Philosophers Series · Part 8 of 12
Haruki Murakami: If You Remember Me
Haruki Murakami is not a philosopher in the classical sense. But few writers of our time have written as much about memory, loss and living on in others. Part 8 of our Philosophers Series.
Death as part of life
Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and is one of the most widely read authors today. In “Norwegian Wood” (1987), the narrator comes to terms with the early loss of a friend. He arrives at an insight that has become one of the author’s best-known lines: death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.
One memory is enough
In “Kafka on the Shore” (2002), the character Miss Saeki says to the young Kafka: “If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets.”
That is a remarkably modest idea of living on. No monument is needed, no audience of millions. A single person who remembers is enough.
In Murakami’s novels, memories are often like rooms or deep wells you climb down into. Whoever loses their memories loses a part of themselves.
His own epitaph
In his book about running, “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” (2007), Murakami considers what should one day be written on his gravestone. His suggestion: writer (and runner) – and that at least he never walked. A man who wryly drafts his own summary before others do it for him.
Living on in reading
For a writer, living on is something very concrete: every time someone opens a book, a voice speaks again. That doesn’t apply only to novels. It applies to every text a person leaves behind in their own words – including a letter to a daughter, or the answer to a question someone asked themselves one evening.
The logical conclusion
Murakami shows two things. You don’t have to write for everyone. It’s enough to write for the one person whose memory matters.
And it’s worth attempting your own summary rather than leaving it entirely to others. Not as control, but as a hint: this is how I saw myself.
Three questions to think further
- For which one person would you write?
- What would your gravestone say if you could word it yourself?
- Which memory would you never want to give up?