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Bezig met laden... Yesterdaydoor Haruki Murakami
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(1st person narrative, subjective point of view, narration by a minor character in past tense.)
Kitaru is a peculiar guy who has had a girlfriend since childhood. They have never had sex. Albeit an intelligent young man who was a prodigy kid, he keeps failing the exam to enter the school that his girlfriend is already attending. He asks one of his friends (the narrator) to date his girlfriend. During their date, Erika, the girlfriend of Kitaru, confesses that she is curious about someone else. Soon after the date, Kitaru and the narrator lose contact. The narrator meets Erika again after sixteen years and he finds out that both she and Kitaru are still single, but Kitaru has moved to the U.S. where he works as a sushi chef.
Quotations and notes
— as it emerges from all the dialogues in the story, coming-of-age is always in strong relation to denial of one’s past and one’s former status, because one finds it embarrassing. It seems that adulthood is unveiling a more meaningful take on things and life, a view that we completely lacked before. It is most probably wrong, and I think the answer lies in the improvised lyrics for the famous Beatles’ melody:
Yesterday (—our past)
Is two days before tomorrow ( — is gone, but we still have today in the middle )
the day after two days ago ( — and our past has been our future once )
Obs. note the repetition of the word „two“, the leitmotif of duality, present in the whole story.
—when we are young we have yet to find an interior language of our own, and change has to come from outside, in a structured yet complex way.
—Life seems easy and comfortable, so let’s challenge it, thinking that we can always undo what we have done. When beauty fades away under the power of habit, we challenge ourselves and call beauty back from afar. We place ourselves in the middle of a circle and let everything go, hoping that two different people can naturally belong together, and the laws of nature can bring back the other one next to us if case be, despite our pushing her away. I think it is what people undergoing uncertainty and cowardice do. Love is not compatible with egocentrism. The quotation must be related to another quotation from the end of the story, that is also the key to this piece by Murakami: „That’s what we all do: endlessly take the long way around.“
By asking his friend to date his girlfriend, Kitaru is forcing the others towards a solution to his problems. He is taking the long way around. Of note is also the natural tendency to open up as a way of escape. In other words, beware of sudden openness, as it might be just someone smoothening their way out.
Music has that power to revive memories,
sometimes so intensely that they hurt.
— A woman in a relationship contemplates solitude. Curiosity is another leitmotif (synonym of opening up.) Again, we have the idea that we make things stronger by throwing our own tests and hardships at them, believing that they are necessary. I must ask, who are we to plan our growing up like that? If we already knew where we had to arrive, we would go there without any test.
Kitaru has yet to find out that his girlfriend liked pizza or drank wine, as they were probably concealed by their easy and comfortable life.
The narrator gets to the point where it dawns on him that he is an almost useless pawn in the story, that there is nothing that he could do to help. „You should do what you want and forget about what people think.“
( )