“Of course I have a lot of memories of my father.” The first person, the subjectivity: this is not a common opening for a book by Haruki Murakami.
In his 40-year-long career, he took his readers to countless worlds. From the mysterious Tokyo of A Wild Sheep Chase, to the surreal dream world of Dance Dance Dance, his pen wrote of hundreds of lives.
Except his own.
“[S]ome of my memories of my father are happy, some not quite so much. But the memories that remain most vividly in my mind now fall into neither category; they involve more ordinary events.”
To tell this personal story, Murakami’s words are flanked by the images by the multi-awarded illustrator Emiliano Ponzi.
In Abandoning a cat, Murakami opens the narration by talking about his childhood pet, an innocent little creature, who is receiving a profound injustice.
Cats are a recurring theme for Murakami: the protagonist of Kafka on the Shore makes a living as a lost cats’ finder and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle also involves a missing cat.
He reflects on his father’s life, on the scars that every parent inevitably leave on their children.
He describes the horror of the war, that his father fought with courage, despite being a deeply religious man.
He reflects on the role of a father, the role of a son, the generational differences and the mutual disappointment.
"My father and I were born into different ages and environments, and our ways of thinking and viewing the world were miles apart,” writes Murakami, before describing the day in which his father died.
A sense of bitterness dominates the story, the characters are nor good or bad, nor happy or unhappy: they are humans, and human life can be grey.
This grey feeling is recalled by Ponzi’s illustrations, with low saturation and the blank faces of his characters, which evoke Edward Hopper’s.
Bi-dimensional figures and contrasted long shadows; Ponzi uses the same colour palette for a distracted boy in school and a soldier who just decapitated his enemy. Because this is what happens in our heads: memories merge and lose intensity, colour and life. With time, they all took the same.
Murakami and Ponzi’s work make us re-thinking the book as an object. This book is not a bunch of sheets of paper with a story printed on them. The story is the book itself and the book is the story.
In as little as 72 pages, the words and the images explore relationships, generational barriers, faith, horror and pain. All this through an anecdote about a cat - or maybe two.
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