CONTENT WARNING: Mentions of suicide and characters struggling with their mental health.
In the first episode of the second season of Hulu and FX’s hit TV series The Bear, Richie Jerimovich talks about his struggle to find purpose.
Richie is 45 years old. His best friend Mikey recently died by suicide and left the family-owned sandwich shop they worked in to his younger brother, a world-famous up-and-coming young chef named Carmy who hopes to turn the shop into a fine-dining establishment. Richie’s wife also divorced him around this same time and is now engaged to another man. He doesn’t know what role he’s meant to play in his five-year-old daughter’s life now that she has a cool new stepdad. He feels lost, and implies in his conversation with Carmy that he’s contemplating ending his own life because he’s “been here [alive] a long time” and doesn’t know what his purpose is.
It’s a heavy scene, but in this moment, Richie also tells Carmy about a book he’s been reading that he’s hoping can help him. He doesn’t name the title or author of the book, but he says it’s about a man who used to have an amazing group of friends who all seemed to be amazing at something, while the man himself didn’t feel like he was really good at any one thing. One day, the man’s friends tell him without warning or explanation that they don’t want to be friends with him anymore, and they cut all contact with him. The man feels lost after that, and he finds himself unable to make any deep, lasting connections with anyone after the loss of his friend group, so he just sits around watching trains. Carmy asks Richie how the book ends, and Richie tells him he isn’t sure because he hasn’t gotten that far.
It’s evident from this scene, though it’s never explicitly stated, that Richie feels very much like the character from this book, and from this point on, trains become a motif in The Bear, especially in connection with Richie. They appear regularly in scenes where he feels alone, when he misses an opportunity to say something he knows he should say, or when it’s clear he’s lacking purpose and is simply wandering through life aimlessly and just going through the motions.
After doing a little research, I found award-winning Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s 2015 novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, which I am almost certain is the book Richie was describing in his discussion with Carmy about purpose.
This book follows the journey of a 36-year-old man named Tsukuru Tazaki, who had an amazing friend group when he was in high school who suddenly decided to stop talking to him when he was 20 years old. For about six months following the breakup of this friend group, Tsukuru lived an aimless life. He was still doing well in college, still got up every morning and brushed his teeth and showered, still ate when he was hungry, and still went to his part-time jobs. But in his free time, he would sit around and watch trains, and then he would go home and sit in the dark, drink a glass of whiskey, and contemplate death, weighing the pros and cons of suicide.
Then, suddenly, one day, he decided he didn’t want to die anymore. He stopped drinking, started eating healthier, picked up swimming as a hobby and a form of exercise, and made friends with a boy his age who frequently swam at the same public pool where he swam. This friendship was close, but it wasn’t as close as his friendship with his four schoolmates had been, and after a while, this boy left him without warning, too.
Then, after sixteen years of wondering why his friends had all abandoned him and what he did wrong—unable to recall anything he had done or said to any of them that could have caused offense—Tsukuru started seeing a woman named Sara, who was the first person he had truly loved since his high school friend group. As their relationship became more serious, Sara began to recognize that Tsukuru was carrying an immense amount of emotional baggage, and she insisted that he needed to assess it and begin to let go of some of it before their relationship could progress in a healthy manner. She helped him track down his four high school friends, and encouraged him to find and speak to them all to find out why they had abandoned him the way they did. And so he does, and that’s what the book is about. It’s an excellent story, and I would highly recommend it.
Anyone, of course, can read this book, but as a fan of The Bear, it is a particularly fascinating read because as you go through Tsukuru’s journey with him, you will encounter a variety of people and scenarios that read the same way as characters and dynamics that exist within the world of The Bear.
For instance, Tsukuru’s friend from the pool, a boy his age named Haida, feels like a combination of Carmy and Mikey, which makes me wonder if, perhaps, the writers of The Bear read this book and decided to split the character of Haida in two in order to create Carmy and Mikey, two unique characters whose professional experiences and mental health struggles often mirror one another.
The character of Sydney Adamu, Carmy’s (eventual) business partner, also seems to be inspired by a character from Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki: Sara, Tsukuru’s girlfriend who encouraged him to seek the closure he needs to move forward in life. Sydney, like Sara, is very level-headed and introspective when compared to Carmy. Each woman acts as a solid landing place for her partner while also making it very clear to him that she is not there to be his mother or his babysitter; she just needs him to work through his problems so they can move forward with their goals. Fascinatingly, Sydney also mirrors and runs parallel to Carmy, just as Sara does to Haida.
But back to Richie— Did he ever find his purpose? Has he stopped watching the trains? Well, I’m not about to spoil anything for you. If you want to know the answers to those questions, you’ll have to watch the show and find out for yourself. I will tell you, though, that by the end of season two, he has made an unbelievable amount of progress, and he’s well on his way in his own Pilgrimage.
The Bear’s third season was released on Hulu and FX almost a month ago, and just last week they were nominated for a record-breaking 23 Emmy awards. If you’re like me and have already watched (and rewatched, and rewatched again, and again…) The Bear and are hungry for more content, or just want a deeper insight into a piece of inspiration for the show as you begin the long wait for season four, I would highly recommend this book.