Melting All the Tigers in the World to Butter

"How much do you love me?"

"Enough to melt all the tigers in the world to butter."

 - Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood.


One of my favourite quotations; facebook profile worthy, no less. I thought it was indulgently surreal until today, when my mother and the second-hand bookshop owner started conversing about their childhood reads.

"Remember Little Black Sambo?"

"Yes - the tigers melted to butter."

Is this a source for the idea that tigers melt to butter? I've discovered the story online (http://www.sterlingtimes.co.uk/sambo.htm)* and it doesn't seem to be love that melts them, but centrifugal force. Perhaps Murakami means that the love his character feels is not only powerful but as giddying as the tiger-whirl-pool. Love as dizzying is a familiar concept, as can be heard from Kylie Minogue's hit Spinning Around. Unless that is about her visiting a roundabout. She is quite small in stature and could no doubt pass the height restrictions that say only children may ride. We envy Kylie, in theory, because we have seen Mary Poppins and want to ride on the big purple horse with the long eyelashes and win the Derby. However, in real life, those roundabouts you find in play-parks are scary and you can't get off when you want without grazing your hands and knees.

You need not have read Murakami's novel to know that he does use British cultural references. You do need to have read the title. This being so, it seems even less likely that butter tigers could be entirely coincidental.

*What kind of website is called 'sterlingtimes' and has a little union flag on its tab top (lack of technical language here, I'm afraid)? I checked: one with too much rainbow lettering. (It's always too much, because they always have to have it flashing, don't they? Like shouting out 'look! I'm someone who didn't grow up with the internet! Look what I can do! Wheee!' Chill.) A patriotic website, dedicated to maintaining such gems as colonial paintings of portly men drinking port in pubs and episodes of Sooty from 1955. If I wanted to watch Sooty, I would watch the episodes from the 1990s because like everyone, I believe programmes from my childhood were the best.