In the world of Haruki Murakami, reality and surrealism intertwine seamlessly. Ordinary lives are shaped by extraordinary circumstances. Characters navigate complex emotional landscapes. Reading Murakami is a reflection of this world. It’s a personal exploration of the themes that resonate deeply in both Murakami’s writing and my own work.
Through his stories, Murakami’s characters search for identity, wrestle with existential dilemmas, and confront the unknown. These themes mesh with and influence my artistic practice. My work is not about presenting singular truths, but about connecting the fragmented and often contradictory elements of life. Like Murakami’s worlds, my art explores the spaces between reality and abstraction, between what we understand and what remains hidden.
This book is a limited edition, an invitation to dive into and question the nature of identity, memory, and connection, just as Murakami does through his characters and narratives. It is an ongoing search. Not for answers, but for meanings. As you explore this work, I hope you’ll find a space where complexity is welcomed, and where multiple truths can exist side by side.
For hard copy inquiries, please contact kamran.ashtary@gmail.com.
Introduction from Reading Murakami
by Tori Egherman
One day, Kamran walked through a portal into a world created by Haruki Murakami, and he has not yet returned. It isn’t that he has left us. No. He is still in this world, living in an apartment on a busy street in Amsterdam, where he can hear the bells from the trams and the booming bass from cars stopped at the light. He is also in a world with talking crows and unusual phenomena, making connections, dreaming the dreams of others, feeding a longing of the soul.
Before he goes to sleep, Kamran makes dozens of sketches that document the world that he has entered. Some use colors that exist only in this other world, an alternate physics, a freedom from gravity. It is a world that is populated with doppelgangers of our own. Horror and beauty combine in equal measure.
Sometimes I think he is trying to make a map. Or maybe it’s better to say that Kamran is revealing a map that does not yet exist– a kind of archaeology of the liminal, uncovering that which is (or isn’t) between presence and absence, past and future. He gives us remnants, shards, and it is up to us to find the connections and make sense.
Ladders invite us to climb up and in. Arrows deceive us like sleight of hand magicians. There is no path. Houses trap us, free us, shelter us, remember us. With each image, we uncover some hint of history: personal, political, and not yet written.
From my own perspective, as Kamran’s long-time partner, I see how his longing for justice and nearly debilitating empathy for those who face oppression and persecution finds expression in the work. The themes he explores—memory, identity, resilience—are deeply personal, rooted in Kamran’s own experiences and shaped by his understanding of the world.
In Reading Murakami, Kamran delves into the complexities of memory and identity. Like Murakami’s novels, Kamran’s work most often explores themes of collective trauma, identity, and the surreal intersections of memory and reality. Nearly every sketch, drawing, and painting asks: How can we understand what overwhelms us? How do we weather waves so large they would drown us? How do we survive the very personal machinations of the enormous, sublime, and horrific? Storms that leave us feeling so deeply that we are either paralyzed or disconnected and unhumanized?
The artist, the author, throw us a lifeline, telling us to hold on until the storm finally frees us. In their words and images, we are allowed to connect, build, imagine, and breathe. We are not alone.
Art is a lifeline that offers hope and possibility, inviting us to see the beauty and complexity of life.
“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Tori Egherman
Amsterdam, December 2024
