Critical Analysis Of Town Of Cats, By Haruki Murakami

Literature has always been one of the beloved arts throughout the ages, all over the world, and has served as inspirations, education, guidance, and assurance to people. History is a record of factual events that occurred in the past; however, it only speaks objectively and does not depict the perspective and insight of the people. Literature of all ages is a reflection of and sometimes even focused on the ordinary citizens' everyday life, and approach complications or inclinations of the people and society at a subjective level. Modern literature is the representation of citizens' spirit and outlook in life sorted by a genre; Asian Literature particularly focuses on democracy, liberalism, collectivism, and ideology while expressing complex …show more content…
Modern society is surrounded by the technology and machinery that make human life convenient and comfortable. Undoubtedly, this is significant progress in human history; however, it has dulled consciousness and decreased the scene of appreciation and awareness of people in the society. "Town of Cats" by Haruki Murakami conveys the message from the vision of Tengo, who seems to have given up on society. He reads a story of a traveling man who ends up finding himself forever stuck in an utterly unknown location where cats being the only residents. Interestingly, they share a similar mindset which is a lack of appreciation, boredom, apathy and in search for inspiration in life. This seems to portray the importance of awareness and seeing things through while appreciating the comforts of life; encouraging one to change their outlook on themselves and their surrounding environment. This work also holds an ambiguous storyline involving a variety of themes that allow personal interpretations such as human relationships and the memory of the war. The story is set in the time when societal reorganization and restoration was completed after World War II, and the society was in the midst of a high economic growth period and the formation of Capitalism. Tengo's father would tell him stories of his hardships and experiences in colonized Manchuria which ended up traumatizing him because he passively inherited individualized memories of the war from his father. Historyis a collective memory which is validated by a civilization; whereas personal memories are solely dependent on an individual which makes it harder to verify it factual. The instability and uncertainty of human memories are depicted in the story as Tengo himself suffers from an unclear memory from childhood. In recent years, spoken memories of colonial and warfare experiences shared by