The Month of March is the month of spaghetti (and so is every other month). You can speak to your cats, get a historical flashback of Japanese war-time crimes, or answer phone calls about strange sex dreams (or refuse to do so).
Here are the things Haruki characters would do in quarantine.
Make spaghetti while listening to jazz and not picking up phone calls.
For many of Murakami’s characters, being in quarantine means spaghetti time. Spaghetti is a way of life. You should cook spaghetti to live and live to cook spaghetti.
The Year of Spaghetti
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~efros/personal/murakami.txt
Think about your ex-lover from college.
There’s no better time to reminisce the days of youth. Staring at the ceiling, you realize that those days will never come back, yet the stores are closed, and kids aren’t going to school. You’re stuck in time, unable to move forward.
Norwegian wood
Paint/imagining the life of the handsome, rich guy across the street/valley.
Now is the time to unleash your hidden artistic talent. You start painting a portrait of the guy across the street, imagining his life. He is handsome, rich, with implacable taste in clothes. He once shook your hand, you remember, with sincerity and without pretension. It was a handshake that was at once firm and gentle.
Killing the Commendatore
Talk to the little girl next door on the balcony.
You sit on the lawn doing nothing in particular because you don’t have anything to do. The twelve-year-old girl next doors is out on her lawn, smoking a cigarette. She asks if you’d like one.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Read long Russian novels, not sleep and eat chocolate.
Because you’re working from home, you can work whenever you want. You don’t have to wake up in the morning and don’t have to sleep at night. When everyone else is sound asleep, you stay awake, drinking wine, eating chocolate, and reading something by Dostoyevsky. You take your time with every single line. When it becomes bright, you look at the sky and imagine yourself swimming.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Lying in bed imagining yourself sinking in the sea of post-war American Neo-Colonialism
You wake up because you’re so hungry. There’s nothing to eat in the fridge. You take out your phone, tap Uber Eats and see that McDonald’s is the only place that’s still open.
The Second Bakery Attack
http://web.mit.edu/norvin/www/somethingelse/murakami.html
