i don’t remember the plots as much as i remember the feeling. a room, a record playing, a man alone with his thoughts, and rain, always rain. the kind you can smell before it arrives.

i read norwegian wood last year around the same time, after that 1q84 and kafka.. recently

murakami writes loneliness like it’s a physical space. his characters don’t talk much, but they think constantly as if they’re narrating them in their head, like how brad pitt was thinking out loud in his mind, while being in cosmic action sequences in ad astra…

his characters cook, they walk, they listen to music, they wait. waiting feels important in his worlds, even when nothing changes. time behaves strangely.

i felt while reading that in the story, days blur and reality almostsoftens at the edges, cats disappear. people do too, sometimes emotionally, sometimes literally. punn

and none of it feels urgent, which somehow makes it heavier.

his books feel like weather more than narrative. you don’t follow them, you sit inside and withthem. they make me nostalgic for things i’m not sure i’ve lived.

and then there’s a problematic part as well, the way he writes women, flattened. sexualised. completely unparallel to the actual story, mysterious in a way that serves a perverted male audience than the story.

sometimes they feel less like people and more like symbols that exist to be desired, lost, not remembered it’s wrong and difficult to ignore.

difficult because the rest of the writing is so gentle, so intimate. loving his work means holding that discomfort alongside the beauty. there’s no clean way around it.

still, i returned to many of his works, not because i agree with everything he writes, its fiction at the end of the day,

but because he captures a certain quiet sadness i recognise. when the world feels distant and familiar at the same time. it sits in the room with you, unannounced.