Blog Post 2 - Spaghetti as Loneliness

When Watanabe writes to Midori about how lonely April and May were without her and ends his letter telling her that he wants to make spaghetti for her (page 259), I was immediately reminded of “The Year of Spaghetti.” I was curious which was written first, and as best I could find “The Year of Spaghetti” predates Norwegian Wood by seven years, first published in 1981 and 1987 respectively. For the Boku of “The Year of Spaghetti,” cooking spaghetti is like “an act of revenge” by a “jilted girl” throwing out love letters. This is pretty close to the cause of Watanabe’s loneliness with Midori spitefully ignoring him. For all he knows, she’s destroying his letters too. Having read “The Year of Spaghetti” first gives an added intensity, a special connotation to Watabane’s suggestion, and I wonder if this was an intentional self-reference to his earlier short story. But what might this repeated use of spaghetti as a food of loneliness indicate? It’s peculiar enough to have spaghetti representing this as is, but seeing it appear in two stories, I began to wonder if Murakami himself has a strong association of loneliness with spaghetti or perhaps had a bad experience with it.

-Kate