Storytelling As Empathy

A good story builds bridges. The reader, and the characters themselves, come to understand the subjects of the story better. A rich person and a poor person; two people of different races, creeds, or nationalities; even, yes, a human and a talking monkey. When good fiction guides us down that bridge, we come to understand other people better, and sometimes even ourselves.

So, how does fiction do this? The elements of fiction lay the foundation for good storytellers to build sturdy bridges. But let’s study empathy in action. How does fiction help us understand one another?

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Close Study: “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey” by Haruki Murakami

Read it here, in The New Yorker.

This story is peak Murakami—a Japanese author who often straddles the border of Surrealism and Magical Realism. In this story, the narrator meets a talking monkey who has the ability to steal the names of women he loves. For most authors, this story would sound impossibly silly. For Murakami, it’s so believable, you might meet this monkey tomorrow.

In speculative stories like this one, the intrusion of the fantastical into everyday life often acts as a metaphor for something. Only this name-stealing monkey—who himself was not born with a name—is “out of place” in an otherwise normal world. What does he represent? How should we understand him vis-a-vis the unnamed narrator? And what makes this story so successful?

Pay attention to the narrator, how he seems to be a vessel for the story’s oddities. But wait, shouldn’t all characters be unique, believable people? Certainly—and this one is, too. We learn a lot about this narrator based on the questions he asks the monkey. It’s never stated, but the narrator also seems to be a lonely person. Why else would his line of questioning veer so quickly into matters of the heart? Why else would he believe something so impossible—that a monkey can steal a woman’s name, fold it into his own heart in such a way that she forgets the word people call her?

I think we learn the most about the narrator when he says this:

“Theme? Can’t say there is one. It’s just about an old monkey who speaks human language, who scrubs guests’ backs in the hot springs in a tiny town in Gunma Prefecture, who enjoys cold beer, falls in love with human women, and steals their names. Where’s the theme in that? Or the moral?”

This kind of meta-commentary rarely flies in fiction. Here, it works, because the narrator isn’t realizing how much the monkey’s story reflects his own psyche. Great fiction, particularly surrealism, does this: reveals the landscape of a character’s personality.

I would argue that there is a theme here, though a lot of it comes down to the reader’s own interpretation. I think that the monkey is a character that many readers can relate to: unable to find love among his own species, and incapable of being loved by any other, he resorts to desperate measures to keep his own heart warm. Sure, he feels guilty about hurting some of the women whose names he’s stolen, but what would happen to his own heart if he didn’t steal them? What do we do, as people, when we don’t feel loved and accepted, to fill the time between now and when we’ll finally belong? To go on living despite one’s existential loneliness is no mean feat, and though we try to carry on while causing as little harm as possible, survival always requires sacrifice.

Of course, the monkey might represent something entirely different to you. That’s the power of fantastic fiction, such as this: its metaphors are like jewels spinning in the light, showing us something different each time we look at it.

Craft Perspective: “Storytelling and the Art of Tenderness” by Maria Popova

Storytelling is sometimes described as a type of empathy work. In her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Olga Tokarczuk takes this a step further, describing storytelling as an inquiry into tenderness—the type of selfless love that connects us to one another, or even connects our humanity to the universe around us.

Tokarczuk writes that there is an “endless system of similarities” between ourselves and the world around us. This is the case at both a micro- and macroscopic scale. It’s true: societies flourish like bacteria in petri dishes, and our own brains resemble the connections of galaxies when we zoom out far, far away. This act of metaphor, this meaning-making is hardwired into our psychologies. What’s more, it’s at the core of literature.

Our instructor Jeff Lyons describes a story as “the combination and interplay of character and plot that is a metaphor for a human experience leading to emotional change.” So, a story is a metaphor, and a metaphor is an act of tenderness, finding selfless connection between two seemingly discrete things.

Stories are bridges connecting us to our shared humanity—and beyond. In Murakami’s story, the narrator’s attention to the monkey’s strange story is also a form of tenderness. And, that monkey’s story being a metaphor for our own loneliness is Murakami’s way of reaching into the void and there, somehow, touching us.

Why do we tell stories? No two writers have the same reason, and I doubt that “tenderness” is the word that comes to mind for many of us. Nonetheless, tenderness is at the core of this work—both the work of writing and the work of reading. if you’re stuck on where to take your story next, or even where to begin, imagine your pen reaching into the murky stillness of the universe, and touching someone on the other side.

Read Maria Popova’s essay here: https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/11/21/tenderness-olga-tokarczuk-nobel-prize/