With news of the cast for the film adaptation of The Great Gatsby abuzz, I gave in to the desire to reread the book.

A post on and then, and then drew my attention to this scene in particular, and after I'd seen it on the blog, I perused it twice, more carefully, during my reading.

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher — shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.”

- The Great Gatsby / F. Scott Fitzgerald

It made me recall another film adaptation, this of Murakami's short story Tony Takitani. The female protagonist had sunk onto the floor in the room of beautiful clothes in a sobbing fit. I remember being bewildered in the darkness of the cinema.

Tony Takitani left the woman alone in the room. She pulled herself together and tried on a few of the dresses. She tried on some shoes as well. Everything fit as though it had been made for her. She looked at one dress after another. She ran her fingertips over the material and breathed in the fragrance. Hundreds of beautiful dresses were hanging there in rows. Before long, tears welled up in her eyes and began to pour out of her. There was no way she could hold them back. Her body swathed in a dress of the woman who had died, she stood utterly still, sobbing, struggling to keep the sound from escaping her throat. Soon Tony Takitani came to see how she was doing.

"Why are you crying?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said, shaking her head. "I've never seen so many beautiful dresses before. I think it must have upset me. I'm sorry." She dried her tears with a handkerchief.

- Tony Takitani / Haruki Murakami

I digress here but this is making me think of another scene in the drama series The L Word. Bette was in a suitor's (I think) bedroom and said suitor had unveiled a stupendous piece of artwork to her as a surprise. She was so stunned and overwhelmed, tears welled up like baubles and she collapsed in a dead faint.

(Turns out, there's a name for this. The Stendhal syndrome, according to the unverified Wiki page, is "a psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art, usually when the art is particularly beautiful or a large amount of art is in a single place".)

Overwhelmed by beauty to the point of tears and loss of consciousness, that was something I've had to ponder and work out and gradually grasp over the last few years.

Anyway. I was wondering if there was a link between the two. A quick Google throws up the tidbits that Murakami had translated The Great Gatsby and had supposedly once said that it was the most important novel in his life.

So there you have it. My curiosity has been satisfied and I'm off to spend the rest of the day in bed with more books.

He might be a tad old for it but I have to admit, I can't wait to see Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of Jay Gatsby.