Okri and Murakami Lore

No pun intended. I don't know why I put it there. Maybe just for fun lor.

I've jumped straight from the African spirit realm of Ben Okri's The Famished Road into the surrealism of Haruki Murakami's Kafka On The Shore. These two books are where you can find my nose buried in these days; everywhere I go, every single waking moment when I am not researching or writing about some impoverished Asian nation. Both are vividly delightful works, the words paint a thousand imageries that play in my mind like a movie reel rolling onto the projection screen.

From Okri's prose I imagine the illustrations of fantasy artists the likes of Alan Lee spring to life - a three-headed monster battling a beautiful maiden gliding on sparkling water as smooth and reflective as the surface of a mirror. From Murakami's words, the entire Studio Ghibli seems to be unleashed on the pages that my fingers flip with constant urgency. Compared to Okri, Murakami is a much easier read.

I've decided to rotate between Okri and Murakami for the follow-up novels of Okri's chronicles of the akibu Azaro and Murakami's countless other fantasical wonders.

The beauty of both books, I find, lies in the words that appear to be so simple that they are profound, that after reading it once, you instantly return to it to find that there's a deeper meaning that you can relate to, one way or another.

I shall quote some from Murakami's Kafka, for inspiration's sake.

"In travelling, a companion, in life, compassion," she repeats, making sure of it. "So what does it really mean? In simple terms."
"I think it means," I say, "that chance encounters are what keep us going."

"Even chance meetings are the result of karma."
"Right, right," she says. "But what does it mean?"
"That things in life are fated in our previous lives. That in the smallest events, there's no such thing as coincidence."

"What I'm trying to say is your problem isn't that you're dumb," Otsuka said, an earnest look on his face. "Your problem is that your shadow is a bit - how should I put it? Faint. What I think is this: You should give up looking for lost cats and start searching for the other half of your shadow"
"To tell the truth, Nakata's had that feeling before. That my shadow is weak. Other people might not notice, but I do."
"That's good, then," the cat said.
"But I'm already old, and may not live much longer ... You die and they cremate you. You turn into ashes and they bury you in a place called Karasuyama. Once they bury you there, though, you probably can't think about anything anymore. And if you can't think, then you can't get confused. So isn't the way I am now just fine? What I can do while I'm alive, is never go out of Nakano Ward. But when I die, I'll have to go to Karasuyama. That can't be helped."
"What you think about it is entirely up to you, of course," Otsuka said, and again began licking the pads of his paw. "Though you should consider how your shadow feels about it. It might have a bit of inferiority complex - as a shadow, that is. If I were a shadow, I know I wouldn't like to be half of what I should be."

"When I drive, I like to listen to Shubert's piano sonatas with the volume turned up. Do you know why?"
"I have no idea."
"Because playing Shubert's piano sonatas well is one of the hardest things in the world. Especially this, the Sonata in D Major. It's a tough piece to master. Some pianists can play one or maybe two of the movements perfectly, but if you listen to all four movements as a unified whole, no one has ever nailed it. A lot of famous pianists have tried to rise to the challenge, but it's like there's always something missing. There's never one where you can say, Yes! He's got it! Do you know why?"
"No," I reply.
"Because the sonata itself is imperfect. Robert Schumann understood Schubert's sonatas well, and he labeled this one 'Heavenly Tedious'."
"If the composition's imperfect, why would so many pianists try to master it?"
"Good question," Oshima says, and pauses as music fills in the silence. "I have no great explanation for it, but one thing I can say. Works that have a certain imperfection to them have an appeal for that very reason - or at least they appeal to certain types of people. Just like you're attracted to Soseki's The Miner. There's something in it that draws you in, more than more fully realised novels like Kokoro or Sanshiro. You discover something about that work that tugs at your heart - or maybe we should say the work discovers you. Shubert's Sonata in D Major is sort of the same thing."

Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.