Especially for Thanksgiving

365 Thank Yous: The Year a Simple Act of Daily Gratitude Changed My Life    John Kralik     (2010)

I first read the memoir 365 Thank Yous when it came out in 2010. It made such an impression on me that I decided to re-read it to review on this blog for Thanksgiving 2019.

In 365 Thank Yous, John Kralik recalls how miserable he felt when he set out to hike the Echo Mountain Trail above Pasadena, California, on New Year’s Day in 2008. His small law firm was in dire financial straits; he was going through an acrimonious, drawn-out divorce; his new girlfriend had recently broken up with him; he was living in a tiny, uncomfortable apartment; he was overweight and in bad shape physically.

During Kralik’s hike, a voice seemed to speak to him, saying, “Until you learn to be grateful for the things you have . . .you will not receive the things you want.” (14) Upon hearing this voice, Kralik began to contemplate the concept of gratitude.

The next day, Kralik received in his apartment mailbox a brief but kind note from his ex-girlfriend, thanking him for the Christmas gift he had given her. This piece of mail confirmed for him that he should be thanking the people around him, and he resolved to pursue gratitude in a specific way:  by sending handwritten notes, one for each day of the coming year.

Thanking people for Christmas gifts that he’d received was an easy start, but Kralik soon went far beyond this, thanking his work colleagues, his friends, members of his extended family, and even the barista who served him coffee. “Many of my notes were not about material gifts. In these notes, I tried to describe just what the other person had done for me and to show my understanding of that person’s effort.  . . .This was part of my shift of focus from the gift to the giver.” (213-4)

The logistics of Kralik’s thank-you project were pretty simple. He wrote two or three sentences in longhand on a plain note card that he mailed through the postal service, and he maintained a spreadsheet of his recipients, with annotations of what he’d written. In today’s advanced internet culture, handwritten mail is an extreme rarity, but even in 2008 people were surprised and delighted to receive Kralik’s thoughtful notes.

The details of the individual thank-you notes that Kralik wrote are really the heart of this book. Kralik includes the texts of many of his notes, reconstructed from his spreadsheet. His words are unpretentious and honest, and they elicit warm responses from the recipients.

Almost immediately, Kralik’s thank-you notes brought him small doses of good fortune. These could, of course, have been coincidences, but Kralik saw them as evidence of the power of gratitude. As just one example, he sent personal thank-you notes to fellow lawyers who had referred cases to his firm. These lawyers then referred even more cases to Kralik’s firm, helping him with his financial woes. Month by month, Kralik wrote his thank-you notes, connecting with people he’d gone to college with or worked with early in his career. He began to realize that he had a powerful network of supporters.

In the end, Kralik didn’t quite make his goal of writing 365 thank-you notes in the 2008 calendar year. It took him about fifteen months to reach this number. But he kept writing, and as a result of the notes, he overcame quite a few of the difficult situations that he had faced on that New Year’s Day. Toward the end of 2008, he took stock:  “If the voice I’d heard in the mountains had implied that I would get all that I wanted, it seemed, at least at this juncture, that it was a promise unfulfilled. Yet, by being thankful for what I had, I realized that I had everything I needed.” (187)

What was that voice that Kralik heard on his hike? Was his conscience telling him that he was an ungrateful wretch? Was Nature reminding him that he wasn’t appreciating the splendor of his surroundings? Was the voice of a deity speaking to him in the wind? It doesn’t matter. Kralik states straightforwardly that he heard a voice, and the thank-you note from his ex-girlfriend confirmed the message of the voice: Be grateful.  

May all of us, even in the face of adversity, be able to ascend into the mountains of gratitude on the upcoming Thanksgiving Day.

The Surreal Meets the Quotidian in Japan

Killing Commendatore     Haruki Murakami     (2017)

Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen      (2018) 

No, this is not a murder mystery. It’s more . . . well, it defies categorization, but maybe it’s an exploration of how our inner lives of thought can transform our external lives of action in puzzling but sometimes pleasing ways.  

The unnamed narrator of this massive novel is a thirty-something artist, a fairly successful painter of workmanlike portraits, mainly for corporate executives who want their likenesses on the walls of their headquarters. When the narrator’s wife of six years unexpectedly asks for a divorce, he dejectedly takes off on an impromptu tour of northern Japan for several weeks and then settles, alone, into a rental house in the mountains near Odawara, in central Japan. This house is owned by the artist Tomohiko Amada, now in a nursing home with dementia, who garnered fame creating traditional Japanese scenes on his canvases. The odd characters who accrete to the tale include an enigmatic tech entrepreneur (Menshiki), an adolescent girl, the girl’s aunt, and, most startlingly, a two-foot tall “Idea” named Commendatore, who comes to life from out of a painting by Amada. This painting, which the narrator discovers in his rental home, depicts a scene from the Mozart opera Don Giovanni. Got all that?  

The characters move through actual places in Japan, and the story progresses primarily through dialogue, which is rendered in idiomatic American English. Western readers can get to feeling comfortable with this dialogue, and even more comfortable because of the many overt and lightly veiled references to European literature, art, and classical music, especially the opera canon. It’s all rooted firmly in realism until—bam—Commendatore appears to the narrator, trying to guide him through his dual crises of marriage and of artistic authenticity. Some examples of Commendatore’s pronouncements:  

• “There are plenty of things in history that are best left in the shadows. Accurate knowledge does not improve people’s lives. The objective does not necessarily surpass the subjective, you know. Reality does not necessarily extinguish fantasy.” (301)

• “Cause and effect are hard to separate here. Because I took the form of the Commendatore, a sequence of events was set in motion. But at the same time, my form is the necessary consequence of that very sequence.” (539) 

The character Menshiki may also have been sent to the narrator as a mentor, since he has some revelatory lines: 

• “The best ideas are thoughts that appear, unbidden, from out of the dark” (203) 

• “Sometimes in life we can’t grasp the boundary between reality and unreality. That boundary always seems to be shifting. As if the border between countries shifts from one day to the next depending on their mood. We need to pay close attention to that movement, otherwise we won’t know which side we’re on.” (206) 

Perhaps Killing Commendatore was not the wisest choice for my initial foray into the world of the prolific novelist Murakami, but I was mesmerized for most of its 681 pages, as the narrative drifted one way and then another. I did struggle with some of Murakami’s elements of the supernatural, especially the narrator’s passage across subterranean Stygian rivers and through murky, stifling tunnels, which may or may not be metaphorical. But Murakami always returns to the quotidian, often with graceful language like this: “I went to the fridge and drank some cold mineral water straight from the bottle and managed to chase away the dregs of sleep that remained like scraps of clouds in the corners of my body.” (177) 

If you’re willing to let your mind embrace the inexplicable for a while, Killing Commendatore may provide insights into human relationships as well as into creative processes. As Menshiki proclaims, “’There are some things that can’t be explained in this life . . . and some others that probably shouldn’t be explained. Especially when putting them into words ignores what is most crucial.’” (593)