Chapter 15 what's south of the border

In the novel, Shimamoto said that whenever she heard this song by Najingao, she imagined whether the south of the border was a place full of beautiful things.Only when I grew up did I realize that the lyrics were about Mexico.Even though Mexico is amazing enough for many people, it still belongs to the everyday world after all, not as Shimamoto imagined: a completely foreign land outside the border. For the traveler Haruki Murakami, what is beyond the border?Is it in, the world of shadows?Is it the dark well?Or is it the valley where the non-existent sheep appear? Beyond the daily life of the protagonists of Murakami eating pasta, drinking beer, and listening to jazz, there are these extraordinary "other places".The recognition of the existence of others often occurs simultaneously with the enlightenment within the character.Internal excavation is manifested as external and spatial search.So the characters embark on a journey one by one, heading towards the foreign land in the novel.

So the man started looking for his friend mouse.Found a warehouse full of old pinball machines.In fact, it doesn't matter where you really go, what matters is the feeling of "other places", which constitutes a foreign experience.It may not be that he went to some distant place, sometimes Murakami just let his characters sit quietly at the bottom of a dark well, or quietly watch people in the street, and he is full of enlightenment expectations for these actions, I believe that some answers will come from which emerged.Foreign experience is also the way of healing. What happens when Haruki Murakami becomes a traveler himself?Perhaps Haruki Murakami once held the imagination of the south of the border, looking for a place.Therefore, before turning 40, Haruki Murakami left Japan and lived overseas for 3 years.In the preface of "Drums in the Distance", he mentioned that the reason he started traveling was because he was worried that he would be busy with daily chores and dragged on year after year without doing anything: "I really wish I could have a living life in my hands." Yes, living time with real feeling."

This expectation of a full and abundant time and life is finally pursued by embarking on a journey.Greece, Italy, Turkey, these destinations and places of residence chosen by Haruki Murakami are some kind of place similar to the south of the border, a kind of healing other place, which sets off Murakami's "living and feeling life". time" imagination.What we see in "Drums in the Distance" and "Rainy Days and Summers" is Haruki Murakami, who is close to 40 years old, and like many characters in his works, he has opened up a long foreign experience for himself.

In this way, Murakami's trip seems to inevitably have the taste of "cleaning up the leftovers".As a member of urban civilization with too many residual tasks, Murakami's journey began with a heavy sense of exhaustion.It wasn't the exhaustion of a traveler - he was already in "great fatigue" before all the travel events recorded in the book happened.The feeling of fatigue, according to Murakami's metaphor, is like suffering from two bees buzzing in the head.Therefore, travel itself becomes a process of reverse elimination, in which travelers are eager to relieve their physical and mental exhaustion.

This kind of imagination of travel is certainly not created by Murakami, but it is almost a common interpretation of travel in popular culture.We also often hear people say that they really want to travel. When we ask about the reasons in detail, it is because they have worked too long, want to leave a relationship, or simply feel tired.In a post-capitalist urban environment, exhaustion often comes from doing nothing, going through the day in the everyday world.In other words, it's because they don't have what Murakami calls living time. But when Murakami's humor is in full play in the book, many events in the journey are full of fun.For example: jogging on a Greek island, stopped by residents who have never seen anyone jogging and asking: "Why are you running?" Dining in a monastery, because they don't know when they can eat and when they can't eat, they beat up devout believers supercilious.At the Turkish border, I was stopped by the army with live ammunition for inspection. In the end, it turned into drinking tea and chatting with the officer and exchanging karate.

Therefore, although the starting point of these two travel books is Haruki Murakami's personal pursuit, and has a heavy and tiring beginning, the whole book is also full of wonderful and interesting experiences.And Murakami's rhetoric is one of the reasons why these two books are interesting.Including his habit of arbitrarily naming the people and things around him: for example, he found that all the dogs in Greece lay flat on the ground indistinguishably in the summer afternoon, which was called the "dead dog phenomenon"; Zorba".This kind of situation will make people from knowing to laughing.

The traveler moves, and the self is the eternal background. Murakami, a traveler who makes interesting observations about things around him, is also a highly conscious traveler. "We're in a very awkward position in every sense of the word. We're not there to see what we're supposed to see and just pass tourists who walk away. But it's not about staying there and putting down roots and settling forever. A long-term living person." This traveler who has entered the "other place" maintains a relationship with the place of travel that is closer than that of tourists, but far more distant than that of residents.Murakami did use his eyes to closely describe many local things, but those gazes were undoubtedly from outsiders.Rather than saying that Murakami writes about Greece, Italy, and Turkey, it is better to say that he writes about Greece, Italy, and Turkey, which are set off by his appearance as a traveler.In the landscape he describes, the self is the everlasting background.What we see is the relationship between Murakami and every position in his movement.

In this way, when it comes to "Close Frontier", Murakami's attitude towards travel seems to be very different.Murakami no longer looks at travel with the starting point of pursuing a living time, and even writes in the epilogue that when looking at travel, it is best to exclude excessive enthusiasm, enlightenment, or excitement and bravado.Only Murakami, as a self-conscious and alienated traveler, has not changed his tone. Even in his hometown of Kobe, he still "feels like he has mixed into a wrong place, like an uninvited guest."When visiting Nomonhan Battlefield and Kobe after the earthquake, Murakami's concern has shifted from personal healing to collective trauma memory processing, and this is precisely Haruki Murakami who wrote "The Subway Incident".I may never know, whether other prescriptions are really effective.But there is no doubt that many of us have had the same travel imagination.Imagine that you can temporarily leave everything behind like switching webpages, go to another place, and gain some precious experience.This is a parallel universe solution to our daily life.And Haruki Murakami's travel books belong to the travel writing of this parallel universe.