Random Questions with No Pretensions

War, challenges, quests, dying relatives, damsels, dames, treasures, love, magic, power, wonder, answers, truth, hope, curiosity.

What is it about protagonists who have something to live for that makes them compelling characters?

What is it about characters that don’t?

Which is more realistic?

Haruki Murakami is a contemporary Japanese author known for his whimsical novels that put a lightness on life’s heaviness. Often Murakami’s books don’t seem to make obvious sense, but yet they manage to leave an impression on the senses. His words flow out of the pages like breeze out of a far distant land that in its very dust contains a story drenched in the past but new as the breath that touches. A reader comes out at the end dizzy and elated, less with a heart-pounding exuberance than a soft recognition, like a simple memory of something that happened long ago. Or like a long beautiful song has just ended.

Last year the author published an essay entitled “Jazz Messenger” in which he explains:

…I didn’t have the kind of technique it takes to become a professional musician. Inside my head, though, I did often feel as though something like my own music was swirling around in a rich, strong surge. I wondered if it might be possible for me to transfer that music into writing. That was how my style got started.

This essay partly answers a question I had about a year ago. It was a couple months after I’d finished my first Murakami book, Kafka On The Shore. There was a local author visiting my high school and I asked her, What do you think is more important in writing, the sound of your prose or the clarity of your words? She answered that though she sought after a musical quality in her writing, coherency was absolutely necessary and most important.

This didn’t help answer how I could have read a book that consciously made little sense, but left such an impression on my senses. I was baffled.

Should a poet sacrifice the wonder of a phrase for its lack of clear meaning? Or should one dance so it all keeps spinning?

Shakespeare’s prose was so powerful that his invented words and meanings found their way into English proper; that is, they became meaningful by their sounds. I think Ray Bradbury once said if he caught himself thinking about what he was writing, he knew that the piece wouldn’t work out. Now Murakami says that he learned how to write by listening to music. What does lead to?