The Last Lawn of the Afternoon

The Last Lawn of the Afternoon is a story of a young man who is slightly detached from the lives of those around him. Murakami conveys memory to be like fiction; or else its fiction that’s like memory. The story has a very nostalgic tone to it. It is set on the day of the man’s last mowing job and focuses on his encounter with a lonely middle-aged woman who hires him. From what I gather, the protagonist is a Japanese college student who enjoys the past more than the present. It seems like he dislikes many aspects of modernity; viewing the youth as lazy and immature. The protagonist appears to be obsessive compulsive over his determination of mowing lawns, however, lacks skills in other areas, such as his schoolwork and human interaction. The abrupt breakup with his long distance girlfriend leaves him disgruntled, for he is unsure if he had ever loved her at all, but nonetheless he is uncertain of how to deal with the turn of events. On the man’s last day of work, he mows a woman’s lawn, however, as he mentioned, the lawn was not in need of care for another two weeks. This demonstrates the customer’s desperation for company. The customer was a tall, broad, middle-aged woman with a very stern, unapproachable presence. After working on the woman’s lawn for about an hour, she invited him inside for lunch. When the young man was finished taking care of the lawn, the woman invited him inside again, showing him a young girl’s room. She asked him to look through the closet and drawers to get a feel for who the girl was without actually knowing her. “All I wanted, it came to me, was to mow a good lawn. To give it a once-over with the lawn mower, rake up the clippings, and then trim it nice and even with clippers—that’s all. And that, I can do. Because that’s the way I feel it ought to be done.” The visit makes him realize that a person can shape memory the same way he mows lawns, for both involve deliberate and highly subjective choices. The protagonist is depicted to hold a subconscious sentiment of loneliness as he and his girlfriend had just broken up. The narrator says, "Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn’t even there anymore. You’re left with this pile of kittens lolling all over one another. Warm with life, hopelessly unstable." From this, we can infer that he relates lawns to be representative of memories; the unruliness of overgrown grass alluding to the way memories are often wild and uncontainable. The protagonist’s encounter with the widowed middle-aged lady on his last job, instills a renewed sense of nostalgia in him as they both are in the process of dealing with losses of their own. It turns into a moving description of two lonely- hearts’ search for understanding and companionship. As the young man looked throughout the room, he felt the girl’s presence but could only picture his former girlfriend. Through the correlation between mowing lawns and reshaping memories, Murakami projects the belief that the process is a cycle, for the grass will grow to be trimmed according to preference and memories will be made, to be altered by conscience. Subsequently those memories will be recounted into bits and pieces of fiction; of what an individual wants to treasure about a moment in time and what is to be discarded. It is about the inevitability and helplessness when faced with a debacle; to be able to do nothing other than reminisce in wistful nostalgia.