Haruki Murakami

People who know me know that I have a love hate relationship with Haruki Murakami. It’s not because I don’t admire his work, I do, deeply but because he never gives me a closure ending. And yet, somehow, I keep coming back to his work.

I’ve read Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore, and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World each so different, yet somehow, the same. They all carry that strange stillness, that quiet space between the real and the unreal, where emotions float without direction.

Murakami’s worlds feel like dreams you half remember. His writing doesn’t shout, it hums. There’s always a cat somewhere, a mysterious woman, jazz playing softly in the background, and an emptiness that somehow feels familiar. In Kafka on the Shore, he said:

“In everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore.”

I think that’s what reading him feels like, standing between those two points, unsure whether to look back or move ahead. Sometimes I reach the last page of his books and feel slightly betrayed. The story dissolves instead of ending. It leaves me restless, still searching for something I’ll never find. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe Murakami doesn’t write for closure maybe he writes to keep us wondering. His writing lives somewhere between mind and heart, meaning and mystery. Murakami’s books never really end; they just stop. But their echoes linger. And despite all my complaints, I know I’ll pick up another of his book again hoping, foolishly, that this time he’ll give me an ending.