Is Murakami Gay for Music? - Rysen

 While I can't speak much for how Murakami uses queer women in his books, the two stories we've read about queer men both discuss music. Most intriguingly (to me at least), the line from "Chance Traveller" seems to allude not to queerness, but to queerness as a representation of music and thus writing for Murakami. From page 239, "'Poulenc was gay, [...] And he made no attempt to hide it. Which was a pretty hard thing to do in those days. He said this once: 'If you took away my being homosexual my music never would have come about.' I know exactly what he means. He had to be as true to his homosexuality as he was to his music. That's music, and that's life.'" From how much Murakami has written on and about music, though not being a musician himself, it seems that this final line is representative of him -- being as true to music as to life. His quote from "The Art of Fiction No. 182" seems to echo this as well, where he states that "Writing a book is just like playing music: first I play the theme, then I improvise, then there is a conclusion, of a kind," with the important caveat that "I wanted to be a musician, but I couldn’t play the instruments very well, so I became a writer."

I feel that this also seems to culminate in his decision to have both the queer characters in "Chance Traveller" and "The Ghosts of Lexington" be piano tuners, rather than pianists themselves. Neither one of them is considered by the narrator to be just a pianist, and is thus defined by helping to fix the tools that allow others to create music instead. Yet Murakami himself seems to live in this same role, using writing as inspired by music, and thus making it something he isn't able to live without -- both in his life, and in his writing.

I also thought it was pretty intriguing too, comparing Murakami to the piano tuner in "Chance Traveller" as both seem to have been estranged following living their true selves (being gay, and being a writer respectively). The piano tuner loses contact with his sister, and Murakami from "Abandoning a Cat" describes how his relationship with his father deteriorated following his decision to become a writer. I do wonder, then, if the piano tuner having sex with a woman may be allegorical to Murakami's decision to stop running his cafe, and whether the last "god of the gays" may be more of a plea to his writing muse.