Haruki Murakami: Does Ordinary Life Hurts Writing？
Right now I am reading What I Talk About When I Talk about Running by Haruki Murakami. It is a very impressive book that discussed Murakami’s life philosophy through running. In this book, running carries a positive and rigid life attitude through long term repeated training to strengthen people’s minds, so people can resist being ware down in daily life and inevitable aging problem.
Like his running philosophy, Murakami's life is healthy yet without anything dramatic. Murakami often mentions western writers lived in the 70s and 80s: for insists F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and so on. However, he lived a quite different life from those writers. Writers like Fitzgerald and Hemingway were not only famous for their writings, but also for their personal anecdotes. They established intriguing characters in readers’ eyes with extraordinary life experiences. When you think about Murakami, you could not think about anything outside the ordinary of him besides he is an amazing writer. It contrasts people’s stereotype recognize of writers that they need to experience in order to create.
Murakami keeps challenging the public’s stereotype of writers: rather passionate, he writes more with logos. Similar to running every day, Murakami sees the necessity of continuously writing. He lives in an organized life with the planned daily schedule and a word count goal for everyday writing. Self-control and logics play important roles in his life. His lifestyle also reflects in his books. Masked by the fictitious side of his book, Murakami also follows certain logic in plot development. From Norwegian Wood to A Wild Sheep Chase, His character’s development always follows a safe yet steady hero’s cycle. Unlike in the Odyssey, the Greek hero Odysseus was consistently involved in perilous tasks, Murakami’s character is often involved in the self-searching journey which happens in a mentally and physically safe status. The only tangible aspect of the story is the character’s subtle inner struggle. Murakami’s lifestyle limited his writing in that it is not going to be dramatic and exciting but also helped him to create his own unique style that his writing is often relatable and exquisite.
Murakami’s experience can be shared with many young writers, including myself. Compared to the last generation’s manifest life stories, our life seems quite ordinary. Our world has left a rapidly changing period and launched into a relatively stable time. On the one hand, almost all the people are living a peaceful life. On the other hand, the depth of our experience has been cut down. Instead of narrating stories using significant historical events as background, many writers start to search within themselves. Most of my writings for WRIT 340 and my artworks are focusing on self-reflection too.
Nevertheless, writers can still produce excellent content under this time period, but in a different way. A lot of contemporary writers produce their content in this way through building furtive connections with people who seem unrelated to them in order to replace the lack of depth in their own experience. In the book “顿悟的时刻”, Chinese writer Yuran Zhang proposed the concept of emotion connection point: writers don’t have to limited themselves in their personal experiences, but it does not mean that writer can capture the experience of any random person. It is important for writers to find their emotional connection point and to write stories about people they can connect to.
Many people might think that writers can change their narrative perspective freely and devote their emotions to different characters, but I disagree. Even though we are reading social news every day about the experiences of different people, our understanding and empathy of certain groups of people are always going to be deeper than the rest: might be caused by the same childhood trauma or something more profound. In this way, even though writers can break through the limitation of their experiences, they are still restricted by their own identity because it is impossible for writers to connect to everyone.
After all, is ordinary life truly harmful to creative writing? Many people might scoff at the idea that writers have to suffer in order to create. However, this saying is not completely wrong. Unique experience does provide writers more advantages when it comes to writing about related topics. However, it is not the only way to create. Ordinary life does limit writers from writing about dramatic stories. In the end, fighting on the front line is different from hearing other people’s war stories. It does not mean writers who live a normal life could not produce good works. Haruki Murakami is a perfect example as writers who never experience anything traumatic, but he can still produce worldly known books.
Each era has its only theme. Maybe for the last era, the theme is to live with unpredictable dramas. But for this era, it is to live peacefully and stable. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about lavish life because he lived through the Grilled Age. Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road because he experienced the confusion spread around postwar America. It is hard for us to write about things we could not connect with, but living an ordinary life does not harm our potential to grow into outstanding writers.
