“They could see a certain sparkle of recognition in each other’s eyes,” Murakami writes. Kafuku is startled by the normally reserved Takatsuki’s conviction and clarity, and their gazes meet. If we hope to truly see another person, we have to start by looking within ourselves. So in the end maybe that’s the challenge: to look inside your own heart as perceptively and seriously as you can, and to make peace with what you find there. I think it’s possible to see what’s in there if you work hard enough at it. Examining your own heart, however, is another matter. I don’t care how well we think we should understand them, or how much we can love them. The proposition that we can look into another person’s heart with perfect clarity strikes me as a fool’s game. The other man seems on the verge of revealing what Kafuku already knows, but instead his heart opens and he says a wise thing: Now, having edged near the subject, Kafuku has opened up a bit, telling Takatsuki that he grieves not having known his wife as well as he wished he did. He initiated the friendship with motives that weren’t entirely clear even to himself he wants to hear more about his late wife, but he also wants to better understand her reasons for sleeping with Takatsuki, and maybe punish Takatsuki, too.īut to Kafuku’s surprise, over a few months of drinking together, the pair have struck up a companionable and affable relationship without ever revealing to one another what actually happened. Kafuku knows, or is fairly sure he knows, about Takatsuki’s relationship with his wife, and he’s also pretty certain that the other man truly loved his wife and hasn’t recovered from the loss. The other is Takatsuki, the last man with whom Kafuku’s wife had an affair before her diagnosis. One is Kafuku, whose wife died years ago after a short bout with cancer. Near the end of Haruki Murakami’s short story “Drive My Car” - on which the multi-Oscar-nominated film is sort of based - two middle-aged men, both actors, are at a bar.

Haruki murakami drive my car book