Murakami, Munch, and the fleeting nature of infatuation

Hope, love, and loss–reflecting on the disillusionment of The One.

“On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning” is a short story by Haruki Murakami, a Japanese writer born in 1949.

I was introduced to Murakami in poetry summer camp when a daily packet of short fiction landed on my desk; innocuous but entirely life-changing. “On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning” was one of the many short stories in the packet but I’m unable to remember any of the others.

Murakami struck a chord with me in the way he infused the surreal into the most mundane parts of the every day. Monsters could show up on people’s lawns from bursting through the ground, giant talking frogs interrupt a man’s normal life to take him on a wild adventure. In this way, Murakami uses the bizarre and dreamlike to tell us things about “normal” life as we know it.

In “On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning”, Murakami writes about a man who ruminates on passing by a girl who he is certain is his soulmate. The man was walking west to east, while the woman east to west. In this man’s retelling of the story to a friend, he shares that he is positive of his love for her because the woman wasn’t remarkable in any way — it was just an intense feeling about the woman that shook him to his core.

If he were to have met her, he says, he would have approached her and regaled her with a story about a man and a woman. This story-within-a-story tells how this man and woman fall in love and know that they are the “100% perfect” ones for each other, but decide to put it to the test by separating and letting fate take the reins.

Fate has its way and soon the man and woman forget entirely about each other. Much later in the future, the man and woman pass each other by on the street and both have a glimpse of a thought where the other is The One for them. In the fleeting moment of heart-pounding potency, both man and woman resign to their path and cross each other without a word.

“A sad story, don’t you think?

Yes, that’s it, that is what I should have said to her.”

And that is how Murakami’s short story ends. A complete look at the failings of “could be” and “could have been” in the microcosm of one man’s conversation.

This man contemplates how he should have spoken to a woman he saw, serenading her with a story about the ephemeral nature of love in an overcrowded maze like Harajuku, Japan. Of course, this story about the man and woman never reaches the target, making it a gorgeous meta-tale about infatuation.

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I recently was able to visit the SFMOMA’s exhibition on Edvard Munch, an 18th-century Scandinavian painter whose symbolic paintings focused on themes of anxiety, loneliness, and love.

In The Lonely Ones (seen above), the painting’s motifs are as simple and in-your-face as Murakami’s short story. The possibility and aching closeness of love are there, but it makes the separation and sliver of emptiness between the two characters all the more apparent.

Much like in Murakami’s story, the man is the one slightly positioned towards the woman, but both are gazing outwards towards the wholeness of life and the future.

As they are turned away from us, neither the subjects nor even our eyeline meets anyone else’s.

No one person is connecting with the other, and this creates a very real sense of loneliness.

Munch created several versions of this painting, but all with the same concept and visual idea. As the man is shaded in darkness and the woman in light, it shows the unavailability of each person to the other.

It’s as if both are passing each other on the street, knowing the possibility of love could be there, but moving past — solidifying the gap that for a brief moment, wavered with chance.