From Familiar Notes to Strange Worlds-Sylvia Chen

Following my reading of the notion of intertextuality, I took some time to think things through and started to reevaluate my experience with Haruki Murakami's writings. This concept reminded me that no text exists in complete isolation; they are always interconnected with other works and cultural symbols. This perspective helped me understand why reading Haruki Murakami's works always gives me that experience of feeling both unfamiliar and yet strangely familiar.

In his writings, diverse cultural components often appear, from the ambiance of American hard-boiled fiction to jazz and classical music, and sometimes even traces of traditional Japanese storytelling. These components seem familiar to most of us, but in Murakami's setting, they are put back together to produce a defamiliarization effect. For example, a piece of music transforms from background noise into a mirror of a character's inner life, and a certain literary style creates new tensions when it is incorporated into Tokyo's everyday situations. 

This led me to see that his uniqueness comes from rearranging and recombining materials inside preexisting cultural networks rather than entirely novel breakthroughs. I am reminded by intertextuality that when I read, I don't merely enter the author's world; I simultaneously step into a vast space of dialogue woven from music, literary traditions, and different cultures.