Morning Pages | 28 August 2025

It's a nice feeling, finishing a Murakami novel.

I found the reference to magical realism that I referred to. It's when the narrator questions the woman in the cafe about what she's reading (chapter 61). She's reading Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez:

"Although [his] way of telling stories might fit the critical criteria of magical realism, for Garcia Marquez himself it's just ordinary realism. In the world he inhabits, the real and the unreal coexist and he just describes those scenes the way he sees them...The real and the unreal are equivalent, and Garcia Marquez is simply recording that."

It feels the same for Murakami novels: it's just ordinary realism. But there's that off-kilter feeling, that he's exploring consciousness, something deeper than what we see in everyday life, but somehow conveying that through describing everyday life, even down to going to the loo. There was a scene in 1Q84 that described the main character going for a pee, and we get a bit of that in The City and Its Uncertain Walls as well.

I took a deep breath and stretched out the joints of my legs till they cracked. I gulped back a few glasses of water and had a good long pee.

I mean how much more realism can you get that going for a pee? Too much realism maybe? haha.

Links

• The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Haruki Murakami