Blog Post 5 - Max Dahlstrom

 I was pretty intrigued by our discussion of magical realism, partly because it reminded me a lot of surrealism. I had some trouble differentiating between the two at first because they both seemed to involve realistic settings in which illogical or unexplainable things happen. After reading some articles about their differences online, I found that people typically differentiate the two genres in regards to the internal vs. external experiences of the illogical. While both genres involve illogical occurrences that challenge different conventions, magical realism tends to focus on the illogical as it occurs in society, whereas surrealism focuses on the illogical as it occurs in our imagination and our subconscious and usually involves more dreamlike settings.

I’m also interested in how magical realism can be used as a tool of critique. In some stories we’ve read by Murakami, it seems like he uses magical realism in a way that can be interpreted as exposing the arbitrariness of certain social conventions and rules. The most obvious example to me is ‘The Bakery Attack’ story in which the protagonists demand that some exchange occurs between them and the baker, even though he offers to give them the food for free. The logic of the demand for this exchange goes unquestioned by the characters and the narration, but it makes no sense to the audience. It seems like it exaggerates conventions that exist in the real world to poke fun at them, in a similar way to how satire typically operates.

I also wanted to mention that I found Stretcher’s interpretation of Magical Realism in Murakami’s texts very interesting. Stretcher explains that Murakami’s works have consistently been most popular among audiences between the ages of 20 and 30 because they use magical realism to play around with identity and its flexibility. He thinks that Murakami’s stories resonate so well with this audience because they touch on the conflict that people have at this age when choosing what they will pursue in life, specifically the choice between becoming a part of the ‘system’ or struggling against it. Stretcher suggests that Murakami used magical realism to play around with identity because he was wary of the loss of individuality ushered in by mass consumerism in post-1970 Japan.

- Max Dahlstrom