Children of God dance

All the children of God dance | Haruki Murakami

All God's children dance is one of Haruki Murakami's collections of short stories, written in 2000 and published by Einaudi. The main theme is the earthquake, which came in 1995 to devastate the city of Kobe: the images of ruin and destruction, imprinted in the minds and soul of the protagonists, are the background to the different life stories.

Realism and minimalism merge with the oneiric dimension, also re-proposed in the surreal titles of the six stories that make up the work.

In the first, a man suddenly abandoned by his wife reacts to the shock with a trip to the island of Hokkaido, where a colleague asked him to deliver a small parcel. The package is light: it contains, perhaps, the emptiness that the man has inside himself, the "air bubble" for which his wife, although less attractive and pleasant than him, left him forever.

It follows the story of a friendship between a young man, fleeing from his family, and a painter who loves to light a bonfire on the beach:

while he does he has an incredible light in his eyes.

The flames of its fires are neither quick nor violent because their only purpose is to "warm people's hearts". The research and the composition of the pieces of firewood, returned from the sea, are for the man equal to the act of the sculptor who sees, hidden in the stone, the figure to be shaped.

The third story, from which the collection draws the title, tells the restlessness of a boy looking for the real father, in an attempt to solve the ambiguous and oppressive relationship with his mother. The woman, to whom she is linked by a morbid affection, has found refuge in the rigid devotion to a religious sect and has raised him in the conviction of being "son of God".

The work continues with the story of a woman professionally established but deeply wounded by married life. He gives himself a vacation in Thailand and meets a man who, in acting as a driver and guide, takes the weight that has dragged his heart for a long time. From him the woman will learn that there is no need "to invest too much energy in living", so as to prepare herself to face death with sweetness.

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The penultimate story, in a totally surrealistic way, offers us the gray existence of a man in whom a giant frog breaks off one day. The protagonist, trapped until then in his own weakness and in his own ghosts, thanks to Frog will have the opportunity to fight a horrible and slimy being, the Great Earthworm, who lives underground and is ready to cause an earthquake capable of devastating Tokyo.

At the end of the opera, a story that starts with a fairy tale told to a child and that always ends with a fairy tale. It is a story of friendship and love between three young people: two very different boys - one sensitive and solitary, the other dynamic and arrogant - and a strong and delicate young woman, loved by both. A trio that will remain close together despite the fact that in the course of life relationships will change their initial physiognomy.

The narrative lightness of the work, also allowed by the mysterious and visionary dimension in which the events have fallen, does not cloud its depth. The author manages to outline with simplicity and great effectiveness the psychology of the protagonists: common existences, sometimes at the limit of the trivial, often solitary and always crossed by existential crises. Pessimism, however, does not have the best: in every story interviews in fact - real or dreamed - intervene in illuminating those painful existences.

Some characters find their place in the world, while others, even if not yet resolved, become more aware of the inner journeys to be undertaken, once they have learned that

This bloody battle took place entirely in the imagination. This is our battlefield. It is there that we win or we are defeated. Of course we are all limited beings, and in the long run we will end up losing. However, as Ernest Hemingway had guessed, the definitive value of our life will not be determined by how we will have won, but how we will have lost.