All God's Children Can Dance Essay

Labeling the end of a Haruki Murakami story as “closure” is a misuse of not only the word but a misunderstanding of the ambiguity that his short stories contain. Ambiguity isn’t a contemporary concept, but the way Murakami uses it in combination with his own subjectivity creates a unique challenge for the reader. This is particularly true in his short story “All God’s Children Can Dance”. Murakami uses the philosophy of existentialism to send the reader into a deeper plane of thought, or the sublime, at the end of his short stories.
To begin with, I am going to confirm the existentialism in Murakami’s work. “The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms” defines atheistic existentialist as “…Rejecting the idea of a supreme being, [they] maintain that existence precedes essence and assert that the universe is an absurd, irrational place without purpose or meaning” (Murfin & Ray 157). “All God’s Children Can Dance”, a short story in Murakami’s “After the Quake” anthology, is the epitome of what an atheistic existentialist story is. In the story, Yoshiya, the protagonist, is a bastard but has always been told that he is
Yoshiya is defining his existence by his actions and choices. The absurdity part of the Bedford definition comes in when Yoshiya begins to randomly dance on the baseball field “long enough for him to perspire under the arms” (Murakami 66). His train of thought was something similar to: The world is absurd, so why not be absurd with it and dance to your heart’s content? The ambiguous ending of “All God’s Children Can Dance” shows that Yoshiya has learned something, though what he learned and whether it is positive or negative gives the story an ambiguous ending. Pondering the idea of existentialism leads the reader into an almost ethereal state of thinking, that feels as if the answer to the questions one would have would make them disappear if