Barn Burning (1983) by Haruki Murakami

WARNING: Lots of spoilers in this review! Turn back now if you haven't read Barn Burning yet!

I'm a fan of Murakami's work and this is his first piece of short fiction I've read, picked up when I had heard that it was adapted into a film by a South Korean filmmaker last year.

I had heard Murakami's novels were far better than his short stories so I wasn't expecting much and Barn Burning completely blew me away. Murakami skillfully sets the scene with interesting characters and disarms the reader with their interactions with one another. The story takes a darker turn from there and ends ambiguously.

I've had issues with some of Murakami's ambiguity in the past. I thought that it was not used particularly well in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle—a book I really liked but was made frustrating by an overuse of oddity and ambiguity that came off as contrived and just-because. This is not the case with Barn Burning, which I found perfectly balanced in its use of ambiguity which heightens the story's impact and leaves a lasting impression on the reader.

NOTE: MASSIVE SPOILERS FOLLOW THE IMAGE BELOW! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

My interpretation of the ambiguous ending: I find it overwhelmingly likely that our faux-pyromaniacal Trader murdered the girl.

• He confesses to the lesser crime of serial arson (but still a shocking revelation if you're not aware the guy is actually a freaking serial killer) to the narrator, providing a hint, as serial killers are wont to do to feed their arrogance after having gotten away with their crimes so many times before. And, not expecting the narrator to go to such lengths to try and witness his act of arson, the killer inadvertently outs himself as having lied about the arson when clearly none has been committed. The "barn" he had planned to "burn" that he confessed was "very close" to the narrator was instead the woman in the story--their mutual friend, but the narrator's for longer--and probably he had been planning to kill her since had met her in Algiers.

• The woman wants the narrator to meet her at the airport after returning from abroad with the trader. The narrator is puzzled by this, as seemingly he has been asked there for no reason. But clearly she wants a third party present because she is still a bit creeped out or uncomfortable around the trader and wants a more trusted friend present as a chaperone in case the trader gets weird back on home soil.

• Eichmann's potential execution by suffocation is mentioned, perhaps hinting to us that the murderer smothers her or suffocates her in some other fashion.

• She disappears without a trace, yet mail keeps arriving at her apartment afterwards so that the box is full when the narrator tries to visit her after her murder, signalling to us that she had not moved out in a normal manner and simply not told anyone. She had all but disappeared, informing nobody.

• Before the woman's disappearance the narrator uses cannabis with the trader and notes that the trader looks "different": notably worn down, a bit disheveled, and with 2 days growth of beard. Presumably this is because he needs a "fix" (in this case, good ole murder) in regular intervals or his mental (and thus, physical) health deteriorates. And when the narrator stumbles upon him again several months after the woman disappears/is murdered, the trader is in the same slovenly condition because he must burn a barn kill every couple of months by his own admission. Further, his car outside the coffee shop exhibits this same fatigued, dirty visage as the trader just prior to killing the woman, and the trader himself is inside chugging multiple coffees, which would indicate he is not feeling at peak and needs to kill sometime soon.

This is a great short story and not at all what I expected from Murakami. I loved it and I can't wait to read more of his short fiction.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐