**4.5 stars**
'The author maintained that human beings, by their very nature, are incapable of escaping from certain fixed idiosyncratic tendencies, both in their thought processes and in their physical movements. People unconsciously fashion their own action and thought tendencies, which under normal circumstances never disappear. In other words, people live in the prison cells of their own tendencies. What modulates these tendencies and keeps them in check—so the organism doesn’t wear down as the heel of a shoe does, at a particular angle, as the author puts it—is nothing other than sleep. Sleep therapeutically counteracts the tendencies. In sleep, people naturally relax muscles that have been consistently used in only one direction; sleep both calms and provides a discharge for thought circuits that have likewise been used in only one direction. This is how people are cooled down. Sleeping is an act that has been programmed, with karmic inevitability, into the human system, and no one can diverge from it. If a person were to diverge from it, the person’s very “ground of being” would be threatened.
“Tendencies?” I asked myself.'
If not for the somewhat messed-up ending, this one would’ve been the best short tale from Murakami that I had come across. It’s probably one of his most experimental, and not from any plot elements' pov. The protagonist is a woman, and the story unfolds from her perspective, and 99% of it involves her life only. Very daring, I would’ve said, given one of Murakami’s spectacular failures has been to conjure a ‘not’ one-dimensional female character who has a life or feelings of her own and can refuse to have sex.
Yeah, the moment she said:
"I wasn’t in the mood for it at all, I didn’t understand why I should have sex then."
, I won’t exaggerate, I literally felt dumbfounded. A moment before, I was feeling: ‘Okay, so here it goes, back to someone willing to jump onto the bed every time asked for it…’
And then I decided I won’t sugarcoat any of the reviews for the books I may read by him in future, because Murakami is, perfectly capable of writing a totally normal, subversive tale about a woman caught in the whirlpool of monotonous married life and seeking freedom from the existential crisis that she was bound to feel. In all that I’ve read by him, one or two plots may demand a one-dimensional woman character, but the rest, Murakami has without a shred of doubt done deliberately. There’s no other logical explanation.
And the plot is thoroughly relatable, as well. Especially in any of the still-too-many patriarchal societies around the globe, almost every housewife (and I can tell from the not-so-few I have for aunts and relatives and neighbours) struggles to find some time for her own, segregated from the hassles she is undertaking for her husband and children (irrelevant of whether she does it from her own will). Now imagine if she loses her ability to sleep, in a way that doesn’t harm her physical or mental health. I don’t know but if I had been there, I would’ve felt like being on the top of the world. An apex predator type.
And the internal thoughts were upheld so masterfully, as well. Or maybe it is that any of us could rejoice in someone’s (literature character) gaining control over the certain anarchic aspects of life. Or going through some optimistic self-discoveries. Not that good times last forever.
Just like I had a hell of a time with this one, though I had a nagging doubt that a few times it decided to play safe, too much for the story’s benefit. Anyhow, even that made me all the more apprehensive about whatever Murakami’s next short tale has in store for me.