The illustration accompanying Haruki Murakami's new story, Samsa in Love (The New Yorker, October 28) is an insect shaped like a human heart, or more specifically, like one of those heart-shaped candy-infested Valentine's day gift boxes.
A central theme of the story is love. But the exploration of this most quintessential of human emotions is wrapped in layers of mystery.
The first mystery is the identity and the personal history of Gregor Samsa. Murakami, a great re teller of Kafka's themes, introduces Samsa as a human waking up from a strange, yet, by all indications, a lengthy sleep of oblivion:
He woke to discover that he had undergone a metamorphosis and become Gregor Samsa.
We don't know who he was prior to this moment of awakening. Was he an insect? The last time we saw Gregor Samsa, the poor fellow had metamorphosed into an insect. But Murakami's fellow seems to have had a reverse metamorphosis.
There are hints that Samsa was locked up in his room by his parents, and that the Samsas are an upper class family living in a grand house in a grand part of the city of Prague in Czechoslovakia. Was he locked up because he had become a gigantic insect?
It's impossible to tell, because Samsa wakes up into a cold and abandoned house. When he takes a tour of the house, his own house, he is like a stranger in a city, lost and stumbling through corridors and rooms. He navigates his way into the dining room and the table is laid out, but at the moment of dinner the people had fled, or so Samsa surmises.
The story is about an overwhelming mystery that Samsa can't solve, yet wants to solve.
A young hunchback woman arrives at the scene, and she is a locksmith. She's come to help fix a lock that had been broken into, she says.
She takes Samsa to be the child of the household and converses with him freely, without any knowledge of the metamorphosis. Or, so it seems.
The hunchback tells Samsa of an upheaval that has plunged the city of Prague into a crisis. Everybody, especially the men, are huddling indoors, not daring to brave the military who have apparently taken over the city.
Samsa listens with awe and wonder to the hunchback and finds his body undergoing certain experiences which he can't name or understand. His male instrument bulges to an extreme and flashes of warm currents courses through his veins.
We understand he is experiencing love--for the hunchback; she is wonderful to Samsa because she is the first female human form he has seen since his awakening.
Is his love, a visceral sexual response to the body of the female?
We are led to believe it is. We are led to believe that Samsa is entering life as we know human life to be, through the gateway of the most primal and "human" of human experiences--the emotion of love.
Samsa likes it; initially he had prefered to have been reborn as a "sunflower" or a "fish", but after experiencing love he is happy he has morphed into a human.
But there are these showers of contextual cues, which tells us that the love that Samsa experiences isn't quite the kind of mindless emotion we have reduced to a cliche in our thinking of it.
The love appears first when the hunchback starts speaking about things which we take for granted, and to which Samsa is an alien. She speaks of god, locks, keys, fucking, revolution, of the "world falling apart" outside, on the streets.
Samsa wants to know what these are; he wants to unlock the mystery to life and the woman would be his ideal locksmith in this process of unlocking.
Samsa is thirsty for knowing. The body of the woman isn't what fills him up with warmth inside and causes his instrument to bulge. It's the promise of knowing that he falls in love with.
When the woman is done with her task, Samsa asks if he can her again.
The woman, taken aback with the invitation asks Samsa, what would they do if they were to meet.
Samsa says:
Talk...about this world. About you. About me. I feel like there are so many things we need to talk about. Tanks, for instance. And God. And brassieres. And locks.
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