I really enjoyed this week’s Murakami reading! Barn Burning explores perception, questioning our sense of reality and where we are positioned in it. A couple months ago I watched Lee Chang-dong’s film Burning that was based on the Murakami story, and so I have been meaning to read it for a while now. It was definitely interesting to see the parallels between the two narratives, but I felt like the film adaptation was more explicit in exploring a particular narrative of the story which I felt wasn’t as clear cut in the original. While Lee’s film is much more of a slow-burn/mood/thriller piece, my experience with Murakami’s was much more subdued and neutral, allowing for room for more narratives to be explored. In both versions, there’s no “truth”, only multiple narratives that lead us to question reality ourselves. This concept is foreshadowed at the start of the story when the woman “peels oranges” to the point where the narrator questions the reality of the act. There is also interesting commentary on social class/social mobility and female objectification which I think the visuals of the film help to highlight. The story does seem to come between the two male characters, with the woman becoming an object between them. This was really interesting to observe after reading a bit into Mieko Kawakami’s critique on apparent sexisim within Murakami’s work (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/18/mieko-kawakami-interview-breasts-and-eggs-haruki-murakami & https://lithub.com/a-feminist-critique-of-murakami-novels-with-murakami-himself/ ). I’m beginning to get more into Murakami’s works, so it’ll be interesting to read with this perspective in mind!
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