"Sleep" by Haruki Murakami

 

Sleep, the fifth short story from The Elephant Vanishes, tells the story of a thirty-year-old wife who, somehow, is unable to sleep anymore. Her inability to fall asleep affects her life and the relationships between her and those around her, including her husband and son.

What separates Murakami as a writer is his ability to tell stories of absolutely normal protagonists who experience extraordinary things. In his long novels, the extraordinary is mostly about something external and the characters are caught in bizarre happenings which compel them to act. However, in his short works, the extraordinary is mostly about something internal, like a curse that causes certain physiological malfunctions in the protagonists' bodies: be it a specific kind of memory loss that causes one to forget his/her own name (A Shinagawa Monkey), or insatiable hunger (The Second Bakery Attack), or an awful case of non-stop vomiting (Nausea 1979), to name but a few.

In Sleep, the wife experienced an awful nightmare that made her unable to sleep. Throughout the story, she tells how her life has changed before this unique condition and after.

Before 'the sleep-eating' nightmare:

She used to be an active person with a distinctive character who drank a lot, read whole volumes of books, especially Russian literature, and ate chocolate without restriction. Her first early months of marriage were happy, but as the years rolled on, this feeling started to fade away. Life became a drag, and every day was a copy of the next, even the exchanges or dialogues between her and her husband and son were 'always the same dialogue'. She began, bit by bit, to lose important things she shouldn't lose, like for instance, the thing that made her husband unique to her, despite his 'not-being-such-a-nice-looking-guy'. 'How can you live with a man so long and not be able to bring his face to mind?' the protagonist asks.

After 'the sleep-eating' nightmare:

At first, she isn't deeply worried about her condition, but then she starts to notice new changes in her: her body, and the way she spends her waking days and nights. Her skin 'has far more glow, far more tautness'. She starts to indulge herself in Russian Literature, coupled with drinking wine and eating chocolate. 

However, as she edges closer and closer to the seventeenth day without sleeping, her worries begin to surface as she realizes that 'this extended life' has to have a 'debt' to settle. Not to mention, that the more she doesn't sleep, the more she distances herself from her family as they're becoming 'strangers' to her day by day. 

We can see the two states of the protagonist's lives. The first where she was 'free' to do whatever she pleased and had more confidence, and the later where the killing routine of marriage has shackled her. The nightmare acts as a catalyst to let her break loose (at a great cost sadly). The man in the nightmare is wearing a tight-fitting sweatsuit (symbolizing her young self), but he's an old man (symbolizing what she's become). The old man acts as a premonition of 'the curse' he's inflicted on the protagonist. It's like saying to her: 'Hey! You'll become just like me: an old woman who keeps clinging to her past'. 

I thoroughly enjoyed Sleep. The prose. The flow of the main character's thoughts. The parallels between the story and Anna Karenina.