Haruki Murakami: Summer doesn't end
Li Li
In Japanese, "Tonight's moonlight is really beautiful" expresses love, which is a sentence pattern of implicit confession in Japanese, and "summer is over" and "the moonlight is really beautiful" also has a special meaning. These two sentences, which can never be understood literally, both create a special context.
Summer is over, it is the meaning of growing up overnight, it is the omen of the end of love, it is the season when youth disappears, it is the dividing point from dreams to reality, it is the night of losing innocence and becoming an adult, and it is also the night when life falls from the unknown full of expectations to the unchangeable at a loss.
Before reading Haruki Murakami, I found that several of his short stories made the most delicate descriptions of summer, not to mention "And Listen to the Wind", "Dancing and Dancing", "Clockwork Bird Chronology", "Strange Bird Behavior"...
"From the cornice down to the yard. Looking around, the end is a complete summer without any additional conditions. The rays of the sun, the hues of the sky, the breath of the wind, the shape of the clouds, the chirping of cicadas, all of this announce the arrival of a truly beautiful summer day. (The Strange Bird's Tale)
"How to say it, it always reminds people of the bright and dangling sun, the cool and cool sea, and there is a beautiful girl lying next to her." The song makes people feel that the world is indeed a real existence. It is the world of mythology, the eternal youth, the fairy tale of innocence, where people are forever young and everything is always shining. (Dance! dance! dance! 》）
If you don't have a real love for summer, how can you write so beautifully! Before, I thought murakami just simply liked summer, but after understanding the Japanese meme "summer is over", I had a new understanding of his obsession with summer. Haruki Murakami not only likes summer, he is clearly obsessed with the dreams of teenagers, and does not want to be pushed by time to grow up. We say that some men are teenagers until their deaths, and Haruki Murakami is such a person. "I've ridden this bike four times in triathlon. The body read '18 Til I Die'. This is borrowed from the title of Brian Adams' famous song "Eighteen To Death". Just kidding, of course. I really want to die at the age of eighteen, and only die at the age of eighteen. This is a passage from Haruki Murakami's book "When I Talk About Running, What Do I Talk About."
Murakami also imagines himself living in Ashra Bhagavatam in another essay titled "Summer." K. Lo Goyn's science fiction novel "Planets of the Frontier" on that very far planet, if you live there, one year is about equal to sixty years of the earth, that is to say, fifteen years of spring, fifteen years of summer, fifteen years of autumn, fifteen years of winter, fifteen years of winter, he intends to be born from the summer of this planet, the boyhood runs east and west in the summer sun, thinking about spring and adolescence in the autumn honestly, and sending away the prime-aged years with the cold, entering old age when the spring turns, and if he is long enough to usher in the second summer, It's best to die in the summer. The best feeling when you die is: Oh, how nice it would be to hear "Beach Boys" somewhere! He wished he could die like this.
Haruki Murakami has mentioned The Beach Boys in several works and quoted their songs. Composed of five middle school students from Southern California, The Beach Boys released their first single "Surfing" in 1961, a young band that perfectly presents the landscape of a place with sun, sea, and sand. They changed the impression of rock and roll as decadent, explosive or long-haired, unique, brisk and sunny, singing waves, beach parties, motorcycles, girls, surfing experiences, etc., which was a very fresh sound in those days, a type of its own. They are an important symbol of the artistic art of rock and roll, and the later "Pet Voice" album is an important classic in the history of rock and roll. But I guess Haruki Murakami still prefers the early beach boys, the sun is shining on the hot summer afternoon, the beach boys wear shorts, hold surfboards, listen to rock while drinking beer, the light is stimulating people, they are immersed in the long summer book. This is also how I felt when I first read Haruki Murakami, who likes to let his stories take place in the summer, and the hot climate makes people more naked and more difficult to hide the desire in their hearts.
Many of Murakami's novels and essays are huge and messy memories of summer. Summer is abundant and grand, squandering passion. Summer is the season when winds are easy to blow, and seems to be more eager to fly than any other season. In the summer, the sun is clear, and everything is like a permeated blue, a thousand strands of blue that are smudged, as if they were only eighteen years old. If you say, "I am 18 years old until I die," this phrase has become a kind of faith for Haruki Murakami, a force that insists on accomplishing something and a goal. Then, the opposite of this sentence is undoubtedly "summer is over": youth scrawled off, the school gate slowly closed, the mood of admiration could not be extinguished, the hand that was not held, the letter that was not sent, the dream that was not fulfilled, and it was no longer full of expectations for everything in the world... The words "summer has passed" are the elegy that people unconsciously sing in their hearts when they are cold and dressed in early autumn; it is an unwillingness for youth to leak from the fingers and look back.
For Haruki Murakami, saying goodbye to Sunny Beach and saying goodbye to his youth is likely to be the same thing throughout life as the summer fades. Summer seems to be in him the spiritual force that sustains life, the symbol of life. However, summer will always end, the eternal fairy tale will be lost, the wonderland adventure will be lost, and the good memories will be lost - in Murakami's pen, the process of human life is the process of constant searching and loss. The regret of Murakami's novel lies precisely in it: there is only the sadness of the soul losing its refuge, only the anxiety of self-loss, but it does not tell us how to settle the wandering soul, how to find the lost soul, how to return to the warm, inhabitable home.
Life is not always summer, and long enough satisfying summer days do not exist. The death of summer does not take away the whole life, but an important fragment of life suddenly disappears. Admit that summer has passed, even if there are regrets and unwillingness, but the door of the season, when it should be closed, can not always hope that it is still open.
Remembering a great lyric of Zhang Chu's "If love is immortal, the dust on it must be very thick", we can also say that if summer does not end, there will always be summer between heaven and earth, the big sun is always shining in all directions with the teenagers, the beach boy must have tried to find a shadow to hide, the sun is dazzling, blurring the return ship near and far, making them black in front of their eyes. The beauty of summer came for a short time, so as not to hurt the light wings of the teenager!