Weekend Reads – Who are we?

In my recent spate of reading, I have been delving into a range of material from Haruki Murakami. Murakami is very quickly becoming on of my favourite authors. At the moment I am making my way through a book called Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman – a series of short stories. I was struck the other night with a story titled “Man-eating cats”.

The story is about a man in Japan, who is engaging in an affair with a woman called Izumi (we never actually learn the name of the man – the narrator of the story). When the affair becomes known to their respective partners, and they are both separated, they decide on a whim to quit their jobs and move to a small island in Greece. As they both say, “there is nothing left for them in Japan.”

The scene that struck me occurs right at the end. Waking up in the middle of the night in their new home in Greece, the man realises that Izumi is not in the house. After he begins searching for her a strange thing happens:

“Just then – without warning – I disappeared.

Maybe it was the moonlight, or that midnight music. With each step I took, I felt myself sinking deeper into quicksand where my identity vanished; it was the same emotion I had in the plane, flying across Egypt. This wasn’t me walking in the moonlight. It wasn’t me, but a stand-in, fashioned out of plaster. I rubbed my hand against my face. But it wasn’t my face. And it wasn’t my hand. My heart pounded in my chest, sending the blood coursing through my body at a wild speed. This body was a plaster puppet, a voodoo doll into which a sorcerer had breathed a fleeting life. The glod of real life was missing. My makeshift, phoney muscles were only going through the motions. I was a puppet, to be used in some sacrifice.

So where was the real me? I wondered.”

The man had already had a similar experience whilst they were flying over Egypt on their way to Greece, but this time it was much stronger. A complete sense of disappearance – that in one fell swoop his past was completely gone, and with his past he himself was gone as well.

I think in many ways we all struggle with the idea of sentimentalism – the thought of something gone past that we will never experience again. We mourn for our childhoods. We wish to relive holidays or great experiences. We worry as time goes, we get older, and we transfer from youth to adulthood to old age. It’s natural I think.

But this takes it to another level. A life completely gone, torn away (through his own fault) and never to return. In moving to Greece he loses everything from his past life (except his new girlfriend) – making his past life almost completely disappear.

And in doing so Murakami sets up a bizarre scenario – one in which everything is completely gone. A new life has begun. Almost a new person born.

But is it really that bizarre?

One of the most re-told factoids (I reckon) is the idea that all cells in the human body get replaced every seven years. Apparently it is not quite right, but the symbolism is strong. Who we were physically 7 years ago is completely different to who are now. We are physically not the same beings. This opens the question of ‘who are we?’ Are we really one continued human, or are we collections of 7 year lives added on top of each other to make a story?

I think the physical reality is somewhat moot. Whilst the body replaces itself every seven years it is a continual process – not one that happens over night. The cells are continuously connected.

But it opens up an interesting question. Is a ‘lifetime’ a real thing? Does what we call ‘life’ actually exist, or is it just some made up idea? If we change everything – start a ‘new life’ – does the old life still exist, or have we gotten rid of it completely?

Murakami helps guide us some of the way. To get out of his slump, the man in the story tries to think of something different:

“I tried hard to think of something else. My sunny apartment back in Unoki. The record collection I’d left behind. My nice little jazz collection, My speciality was white jazz pianists of the fifties and sixties. Lannie Tristano, Al Haig, Claude Williamson, Lou Levy, Russ Freeman. Most the albums were out of print, and it had taken a lot of time and money to collect them. I had diligently made the rounds of record shops, making trades with other collectors, slowly building up my archives. Most of the performances weren’t what you’d call ‘first-rate’. But I loved the unique, intimate atmosphere those musty old records conveyed. The world would be a pretty dull place if it were made up only of the first-rate, right? Every detail of those record jackets came back to me – the weight and heft of the albums in my hand.

But now they were all gone for ever. And I’d obliterated them myself. Never again in this lifetime would I hear those records.”

I find this passage extremely striking. He is only discussing a record collection, but the record collection symbolises so much.

The narrator here connects himself back to his memory. Whilst his real life connections from his old life are gone, his memory still connects him there. His ability to remember every record with absolute detail takes him directly back to his past life, recreating its existence. But memory is not necessarily a perfect thing. We often forget particular parts of our lives, and embellishing others. Memories in some ways therefore are not necessarily an accurate representation of life, but rather how we tell ourselves the story of our lives.

It is here where the tale of the story may be useful. Our lives may exist because we tell the stories about them – because we give them meaning. The idea of a ‘lifetime’, just like everything else, is something we construct in our minds and societies – it is something we tell stories about and therefore it is something we make exist.

Our lives are real because we give meaning to them. We place significance in them, and tell the stories of them. Whilst we physically and mentally may change, the story of the life is what makes it important.

The question then arises, what happens when the stories of lifetimes stop being told? Did that life still exist?

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