Musings

Murakami and Muktiyar

M&M: What love means - from an old Japanese author to a Rajasthani folk singer and everything in between

Love is a slippery thing. It refuses definition, resists containment, and yet somehow threads itself through every culture, every language, every quiet human moment. From the hushed, introspective worlds of Haruki Murakami to the earthy, echoing songs of a Rajasthani folk voice like Muktiyar, love transforms but never disappears.

Murakami once wrote, “Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting.” That might as well be his thesis on love.

In Norwegian Wood, the protagonist Toru Watanabe moves through love the way one moves through fog, slowly and uncertainly, guided more by feeling than clarity. There are moments of closeness that feel almost sacred, and others where distance arrives quietly, without warning. Love here is not loud or declarative; it is fragile, shifting, deeply entangled with memory and time. It lingers not just in what is said, but in what remains unsaid. Nothing resolves cleanly. That is precisely the point. Murakami’s love stories do not offer closure; they offer recognition.

Or take Kafka on the Shore, where love dissolves the boundaries of time, identity, even reality. A boy searches for something he cannot name, while a woman lives inside a memory so vivid it shapes her present. Love here is surreal, almost metaphysical, less about possession and more about connection across impossible distances. As though two people can inhabit separate worlds and still, somehow, touch.

Murakami doesn’t ask, “Who do you love?” He asks, “What part of you do they awaken?”

Now travel thousands of miles west, the landscape shifts from subway tunnels to sand dunes and love begins to sound very different.

In Rajasthani folk traditions, voices like Muktiyar don’t whisper love; they declare it. There is a rawness, a fullness. If Murakami’s love lives in silence, Muktiyar’s lives in sound.

A familiar refrain echoes through the desert: “Kesariya balam, aavo ni, padharo mhare des…” (Beloved, come home, come to my land.)

It’s not subtle. It’s not restrained. It’s longing, unfiltered. The kind that stretches across miles of desert and still refuses to fade.

An old anecdote from Rajasthan tells of a woman who climbed the same dune every evening at sunset, singing into the wind for her lover who had left for trade and never returned. People asked her why she kept singing when there was no answer. She simply said, “The song is the answer.”

That is Muktiyar’s world. Love is not something you analyze—it is something you carry in your throat, something that demands to be released.

And yet, despite the distance between Tokyo’s neon glow and Rajasthan’s golden sands, something essential remains the same.

Both Murakami and Muktiyar understand that love is not just about togetherness. It is about presence, even in absence. About the quiet reassurance that distance does not erase what has been felt deeply. About the strange way another person can exist inside your days, your habits, your thoughts, no matter where they are.

Murakami captures this in another line: “Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the middle of it, I didn’t realize anything.” Love, like memory, often reveals itself only in retrospect, in the rituals we carry forward, the songs we replay, and the silences we begin to hear.

Muktiyar’s songs say the same thing, just louder. In many folk lyrics, the beloved is absent, delayed, or distant, but never gone. Love becomes endurance. Waiting becomes its own form of companionship.

If Murakami teaches us that love is internal, a quiet reshaping of the self, Muktiyar reminds us that love is also external, a call, a cry, a story that refuses silence.

Perhaps that is what love truly is: a spectrum. At one end, it is a silent memory you carry alone. At the other, it is a song you cannot help but sing.

And in between lies the steady, patient knowing that some connections do not require constant presence to remain real. They persist in pages, in melodies, in pauses, in the soft certainty that what matters does not simply disappear.

“Murakami and Muktiyar” are not just two names bound by alliteration. They represent the universality of feeling, a reminder that love, whether written in a novel or sung across a desert, remains deeply and recognizably human.

Because whether it arrives like a quiet sentence or a soaring song, love always finds a way to stay.

- RABB, 19th March 2026