When I first read the story “Sleep” by Haruki Murakami as a young adult, I thought it was one of the most powerful stories I had read.
I couldn’t put my finger on why it interested me. It did not seem to provide any concrete answers at the time, but only to posit riddles.
Revisiting it now, I was reminded why I liked it so much.
I will deconstruct the story to get at some hidden meaning, or personal interpretations.
This will necessitate listing the main events in the story to discuss how they connect to the subtext. The manga adaptation usefully strips away some of the rhetorical devices and artfully focuses on the core images.
This is 1 of only 2 stories written by Murakami from the first-person female perspective. The other one is called “Creta Kanno,” which is only available in Monkey magazine.
Why did he choose this perspective? The main character’s role as a housewife is ideally suited to the plot of the story. As a woman, she also might feel more fear from the male antagonists in the story. Every other character in the story is male. I would argue that the shadowy beings at the end are also perceived as male, even if their gender is not explicitly labeled. The policeman who questions her when she is loitering in the parking lot reminds her that there was a rape and murder in the area recently. This sets up the ending. It plays into the protagonist’s fear of death and her fear of uncontrollable forces. She feels helpless, as a woman, as a wife and mother, and as a human being. A victim of mortal constraints, burdened with responsibilities. It is a relatable position, this pervasive feeling like one’s life is arranged so that there is no room to find one’s purpose.
The plot begins when she has a night terror, a waking nightmare where a ghost or old man, or spirit, pours water over her naked feet. She experiences sleep paralysis. This being is the first encounter and precipitates her sleepless condition. She does not understand the significance of the night terror but somehow knows it is to blame. One might interpret the dream as a signifier of powerlessness. It mirrors the ending, which can be called a night terror of another sort, where the body does not respond, and one helplessly succumbs to the manifestation of one’s fear.
She is trapped in an aging body. She has a fear of aging as well, so she combats the flab with vigorous swimming each day. Sleep, which is supposed to rejuvenate her, has excluded her from its domain. She, like the main character from Groundhog Day, is the only one in the universe who suffers from a strange exemption from reality. In that way, it can be called a form of madness.
One of the symptoms of sleep deprivation, she later reads, is madness. Another is death.
She does not consult a doctor, nor tell her husband, who is a dentist. I think the fact that he is a dentist bores her. She also seems bored by her well-behaved son. Her relationship with her son and husband are depicted with professional distance. If she loves them, it is only out of duty.
After the initiation ceremony, as I call the first night terror, she relishes her sleeplessness, falling into a new set of nighttime habits. She clearly wants to take advantage of the situation while at the same time subtly knowing that it will spell her doom.
She’s a daily swimmer. She swims with a vengeance to punish her body for aging, to slow the aging process, to purge something from her, as she says. She likes her own body, though Murakami casts her in an asexual light. She only engages in intercourse with her husband without passion, the way she cooks dinner.
She finds her own face dissatisfying. When she watches her husband and son sleep, she dislikes their faces. They seem like the same face on two different people to her. This inability to love and recognize the humanity in peoples’ faces seems like a symptom of her sleeplessness. They seem like automatons, snoring away while her ceaseless consciousness continues. Sleep transforms them, or rather, displays who they really are. She lacks their innocence. She knows that the world goes on while others sleep.
Her sleeplessness is an escape from this condition of mankind, while it is at the same time a lack of escape. She is unable to return to the real world of routinely sleeping. She is a woman apart. Her family is wholly ignorant of her condition, which lasts at least 17 days. She reads about how this should be impossible. So long without sleep should be fatal. It should at least result in irreversible insanity. Her terror at the incongruity infiltrates her.
She worries about the meaninglessness of her situation. Her life was even more meaningless before her chronic sleeplessness. After the twilight zone period begins, it assumes shades of meaning she cannot understand. Her chores and reading keep her busy. Murakami often puts his characters in situations where they are able to read and leave their lives behind. As a fellow bibliophile, I sympathize with the desire to do nothing but read – to pause time, to put one’s life on hold. I have often wished my body did not need sleep so I could just read all night. The main character chooses Anna Karenina to get her into the groove of reading again. She is able to read with absolute concentration. There are no distractions in this version of the world she inhabits while the rest of humanity sleeps. The Romance and layers within the novel speak to her. She describes Tolstoy’s method as creating Russian dolls of meaning, meaning hidden beneath meaning, nestling subtexts within one another. I believe Murakami aspires to similar levels of compression, but his writings always suffer from an indulgent weirdness. Tolstoy’s stories were grounded, and when they contained flights of fancy, the interpretations were fairly clear. You get a lot of closure with Tolstoy, though he also left some threads dangling. So too, with Murakami, you can bring your personal opinion into the story, take from it something unique, but ultimately, it resists a total closure.
Some readers may be dissatisfied with the ending of this story. We do not learn what happens to our main character after her car is ravaged by two shadowy beings.
The car, like the book, is another escape for her. She leaves her house and wanders the town. She is disappointed that the streets are not empty. other drivers seem to live nocturnal lives.
Her awareness of the arbitrariness of death increases. She feels arbitrarily chosen for this period of sleeplessness. She lacks the reset button other people gain from sleep. It is like she is living one day that does not end.
In the final scene, there is anotehr car in the parking lot with her. That is specifically stated. This shows that she is either imagining the shadowy beings or that the other car did not respond to her dire situation. Perhaps there was no one in the car. The main character suggests that there were two lovers in the clandestine car, so one can only assume there was some indication that it was not uninhabited. Perhaps the inhabitants become the shadowy people who come after her. She cannot drive away or do anything to escape indicates that she must be having anotehr night terror to mirror the first.
We could interpret this second attack of powerlessness as either her foreshadowed death, or the end of her sleepless illness. It is open to several interpretations.
The second story in the collection is also interesting. “Scheherezade” is about a woman storyteller, who regales her lover with a story every time they meet. The story within a story she tells is not too complex and partakes of Murakami’s signature weirdness. The art was rather grotesque in this manga adaptation, though the progression of the story is satisfying. It also lacks closure in some respects. I get the sense that the author likes to leave his stories open-ended, so that we can imagine our own continuations. Reading a Murakami story is like a brief glimpse into a skewed world. The characters often act irrationally, and their emotions cannot be explained unless you look deeper. They feel deeply, but they do not know why they feel what they feel.
The female character talks about her past obsession with a boy in her class. This was an infatuation which simply evaporated after her graduation. It is easy to recall similar circumstances from my own life, where I stopped talking to friends and stopped liking or loving people in my school for inexplicable reasons. In reality, our interests simply diverge. One person who seems to have a soul-deep connection to us turns out to not be desirable at all.
There is a confessional quality. The frankness of the lovers toward one another is touching. Is it needlessly explicit? Some may think so.
As models of craft, I believe Murakami provides many good examples. His stories often have framing devices, though they return to the same images again and again. The characters all inexplicably love jazz and know factoids about obscure classical composers. Obviously, we are simply viewing different components of the authors psyche given life in fictional characters. Are his stories ultimately convincing? They work dramatically, in my opinion, even if they require a lot of suspension of disbelief.
L. S. Popovich 
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