Sleep- 10/10/08.

"I chose Anna Karenina.  I was in the mood for a long Russian novel, and I had read Anna Karenina only one, long ago, probably in high school.  I remembered just a few things about it: the first line, 'All happy families resemble one another, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,'  and the heroine's throwing herself under a train at the end.  And that early on there was a hint of the final suicide.  Wasn't there a scene at a racetrack? Or was that in another novel?"

The strangest part of this short story titled "Sleep" was the fact that the main character was a woman.  All of Murakami's previous stories featured male protagonists and this seemed logical to me as Murakami himself was a man.  The voice of the narrator just felt wrong to me.  I figured there had to be something in his female protagonist, and he was trying to reveal something specifically about women in this story.

The novel Anna Karenina features a female heroine as well, and is written by Leo Tolstoy, a man.  Anna has a son and a husband that she had loved or respected until she meets Vronsky. Then her love for her child and her respect for her husband die a little.  This resembles what happens to Murakami's protagonist with her son and husband after she stops sleeping.  These similarities led me to believe that Murakami alluded to Anna Karenina because he wanted it to be almost like a macrocosm, or a larger, lengthier, and already established story symbolizing Murakami's own story.  The reappearance of a female protagonist only supported the idea that Murakami purposely chose to write as a woman this time.

I just want to mention that I am currently in the middle of Anna Karenina, and Murakami just spoiled the dramatic ending for me. booooo.

Besides serving as a symbol of Murakami's own story, Anna Karenina also serves as a marker, or a constant that, through its unchanging state, reveals the protagonist's own changing state.  The protagonist had read the story once before when she hadn't been afflicted by "something like insomnia," and she is reading it once more during her changed state.  By using the book as a constant, Murakami allows the reader to accurately juxtapose the two versions of the protagonist, and see what exactly changed. The reader notices the protagonist's heightened awareness.  Her first reading of the novel left her with blurry uncertain recollections like the racetrack that may have been from another novel, but during her second reading the reader can see the profound effect the book has on her in the way she frequently recalls scenes from the book throughout her day.