An article in The Guardian describes how Murakami “likened the solitary act of writing to cooking one of his favourite foods, deep-fried oysters. His wife can’t stand the dish, so he has no choice but to cook and eat them alone. I am lonely, but they are delicious. Like the relationship between solitude and freedom, it moves in an endless cycle. Picking out single words that are contained within me is also a solitary act so [writing novels] is similar to eating fried oysters by myself. When my mind grows pressured when I think that I am writing a novel, I feel more relaxed when I think that I am only frying oysters.”
I am curious about the relationship between loneliness and food in Murakami’s writing; they are both frequent features in his stories, but I had never before considered that they might be linked. Murakami’s characters do a fair amount of eating, especially at that point in their journeys where they have entered another world and are undergoing the purification process. Boku spends a lot of time eating alone and Murakami describes the process and the foods in detail ie. cooking spaghetti or the doughnuts and other scrumptious meals in The Strange Library. Consuming food, the conception of mealtime, does have a certain social connotation. Humans tend to eat in groups. But Boku often has or desires no one to break bread with him. The fueling of his body becomes a meditative, introspective event.
Murakami also uses food as a way for Boku to relate to other characters. Many important conversations are described in the context of a meal or a drink ie. Boku and the Rat having a beer, Midori cooking for Watanabe, the husband and wife with no food in the house in The Second Bakery attack etc.
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