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The work of the immensely popular Japanese noir or “sushi noir,” as he calls himself (Mussari: 97) author Haruki Murakami is characterized by an odd sense of repetition. Mark Mussari is right when concluding, for instance, that “Hotels play a recurring role in Murakami’s writings, and they often function as portals to other planes of existence” (70). Yet the repetition here, contrary to how one might read this quotation, does not lie in the word “hotel,”, or in the cats and crows or in any other word that often appears in Murakami’s stories. It would make up a strange linguisticism to assume that the “hotel” in Kafka on the Shore should relate (because of the word used) to the hotel in 1q84, or that the cat in Norwegian Wood is necessarily connected to the cat in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. The repetition, instead, happens in the way “other planes of existence” are introduced with the hotel. The repetition appears to us in feeling the movement of withdrawal from under the words as these other planes of existence suddenly realize themselves, removing us from the familiarity of presence over and over again. Only then “something beyond words appears to make itself felt” as Hobson reads a similar movement in Derrida (1998: 211). Only then do the words of Murakami become haunted. Moving beyond the words themselves takes us to the breaths by means of which the words travel, by means of which they are being articulated. Being left to the tender mercies of these breaths, as they come from all possible directions, repetition takes place. Throughout his work, Murakami continuously breathes another space into a room, into a suburb of Tokyo, into a forest or into a highway. It clinches itself onto the objects, on the words being spoken, on the futures to come. Then, with a Lynchian slowness, this anotherness takes over. It is always already out there, as it is always in here. In his earlier short stories, space is still rather mechanistically approached as a means to release the breath of noir. In The Elephant Vanishes, for instance, we find ourselves in the suburb where the only attraction of a former zoo is an elephant that somehow disappears with its caretaker (which was impossible, considering the size of the elephant and the routes available). Similar to how H.P. Lovecraft, in his first short stories, experiments with an unknown and unknowable (for untraceable) secret that forms the center of his space (think of his The Music of Erich Zann), the early Murakami, too, circles around such a single crack in the world, a wormhole or vacuum solution that warns us fot the existence of another spacetime. Later in his oeuvre, however, the crack is not placed center space, but rather seem to be absolutized in the sense that, more and more, anotherness is approaching us from every possible angle. In his latest work, 1q84, this anotherness (established by the Little People) breathes into every possible space (from Tokyo to Chikura) as for instance the sky now always carries two moons: the moon we’ve always known is now accompanied by a small, green and hideous moon that haunts it just like the Mothers are haunted by the Daughters and the ‘pupa of air’ that is ready “The World of the Grotesque is the Darkness Within Us”: The Noir Geoaesthetics of Murakami’s Nakata