Murakami Bingo

Mainly I think I'm posting this image because it amuses me, but it also played a central role in one of my classes the other day. I'm teaching a COR 115, Rhetoric, this semester for the first time because the division was in a bind so I picked it up at the last minute. Instead of being a sensible soul and choosing something manageable like Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio I instead had the students read the first fifty pages of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and the Haruki Murakami novel Kafka on the Shore. Why? It's not simply because I'm inherently cruel, at least not entirely. One of the points of the course is to teach the students how to grapple with difficult texts, and, well, it is Proust and Murakami. Our texts for the day were the short story "The Year of Spaghetti" and the first eight pages of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, both of which opened with a classic Murakami scene: a guy trying to cook spaghetti when a mysterious woman calls and disrupts his plans. I also gave them a copy of a Murakami bingo card that, I think, was from a New York Times article. Mainly I was trying to get them to understand the importance of metaphors and that they needed to learn to read on a much deeper level, not only because it was key to college paper success but also because it was a key component in eventual advancement in their careers; as I always opine, "Your boss is not going to be interested in you explaining the obvious, she's desperately interested in your telling her what the obvious actually means." In regards to the bingo, I was hoping that the reason why these events always show up in Murakami novels was because they are metaphors that he's always relying upon (and not simply because he's a weirdo), and that if they can start reading more proactively and analytically they'll both do a better job and actually maybe even enjoy reading more. The jury is still out on the latest experiment.

And I'm glad that someone else noticed Murakami's ear fetish, I was afraid it was just me.