8 Haruki Murakami Tropes And What They Really Mean
7. Preparing Food (Spaghetti And Beyond)
What It Is: Murakami protagonists love preparing food. It's something of a ritual, and is almost guaranteed to show up in any particular novel. But what's so remarkable about preparing food? Probably the most well-known example of this comes at the beginning of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, when Toru Okada is making spaghetti and receives a saucey phone call (pun totally intended). What It Really Means: A lengthy description of food preparation is a great way of introducing the reader to a protagonist whose most notable quality is that they're about to eat something. It's an effective technique for establishing mundanity, the quality of being totally run-of-the-mill ordinary and that's just the kind of character Murakami loves to write about. Alongside mundanity, Murakami often talks about the rhythmic quality of writing.
Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people wont keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music and mainly from jazz.
Cooking food might seem like a strange thing to describe, but it's all part of a healthy, balanced rhythm.
