#121 New York Mining Disaster- Haruki Murakami
I’m not exactly sure I know what’s going on in this story. I
think it’s a man trapped in a collapsed mine thinking about death,
hallucinating about another life, or his previous existence before the mine.
He’s thinking about a friend of his that has a black funeral
suit. His friend hasn’t had to use the suit since he bought it, nobody he knows
has died. He has know many people that have died in that time frame and
has borrowed the suit every time. He returns the suit and wonders if it smells
like a funeral, smells like death.
“Clothes aren’t important. The real problem is what’s inside
them.”
Smell is a theme brought back a few times, smell connected
with death:
“…there are ways of dying that don’t end in funerals. Types
of death you can’t smell.”
The narrator has an odd exchange with a woman at a party
about death:
“You look exactly like someone I know”
“If he’s that much like me, I’d like to meet the guy.”
“You would?”
“I’d like to see what it feels like to meet someone who’s
exactly like me.”
“But that’s impossible…he died five years ago.”
“Is that right?”
“I killed him.”
This seems like a hallucination due to deliria, bouncing
between funerals, zoo visits, caged animals. Intriguing, but I struggled at its
meaning.
Notable Passage: “…the ground we walk on goes all the way to
the earth’s core, and I suddenly realized that the core has sucked up an
incredible amount of time.”
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