October 9, 2006 10:07 pm
I am just about to go to bed and finish off the long day by reading Haruki Murakami’s short story, “The Year of Spaghetti” from his new book of short stories Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. As you may know from two previous posts (Noruwei no Mori and Haruki Murakami), I am very much a fan of the Japanese novelist. In any event, this story is about a guy who spends an entire year cooking pasta for himself everyday, seven days a week, and always eats the pasta by himself. As a matter of fact, he believes that pasta should be eaten by oneself in solitude. When I read the following lines, a huge smile formed stretched across my face (emphasis added in bold):
“Every time I sat down to a plate of spaghetti –especially on a rainy afternoon — I had the distant feeling that somebody was about to knock on my door. The person I imagined about to visit me was each time different. Sometimes stranger, sometimes someone I knew. Once it was a girl with slim legs whom I had dated at school, and once it was myself from a few years back, come to pay a visit. And one time it was none other than William Holden, with Jennifer Jones on his arm . . . Not one of these people, though, actually ventured into my apartment. They hovered just outside the door, without knocking, like fragments of memory, and then slipped away.”
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[…] A few nights ago, I read “Toni Takitani” from Haruki Murakami’s Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. I enjoyed the story, but was a bit disturbed by its first sentence: “Toni Takitani’s name was indeed that: Toni Takitani.” It is incredbily similar to the first lines of a story that I myself have been working on recently. My story (as it presently stands) begins, “Jimmy Castro was often as absurd as his name was ridiculous,” and continues, “Jimmy’s real and official name was just Jimmy. Worst of all, no one in his family could pronounce an English ‘j’, so he would ever be referred to by others and by himself as ‘Jimmy’. Other than that similarity, though, the stories are completely different. […]
By Grave Error » Toni Takitani and Jimmy Castro on October 19, 2006 at 5:28 pm