Sam Blog Post 1

Haruki Murakami and Identification

I find that Murakami's work deals very much with a purposeful lack of detailed information about his characters, at least beyond general traits and thoughts.  What I find interesting about this is that this 'lack of details or traits' that could be used to identify a character more deeply, or to illustrate a character more precisely, creates an atmosphere where said character actually becomes easier to identify with, at least in a general sense.  Murakami's clean-cut, nondescript, average, everyday characters are people who's shoes most readers can easily slip into.  In the case of Boku, the purposeful lack of a name and his 'average Joe' quality seem to almost be purposefully created that way, in order to allow vast amounts of readers to easily see the world through Boku's eyes, and to allow them to feel a sense of closeness with him in a 'general' way.  Of course, the possible downside to this, in my opinion, is that you can never have an extreme, or intimate, level of closeness or identification with his characters.  While nearly everyone, including myself, can identify with the 'average' type, there's something to be said for a more detailed, more outside-of-the-box character too.  The more niche group of people that can identify with that type of character will very likely feel a more intimate level of identification with him or her.