In the Miso Soup

by Ryū Murakami

What’s good about Americans, if I can generalize a little, is that they have a kind of openhearted innocence. And what’s not so good is that they can’t imagine any world outside the States, or any value system different from their own. The Japanese have a similar defect, but Americans are even worse about trying to force others to do whatever they themselves believe to be right.

All Americans have something lonely about them. I don’t know what the reason for that might be, except maybe that they’re all descended from immigrants.

It isn’t easy to live a normal life, though. Parents, teachers, government—they all teach you how to live the dreary, deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally.

The ghosts of sad, cheap souls live on in sad, cheap furniture.

Our ancestors were capable of imagining all kinds of horrors, which they had to try to prevent from becoming realities. And modern people still have the same ability. When it’s used in positive ways you get artists and scientists and so on, but when it’s used in negative ways it always turns into fear and anxiety and hatred, and it can cause a lot of damage.

Basically people who love horror movies are people with boring lives. They want to be stimulated, and they need to reassure themselves, because when a really scary movie is over, you’re reassured to see that you’re still alive and the world still exists as it did before. That’s the real reason we have horror films—they act as shock absorbers—and if they disappeared altogether it would mean losing one of the few ways we have to ease the anxiety of the imagination.

If you don’t keep your body and brain active, senility sets in, even if you’re a little kid. The circulation in your brain gradually decreases. Like the cat in that experiment—by the time he lost interest in eating, the blood in his brain was just barely moving. It’s the stress that does it. Human beings have thought up everything from hunting in groups to pop songs and car races so our brains wouldn’t atrophy, but there aren’t that many genuinely effective ways to guard against senility nowadays.