Death, Absence and Emptiness

Introduction

If it is true that writers and artists should spend their entire lives and careers investigating, examining, and trying to understand the same themes, then Haruki Murakami is a prime example of how to do this successfully. Like a jazz musician building on the same note, Murakami has — from the start — been obsessed with issues of sexual identity and love, loss and detachment, history and war, and nostalgia and fate. He has been deeply influenced by Western culture, and his themes, in some ways, are distilled from his favorite writers and musicians.

Thesis Statement

Death, ...