Lit geek update #9: "The Seventh Man"

These past few months, quite a number of people have landed on my blog searching for a write up on this particular short story. They've most probably ended up disappointed because the only thing I have here related to it is a quoted passage.

So I decided to reread the story and write about it.

"The Seventh Man," which is the thirteenth story in Haruki Murakami's 24-short fiction collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, is, in a nutshell, about the trauma a young boy goes through after the death of his childhood friend, K.

K got swallowed by a gigantic wave while the two of them were taking a walk by the seaside after a huge typhoon hit their small town. In usual Murakami style, the description of the tragedy is nothing short of surreal. The imagery is enough to etch itself on the reader's mind, clinging, disturbingly strong.

The shock of the encounter was, naturally, traumatic for the young boy, and this was something he carried with him through adulthood, disrupting his life for the longest time. Right after the accident, he went through a breakdown, suffering deliriums and physical illness. He had difficulty facing the life he had lived before the episode; he was haunted by constant nightmares.

Salvation came, albeit after long years of struggle (or non-struggle) when he came across a bunch of paintings made by K. Inch by inch, he came to terms with his fear, but only when he confronted it, after turning his back on it for so long.

The last paragraph reads:

"They tell us that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, but I don't believe that," he said. Then, a moment later, he added: "Oh, the fear is there, all right. It comes to us in many forms, at different times, and overwhelms us. But the most frightening thing we can do at such times is to turn our backs on it, to close our eyes. For then we take the most precious thing inside us and surrender it to something else. In my case, that something was the wave." (p. 177)