Murakami and Obsession

Haruki Murakami is not just a writer of famous novels, he has also written plenty of short stories. One common thread that comes up in a few of them is the theme of obsession as a psychological coping mechanism for other events. Murakami has been a psychological writer throughout his bibliography, but this theme of obsession is more noteworthy in these short stories as there isn’t much other content to cover in them, and in some cases, obsession is a central theme. Shown as examples here are The Year of Spaghetti and Tony Takitani.

The Year of Spaghetti places the titular Boku as a loner, someone whose only daily task seems to be making spaghetti. While making spaghetti, Boku receives a call from an ex-girlfriend of a friend. Despite her pleas to tell her where his friend is, Boku seems distracted, obsessed with making spaghetti as a way to cope with dealing with any outside events. The point is driven home in the last sentence of the story, that instead of spaghetti the Italians were exporting “loneliness.”

Another example is one of Murakami’s most famous short stories, Tony Takitani. Here, it may not be the titular Tony faced to deal with obsession, but his wife. While this is by all accounts seemingly a good relationship between the two, much of Tony’s income goes to shouldering his wife’s obsession with buying dresses, filling a large closet to the point where she admits it is a “drug addiction.” This rears its head when Tony states that she may not need so many expensive dresses. Not being able to “stand it” despite knowing “he was right,” she is soon “instinctively” involved in a fatal car crash. If this is the fate that awaited somebody torn apart from their dress-buying obsession, would a similar fate have awaited a Boku forced to stop making spaghetti and to acknowledge the outside world? Only Murakami knows.

-William