What Richard Kelly's "Donnie Darko" has taught me...

Richard Kelly’s 2001 cult-film Donnie Darko reminded me of one important lesson. When Darko is asked by a pesky gym teacher to make a moral choice during an empowerment exercise, he refuses to do so and says that one cannot simply divide the world into two categories – the black and the white. That is because the world is a much more complex place, and sometimes individuals are compelled to make morally ambiguous choices.

If the young across the world were to understand this one single message, we would at least be on our way to solving existing social problems rather than bickering among ourselves as to who is morally superior. Left-wing vs Right-wing. Environmentalists vs Industrialists. Socialists vs Capitalists. Liberals vs Conservatives. Believers vs Doubters. A man who calls for a stop to immigration and advocates harsher penalties for criminals is immediately labelled a “Hitler”; a parent who believes in corporeal punishment in child-rearing is seen as a “monster”; a teacher who uses unorthodox methods is perceived as a non-conformist and a threat. The world suffers from the need to categorise and to label CLEARLY what it is dealing with. No greyness allowed.

And yet the world is as grey as the Valley of Ashes.

Environmentalists are not necessarily helping the world to heal itself. Industrialists are not always the unconscionable villains we would like to see them portrayed. The militant self-righteousness of left-wingers often has a Fascist whiff about it. The fervour of right-wingers sometimes does more good than harm, driving home issues society would rather sweep under the rug. The parent who spares the rod does not always produce a scar-free child. The parent who harshly disciplines his child does not always produce an emotionally compromised teen. Freedom is not always a good thing. Restriction is sometimes productive.

Bring on the grey, please...

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Approaching Haruki Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore” the Jungian Way

“The world of gods and spirits is truly nothing but the collective unconscious inside me.” – Carl Jung, On the Tibetan Book of the Dead What appears to be supernatural and surrealistic in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore does not have to remain that way once we accept that in Murakami’s fictional world, the natural and the supernatural often cross paths and become one single unity. In the previous three entries on the novel, I have extensively discussed its relation to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex . But here I intend to explain why the supernatural should in fact be deemed natural, and how this reasoning is a direct reference to the theories of Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung and German philosopher G.W. F. Hegel, both of whom are mentioned in the novel. Carl Jung’s psychological theory on the “collective unconscious” (the notion positing that all humans – regardless of race and culture – share a psyche containing “latent predispositions towards identical reactions” [1...

Found in Translation: An Interview with Jay Rubin and J. Philip Gabriel

I came across this revealing interview with two of Haruki Murakami’s trusted translators: Jay Rubin ( 1Q84 ) and J. Philip Gabriel ( Kafka on the Shore ). It sheds light on how difficult it can be to translate a "culture." The interview can also be found at San Francisco Bay Guardian Online . Found in Translation Haruki Murakami's interpreters discuss the art of building literature anew 04.11.12 - 3:22 pm | Soojin Chang Jay Rubin & Haruki Murakami Ludwig Wittgenstein once said "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world." So for the sake of expanded horizons, let's say thank you to professional translators, the diligent souls who dedicate their lives to the subtleties of language. When interpreters dissolve linguistic barriers, we are able to peer into the worlds articulated in literature of distant lands to understand them as our own. But how do they do it? Surrealist Japanese author Haruki Murakami's translato...

Inside Toru: An Analysis of Haruki Murakami's "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" (Part 2)

Darkness, wetness, claustrophobia – three unpleasant elements that we usually associate with the water-well. The well, due to its mysterious and sinister status, has in the past featured prominently in popular Japanese culture, with perhaps the horror trilogy Ringu being the prime example. It plays a central role in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle . The first page of my 1998 Harvill edition is ink-black with a white circle hovering in the top half, representing the perspective of one who sits at the bottom of a well and looks up. This is an ominous foreshadowing of what is to happen to Toru half-way through the novel. In Book 2, Chapter 5, Toru descends to the bottom of the well on the Miyawaki property for the first time. The rationale behind this strange act is never clearly spelt out, but the reader would not be wrong to deduce from the circumstances in Toru’s life that he believes by spending some time in the well, his mind will find the peace that it desperately needs. What...

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