On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning by Haruki Murakami

Some pretty flowers for a pretty lady.

It's been a while since I've read anything by Haruki Murakami. Taken from his collection "Elephant Vanishes", this particular story reignited my admiration for this author. His delectable prose, elegant in its simplicity, imbued with an underlying melancholy, reminds me why I cherish his writing so deeply. Murakami has this unique gift for capturing the profound sorrow of loneliness and intense yearning for genuine romantic connections. Here, he takes the familiar "boy meets girl" motif and transforms it into a cosmopolitan fairy tale that feels fresh and emotionally evocative. The idea that someday we'll encounter our ideal partner and achieve total happiness is nothing but a fallacy. This might be true for some people but in most cases, it's a misleading notion and often cultivated by an overindulgence in movies or romance novels where love inevitably conquers all. Of course, one might indulge in the delightful fantasy of encountering this perfect person, and this narrative wholeheartedly embraces such a whimsical notion of reality:

"They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been found by their 100% perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your 100% perfect other. It's a miracle. A cosmic miracle."

Or what about this: "Their heads were as empty as the young D.H. Lawrence piggy bank."

Ouch, total burn. Throwing D.H. Lawrence under the bus like that is some serious shade. Despite the narrators pensive reflections and claiming that this is a sad story, there is still a delicate balance of lighthearted humor. Missed connections, awkward encounters, anxious internalized monologues and experiencing nostalgia for something that never happened yet are other interesting aspects worth noting. For such a simple premise, there exists a complex psychological underpinning of perception related to idealized love. Murakami is a literary rock-star, a short-story virtuoso and a master of narrative technique. Each encounter with his work leaves me craving more.