Something striking to me about all of Murakami's works is his fixation on food. Considerable time is spent with the narrator – often alone – preparing food. This seems like a very normal and obvious thing to write about, but I don’t think many authors have this tendency quite like Murakami. I looked back at some of the food-writing that stuck with me from past readings of Murakami and wanted to find some purpose for them. Here is what I found and what it made me think about.
In A Wild Sheep Chase, Murakami describes in detail the different meals that Boku makes while alone in the house:
With all this free time, I cooked up a storm. I made a roast beef.
I defrosted a salmon and marinated it. I searched the pasture for
edible vegetables and simmered my findings with bonito flakes
and soy sauce. I made simple cabbage pickles. I prepared a
number of snacks in case the Sheep Man showed up for a drink.
(Murakami, 305)
Similarly, he describes Boku alone preparing a meal for himself in Hard-Boiled
Wonderland:
While I waited for her, I fixed supper. I mashed an umeboshi salt
plum with a mortar and pestle to make a sour-sweet dressing; I
fried up a few sardines with abura-agé tofu-puffs in grated yama-imotaro
batter; I sautéed a celery-beef side dish. Not a bad little meal.
There was time to spare, so I had a beer as I tossed together some
soy-simmered myoga wild ginger and green beans with tofu-sesame
sauce.
(Murakami, 89)
Stylistically, these excerpts are quite similar, and more quotes like these exist within Murakami's works. I think these moments function in multiple ways for Murakami. For the reader, I think this sets a tone of mundanity amidst the surrealism of his writing. In a Wild Sheep Chase, this excerpt and a few more like it occur during the days that Boku spends at the house. Murakami juxtaposes one of the most surreal parts of the novel with the banality of baking bread or eating Campbell's soup. In Hard-Boiled Wonderland, this scene also comes after a surreal episode for Boku. I think Murakami tries to ground the narrator and the reader in reality with moments like this, to distract from the surreal, which is what creates such effective magical realism.
Additionally, I believe that these descriptions of solitary cookery may offer an indirect glimpse into the minds of our narrators. Having recently read Murakami's short story “Τhe Year of Spaghetti”, I started to think a little deeper about these cooking episodes. The story follows a narrator who cooks spaghetti fervently as if it “were an act of revenge.” (Murakami, 173) At the same time, he seems to be falling deeper into the lonely crevasse of his own mind. The story ends with this quote: “Can you imagine how astonished the Italians would be if they knew that what they were exporting in 1971 was really loneliness?” (Murakami, 173) Murakami uses the cooking of spaghetti as a metaphor for exploring, or falling into, your subconscious. A case can be made to apply this metaphor to both a Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland. Both stories explore a narrator who is forced to explore the inner workings of their own mind. I believe that Murakami uses cooking as an indirect expression of the narrator's lonely search inward.
There are many other instances in which Murakami describes food and cooking. This post only scratches the surface, and after writing it, I found an article that goes into more depth. Here it is, if anyone is interested: Haruki Murakami’s Metaphysics of Food. There is another interesting food parallel between the two aforementioned books; both involve fancy Western restaurants with eclectic female love interests. I may dedicate my next blog post to exploring that.
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