Barn Burning – Haruki Murakami

This is a disturbing short story that can be read as a straight depiction of a sinister undiscovered killer, or as an exploration of good and evil. With it’s matter-of-fact style and ambiguity it has an unspoken creepiness that remains with you.

It’s told in the first-person by a writer looking back to a period a little earlier in his life. He had become friends with a girl, an interesting woman who has a complete innocence about her. She doesn’t seem to have material needs, is entirely trusting of others, and she is often reliant on other people to help her live in the world. But at the same time people are drawn to her goodness.

She travels for a few months (to Beirut) and returns to Japan with a guy she’s met, who seems to be successful, rich and live a pretty charming and charmed life. It’s an odd match.

There are two significant moments after that. First, the writer and the guy spend an evening getting drunk and stoned, during which the guy tells him that every couple of months he burns a barn down. The writer is incredulous, but intrigued. What? It makes no sense. Why? How? Doesn’t he get caught? The guy tells him the next one will very close to home, so the writer plots out where all the barns are in the area and checks them out every day. No barn is ever burnt down though.

Then, about a year later, the writer runs into the guy again. He asks him if he burnt the barn down, and the guy says yes, the writer must have missed it; it’s easy to miss things that are so close. And then they talk about the girl who the writer hasn’t seen since the day a year ago when they talked about burning barns, she’s gone missing. She’s never seen again, as far as we know.

One way to read this book is to see it as a pretty straight – though fairly ambiguous – story of a killer. This guy, with his money, car and looks, is also a murderer, and when he’s talking burning barns it’s actually a metaphor. He’s saying every now and again I kill things, and this time I’m going to kill something close to your home – the girl. He refers to burning barns that other people own but nobody looks after, where he won’t be caught because nobody is looking out for them – like the girl. You can imagine he travels around getting away with murder.

Another way to read the story is to see the characters as representing something bigger. The guy we might see as the devil. He says at one point that he’s been everywhere, done everything – implying in the conversation that he’s timeless, beyond the constraints of the law, beyond the here and now. He’s kind of like the evil that lurks inside all of us, but condensed. The girl on the other hand is an innocent, a holy fool of some kind, who has none of the cynicism and earthly attachments of the world.

And the writer might, in this reading, stand for a kind of passivity or inaction. He knows what’s going on, he knows this guy is going to do something, but he’s so disengaged from what’s happening that he doesn’t realise it until it’s too late. It ends with hims still checking daily to see if the barns are burnt down long after the girl is gone – he wants to find a burnt down barn, presumably, because that would justify his inaction, make it OK that he didn’t realise what was really go on and save the life of his friend. But he never finds one.

Image: By Fir0002 – Originally uploaded to the English Wikipedia here by the author, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11904