Unavoidable Mirrors

     After readings several works of Murakami, I can't help but think that he is obsessed with mirrors and the search of true identity. In his short stories, The Mirror and Where I'm Likely to Find It, as well as his novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, he will dedicate a whole scene to the narrator and his experience with a mirror. In these three works of Murakami's, the narrator doesn't have a name and the story is told in the first-person narrative always. Without too much special personality, these narrators are on some sort of mission, but bump into a mirror.

    In The Mirror, the narrator is just an ordinary night watchman at a school who encounters a mirror that never actually existed. The narrator acknowledged he saw himself, yet he thinks it isn't him. It bothered him and he couldn't explain it. The narrator concluded: "The one thing I did understand was that this other figure loaded me. Inside it was a hatred like an iceberg floating in a dark sea. The kind of hatred that no one could ever diminish" (p. 59). It's as almost that he saw the person with his true identity, but that person doesn't like who he is right now. And that truly haunts him till this day.

    In Where I'm Likely to Find It, the narrator is trying to find his client's husband who went missing, but finds a mirror during his search. A little girl he bumps into on the staircase tells him that the mirror between the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth floor makes you look the best. Looking into the mirror, the narrator thinks: "And, sure enough, the image of me reflected in the mirror was a few degrees removed from what I was used to seeing. The me in the mirror looked plumper and happier. As if I'd just polished off a stack of hot pancakes" (p. 287). Once again, the narrator in this story believed the "man" he sees in the mirror is happier than him. After all, the narrator is a detective without extreme motive for money and does these investigations for free. He sees this happy man in the mirror, but doesn't seem to want to be him.

    In A Wild Sheep Chase, the narrator finds a dirty mirror in the Rat's house and decides to clean it. After it was cleaned, he looked into the mirror and just thought that it was a normal reflection of him. But he thought to himself: "My image was unnecessarily sharp, however. I wasn't seeing my mirror-flat mirror-image. It wasn't myself I was seeing; on the contrary, it was as if I were the reflection of the mirror and this flat-me-of-an-image were seeing the real me" (p. 319). Again, here we see the narrator not thinking that the reflection in the mirror is truly him. They did the same movements and look exactly the same, yet he still believes it is not himself that he is seeing.

    The names of these three pieces all connect to the fact that he is chasing something down or finding someone that is not himself. Murakami obsesses over looking and looking for something, therefore having written works in detective style. But I think what he is looking for in all these works is his true self. His own identity. Without mentioning his name once in these stories, the narrator is plain and usually doesn't have very unique or appealing characteristics that people want to remember. And while the narrators are searching and searching for their identity, they end up seeing someone else in the mirror that they don't believe is them. And they will just leave the mirror without much thought. But what I think is that they see this other version of themselves in the mirror which gets them a step closer to finding their identity. They see themselves in another light with their own eyes, but they all walk away from the mirror without too much thought. This makes me think that they either don't like their true identity and just want to continue the simple life they are already living or that what they saw is not their true identity and that they have to continue on with their search to find the true identity they want to find.

Sonia