I [Kidney] You
February 8th, 2007I’ve been teaching a section of creative writing at Otis, and it meets for three hours, once a week. The class is right after lunch, so there’s a subtle drag on enthusiasm, an undercurrent of nap-yawn. Yesterday we had a great discussion, though, about two Haruki Murakami stories we had read. If you have read any Murakami, then it makes sense to you that some of the discussion questions I posed were these:
- Why spaghetti?
- Why a kidney shaped stone, rather than some other shape?
- What if she had been something else, instead of an urban tightrope-walker?
The class came up with creative and intelligent answers for all of these questions. My favorite were the associations with kidneys: They filter things. They have no cliche social connotations (like the heart does). They make you think of beans. And you can donate one. With such insight, I saw the story in a new light. And now, for Valentine’s Day, I think it would be more romantic to receive a piece of jewelry depicting a kidney than one depicting a heart. Or better yet, a real kidney. That’s love.
February 9th, 2007 at 8:48 am
I think an iPod shuffle would be love. Yes. Especially and orange one, with something engraved on the back. Yes.
Oh, and I LOVE the Murakami story about the tightrope walker. In fact, I love all of Murakami’s stories and novels. After the Quake is one of my favorite books of all time.
I once spent an entire weekend in college writing out one of his stories by hand so I could feel the rhythm of his writing. It was so beautiful, I cried myself to sleep every night.