56 pages • 1 hour read
Haruki MurakamiA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
“The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women”
“The Second Bakery Attack”
“The Kangaroo Communiqué”
“On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning”
“Sleep”
“The Fall of the Roman Empire, the 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler’s Invasion of Poland, and the Realm of Raging Winds”
“Lederhosen”
“Barn Burning”
“The Little Green Monster”
“Family Affair”
“A Window”
“TV People”
“A Slow Boat to China”
“The Dancing Dwarf”
“The Last Lawn of the Afternoon”
“The Silence”
“The Elephant Vanishes”
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
A university student in his early twenties works for a year at the “The Pen Society,” a company that helps members improve their letter-writing skills. As a “Pen Master,” the narrator responds to letters from members, providing corrections and comments to help them improve. After leaving the company, the student accepts an invitation from one of his correspondents, a 32-year-old woman with no children. The woman promises to cook the narrator a hamburger steak (the subject of their last correspondence, quoted at the beginning of the story).
The narrator enjoys his dinner with the woman as the two discuss literature and writing. The narrator praises the strengths of the woman’s writing, telling her he enjoyed her letters, even though he “could hardly remember anything she had written” (194). Years later, the narrator continues to think of the woman when he passes by her neighborhood and looks up at the windows of her apartment building, trying to remember which one is hers. He says that “the central question” (194) of the piece is whether he should have slept with her, a question he still debates.
The narrator’s college job as a “Pen Master,” as the narrator comes to realize, is less about helping clients (mostly female) improve their writing than about providing companionship, emphasizing the collection’s theme of Internality and Social Relationships:
I didn’t realize it at the time, but these women were lonely (as were the male members of the Society). They wanted to write but they had no one to write to. They weren’t the type to send fan letters to a deejay. They wanted something more personal—even if it had to come in the form of corrections and critiques (191).
This drive for social connection is not only profoundly human, Murakami suggests it is an impulse shared by all living things. The narrator finds himself simultaneously dismissive of the presumed superficiality of the interactions with members and amazed by the variety and honesty of the letters he receives, realizing that the connections he makes with his members—superficial as they may seem—also create a reality and meaning of their own. He thus finds himself strangely ambivalent about this job, admitting that he is both happy and sad to leave it.
The narrator’s dinner with one of his correspondents reflects this tension between superficiality and intimacy that characterizes his role as “Pen Master.” In many ways, the woman is a typical example of the Society’s members—a lonely woman looking for social connection and understanding. She is not even particularly memorable (the narrator cannot remember most of her letters). Though the woman is married, she clearly feels lonely, telling the narrator that “there are certain things [she] can’t really talk with [her husband] about. Her feelings don’t get through to him. A lot of the time, [she] feel[s] [they’re] speaking two different languages” (193).
The narrator claims to feel sorry for the woman, continuing to reflect on her—and whether he should have slept with her—years later, but he only relates to her vis-á-vis his own needs and desires rather than attempting to determine hers. He wonders “how one could go on living with someone to whom it was impossible to convey one’s feelings” (193), and cannot seem to make up his mind about what she was trying to tell him—likely because he wasn’t really listening. The “window” of the woman’s apartment, which the narrator searches for in her building whenever he passes her neighborhood, thus becomes a metaphor for the many possible ways to make social connections and interpret one’s experiences. Just as there are “simply too many” (194) windows in the woman’s building for him to remember which is hers, the narrator feels there are too many possible answers to the question of what the woman’s experiences were. The narrator believes the “central question” of the story is whether he should have slept with her, pointing to the myopia of his perspective.
By Haruki Murakami