Harsh Realities of Familiar Places: Exploring Nostalgia and Regret in Murakami and Atwood

Grace Holland

Often, we feel nostalgia or even regret when we think about something familiar, such as an environment that brings us back to another era in our lives or a person that we have not seen in a long time. Nostalgia, the feeling of fondness we get when we think of a past event or time period, does not always have a positive connotation. Especially when nostalgia goes hand-in-hand with regret, it can bring up feelings of sorrow over what could have been. Lois, the protagonist from Margaret Atwood’s “Death by Landscape,” remembers her childhood camp through the paintings on her wall, painfully reminding her of the mysterious loss of her friend Lucy and the guilt she feels over the tragedy. In Haruki Murakami’s “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning,” the unnamed narrator walks past a woman who he deems as “perfect for him,” but he does not talk to her and instead imagines situations that could happen. While both stories describe seemingly pleasant, nostalgia-provoking physical environments, specifically Canadian nature and a nice April day, Atwood depicts intense regret that contrasts the beauty of the story’s setting; meanwhile, Murakami depicts the more positive side of nostalgia without the regret, the beautiful weather mirroring the narrator’s romanticization.

“Death by Landscape” follows the perspective of Lois, a now-grown woman who accompanied her childhood friend Lucy on the summer camp excursion that led to her disappearance. Atwood employs a sorrowful tone to slowly reveal the tragedy that has followed Lois through the various stages of her life. Starting in Lois’s adulthood, Atwood does not immediately give the full context but instead alludes to the childhood event. For example, she describes the “wordless unease” that Lois feels when she looks at the paintings on her wall (1). As the story begins to explore Lois’s childhood experiences at camp, her feelings of nostalgia are clearly negative. Lois will “never be able to forget” the words to the camp songs and the gestures that go along with them, but she views this as “a sad thought,” demonstrating how she would forget her camp memories if she could (Atwood 2). Once it is revealed that Lois’s regret stems from Lucy’s unexplained disappearance, the story more explicitly describes the grief that haunts her. Aside from her real life, Lois cannot shake the feeling of “another, shadowy life that hovered around her and would not let itself be realized, the life of what would have happened if Lucy had not stepped sideways and disappeared from time” (Atwood 7). Because of her guilt, Lois feels a responsibility to help Lucy live on, and she believes that Lucy lives through their camp’s environment. This explains why she hangs up the paintings on her wall. Since she cannot entirely block out her memory of the camp, she continues to feel pain and regret over Lucy’s disappearance, especially when she observes the paintings.

Unlike “Death by Landscape,” Murakami’s “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning” establishes the narrator’s nostalgic memory from the very first line: “One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo’s fashionable Harajuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl” (1). While the narrator could have done something to avoid a missed opportunity and its accompanying uncertainty, he chooses not to talk to her. His agency allows him to romanticize the event by imagining positive scenarios. Another argument may suggest that Murakami’s narrator imagines these scenarios because he regrets not talking to the woman; however, I would suggest does not regret his avoidance of any interaction with her, as he would rather imagine scenarios than face her rejection. He says “wish I could talk to her,” rather than ‘wish I talked to her’ (Murakami 1). When a friend asks the unnamed narrator if he interacted with the girl at all, he responds, “Nah, just passed her on the street” (Murakami 1). The narrator’s avoidance of the past tense in his hypotheticals, along with the indifference he shows towards his friend’s question, demonstrate his imaginative and unregretful tone. On the other hand, Lois faces the regret of her inability to prevent Lucy’s disappearance. As a result, Lois cannot hang onto the same “potentiality” that “knocks on the door of” the unnamed narrator’s heart (Murakami 2). Lois did not have the choice to save Lucy and avoid these feelings of regret, while Murakami’s main character could have talked to the woman; as opposed to risking rejection, he chose to leave the interaction open to his imagination. Whereas Lois’s grief and regret stays with her through adulthood, the stream-of-consciousness of Murakami’s unnamed narrator suggests short-term obsession rather than long-term longing.

Although Lois’s perspective guides “Death by Landscape,” the feelings of nostalgia and regret are weaved through the descriptions of Lucy, her childhood friend. Lucy and Lois built a strong friendship over their childhood summers by writing letters to each other through the winters. Atwood writes that “they were both only children, at the time when this was thought to be a disadvantage, so in their letters they pretended to be sisters or even twins” (3). Sincethey held this strong bond during such a formative period of their childhood, Lois’s grief alters the course of her life, as she feels a responsibility to help Lucy live on in her memory. “100% Perfect Girl” also directs the main character’s feelings onto one other person, but Murakami utilizes the concept of the male gaze. The unnamed narrator states the girl on the street is “not that good looking,” yet he knows nothing about the girl’s identity when he decides on her perfection (Murakami 1). Murakami comments on the superficiality of romantic infatuation, especially when involving the male gaze, which differs from the true platonic friendship depicted in “Death By Landscape.” This superficiality emphasizes the narrator’s lack of regret, especially in comparison to Lois, as he cannot truly have the full desire to explore an emotional connection with this woman when he knows nothing about her.

Through his descriptions of the beautiful April morning that contextualizes the memory of the narrator’s “100% perfect girl,” Murakami creates an idealistic tone that demonstrates the positive nostalgia his main character feels. The ideal weather mirrors the romanticized scenarios that Murakami’s narrator imagines in his head, such as an imagined walk by a flower shop: “A small, warm air mass touches my skin. The asphalt is damp, and I catch the scent of roses” (2). Along with the pleasant imagery of the scent of flowers and the warmth of the air, Murakami repeatedly circles back to the statement that “it’s a really nice April morning,” which emphasizes the effect of the weather on the narrator’s tone (1). While Atwood also describes seemingly pleasant scenes, it serves the purpose of juxtaposition between the beauty of nature and a past tragedy. Because Lois never got closure on what happened to Lucy, she imagines that Lucy lives in the landscape paintings, “in the yellow autumn woods she’s behind the tree that cannot be seen because of the other trees, over beside the blue silver of the pond” (Atwood 8). We generally associate autumn leaves and silver ponds with the beauty and calmness brought to us by looking at a nice view. However, the landscape paintings represent the loss of Lucy and the “shadowy life” that follows Lois through her own life (Atwood 7).

Setting plays an important role in both of these stories, emphasizing the romanticization of Murakami’s narrator and contrasting the grief of Atwood’s main character, therefore adding depth to the tone of each short story. A major difference between these stories lies in the presence of regret. While Murakami’s narrator chooses to keep his feelings for the “100% perfect girl” in the superficial infatuation and daydreaming stages, Lois experiences a life-altering event and can never move past the disappearance of her childhood friend. This is not to say that Murakami does not tackle themes of regret, but he builds a character that chooses to imagine scenarios instead of taking action, forcing us to consider the role of emotional risk in missed opportunities. In other words, he tackles this theme by building a character that refuses to feel regret. Murakami’s narrator recounts a “nice April morning” and Atwood’s protagonist dwells on her childhood summers, but each of their reflections bring up different emotional responses.

 

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. “Death by Landscape.” Wilderness Tips, Doubleday, 1991, pp. 1-8.

Murakami, Haruki. “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning.” The Elephant Vanishes, Vintage Books, 1981, pp. 1-3.

 

Grace Holland is a junior at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, originally from West Chester, Pennsylvania. She is studying English with a concentration in Creative Writing, a specialization in Teaching the English Language Arts, a specialization in Writing, Rhetoric, and Literacy Studies, and a minor in sociology. She is also the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Jabberwocky, the official undergraduate literary journal of the English Department, and a tutor at the UMass Writing Center.

Website: gracehollandwrites.wixsite.com/website

Instagram: @gracehholland

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Writing the World 2023-24 by Asher McMahan, Mato, Grace Holland, Isabella Livoti, Andrea Tchesnovsky, Javor Stein, Hannah O'Brien, Dex Veitch, and John Alessandro is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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