Barn Burning by Haruki Murakami

Some men just want to watch the world burn.

In many Murakami stories, an underlying melancholy is often evoked by the narrator's personal reflections, sifting through an archive of memories and reshaping them to hopefully gain some insight into the past. As an unreliable narrator, a key passage in "Barn Burning" explicitly highlights this approach: "Though maybe that was a mistaken impression on my part: I have this convenient tendency to rework my memories." This "reworking" of memories is important to keep in mind when reading this story. Not only is it an effective narrative technique that Murakami utilizes to emphasize a fragmented consciousness but this blurring of truth brings these unconscious processes to light where the buried, hidden self is slowly revealed. This is a relatively simple story where nothing really happens in terms of plot but it contains plenty of psychological depth. Subjectivity, unresolved trauma, ennui, even split-consciousness: "Simultaneity, if there was was such a thing: Here I had me thinking, and here I had me observing myself think. Time ticked on in impossibly minute polyrhythms." Weed certainly has the ability to create an out-of-body experience. 

Through pensive contemplation, the narrator reflects on a friendship he once had with an eccentric young woman and her boyfriend, who tells him a strange secret while smoking weed together: he enjoys lighting barns on fire. The narrator is fascinated by this seemingly random act of arson, which shakes up his entire world view. He wants to understand "why" the boyfriend has this peculiar obsession with igniting barns into flames but he remains evasive, never providing a clear answer. So, what does this story all add up to? In the end, I don't think it really matters. The allure of this bizarre and enigmatic narrative lies not in resolution but in the intrigue of ambiguity.