of creative energy in the human. That is to say people write better and more inspired pieces about bad things.


So now how about this UFO story which didn't even have a UFO?
Mystery definitely drove this story. Before you even read it, the title insinuates aliens and UFOs. That mysterious title interested me enough to read it. Then there is a focus on earthquakes. Komura's wife watches coverage of the earthquake for five days straight, placing a lot of emphasis on them. As a reader I kept this earthquake in the back of mind, waiting for it to be explained in relation to UFOs. Then poor Komura's wife leaves him, and without much explanation. Is this connected to the earthquakes? And what to make of her incessant watching of earthquake coverage? At this point I am expecting an alien abduction story with hopes for total apocalypse and human annihilation.

Then this mysterious package is introduced. I am hoping this is some sort of device to active world detonation. In the perfect world Komura's coworker and coworker's sister would be cleverly disguised alien using Komura as un an unwitting companion in the destruction of the world. But I don't know this, so I read on. Then there are these mysterious women at the airport, who seem very sexually interested in Komura. When they take him back to a love hotel and make him get naked and take a bath, I am really hoping for an alien sex scene. But again, no luck. But whatever, the girl is getting naked too, I so keep reading.

At the end none of the mystery is fulfilled. This bothered me. I felt a bit cheated by the story. I can appreciate what our friend Haruki Murakami is doing introducing mysteries and forcing me to read on, but I hardly call this a successful story. It was more an exercise in narrative tricks, in my opinion.