Strecher Article - Audree Post #5

One of the things that has fascinated me the most about Murakami's works is how he presents and deals with identity, and so when reading the Strecher article about how Murakami's use of magical realism serves as yet another tool to understand identity in his works, I was immediately intrigued. 

I found it very interesting how the article situated Murakami's writing within the historical context of a generation of Japanese people for whom identity was already something they were struggling with. Strecher says that "Murakami has shown contemporary readers their own faces in the mirror." I liked this sentence for one, because it uses a recurring Murakami symbol, namely the mirror, but also because it links Murakami's often detached narrators to the real world struggle of being confused about one's identity. The fact that the detachedness of a character in a book can actually enable people to become more cognizant of their own identities is a really interesting effect of Murakami's writing. 

Strecher also points out Murakami's use of the term "black box" to refer to the unconscious, which reminded me of the black box theory of the mind Although the idea was starting to lose steam when Murakami was writing, it was nonetheless the dominant psychological theory in the West when Murakami must have been growing up. I wonder if Murakami used this term purposefully with knowledge of the theory or if the idea of the mind being a black box was just intuitive to him and therefore decided to use that phrase accordingly. 

Another thing that struck me from the article was how Strecher describes Murakami's use of magical realism: "In Murakami's magical realist universe [...] the linguistic connections, which in real life are unknown, unconscious, or even unintelligible, become magically visible and tangible. In short, they become magically real." The idea that aspects of one's mind and identity that are unavailable to us can make themselves known through magically real elements is really interesting and rang very true for me. The Little Green Monster I find to be a really great example of this. Instead of describing whatever trauma the main character has literally and realistically, Murakami makes the narrator interact with this magical creature that stands in for what is going on in her mind. In this way the reader can interpret the story in many different ways, or they don't have to interpret it at all and simply take it as a strange story of a woman being mean to a helpless creature. The explicit unreality of the magical elements makes for much more subtle and implicit meaning. Indeed, the main characters don't often acknowledge, consciously at least, the strangeness of the magical elements. This is a hallmark of magical realism but I also interpret it as the characters simply not having full awareness of their psychological states, of their inability to see what's inside the black boxes of their minds.