Haruki Murakami

When I was a kid, in 2^nd grade, my dad was posted in the Himalayas. Families weren't allowed there, so I used to live with my mother at her mother's house. Right above the bed where I used to sleep with my grandmother, was this strange painting of a house. The canvas was a dark cloth, and the painting was made of light-grey outlines of a hill with a house on it. It had a slanting roof and a chimney with a hand coming out of it. I used to stare at this terrifying picture every night while going to sleep. It was much later that I realised it was actually smoke that was coming out of the chimney. Smoke that looked very convincingly like a hand.

Whenever I think of this picture, feelings of horror are mixed with the beautiful memories of living with my grandmother. Listening to the watchman making his rounds around the houses, listening to tales spun by my grandma, peeking outside the vertical-tilting window to see the moonlit houses. That green Russian folktales book I had, and Baba-Yaga. Chasing dust-mites in beams of light, playing with a 1991 calendar; with faint memories of something big going on. The house in the painting itself must have featured in many of my dreams and my nightmares. All these memories mix and mingle to evoke feelings from every corner of my brain. I am left with tears in my eyes, heaviness in my heart, and regret in my mind that all of it is now gone.

And somehow, everytime I finish a short story by Haruki Murakami; all these feelings rush up to me. Whether the story had a happy ending, or challenged my stomach; the nostalgia, the beauty, the love, all rushes up to me. Each story reminds me of my love for thunderstorms. For stormy nights, that are spent alone. Loneliness that I cannot bear, but the feeling of which I love.

I remember so much that I just want to lose myself in my memories.

That is Haruki Murakami for me.

Read me, Like me, Read me not

There are three kinds of literature. One is which consists of must-reads for everyone. Which contain wise thought and will lead to a general betterment of all that read it. The poems of Robert Frost, written in a relatively simple language and essays such as Francis Bacon's "Of Studies" are good examples of these.
The second are those which cannot be appreciated by the lay mind and are purely works of art. They might not even be liked by all connoisseurs of literature. They often contain radical ideas and techniques, and are often intriguing to say the least. Examples include Franz Kafka's Surreal stories and Emily Dickinson's Lachrymose Poetry.
The third kind is that of literature purposefully written in a manner that appeals to only a specific section of the masses. These contains lessons and learnings that would do great harm if they were to be taken seriously by the wrong people.
A case in point is Emerson's Essay "Self-Reliance". If fools were to live by the essay, we would be surrounded by idiots who would abide by their own distorted version of the essay, living out their lives refusing to believe anything anyone says and refusing to follow basic social norms and laws.
For this very reason, I believe that the essay has been written in a convoluted style with curious word play, double negatives, heavy use of Old English and Unorthodox use of current English.
A fool would either be unable to understand it, or else would get frustrated by his constant need to refer to a dictionary.