Murakami Haruki: The Strange Library

As of this writing, this is the most recent English translation of Murakami.  The story has a slightly complicated history.  It was published, as a short story, in 1982, under the title "Toshokan kitan 図書館奇譚" (Strange tale of a library).  In 2005 he published it as a stand-alone picture book, with illustrations by Sasaki Maki;  at this point he rewrote the story somewhat and changed the title, to "Fushigi na toshokan 不思議な図書館."  The latter version is what has been translated into English as The Strange Library, and published as a stand-alone picture book;  the illustrations for the English version are by Chip Kidd.  In my last post I linked to a blog by some of Murakami's European translators that mentions the Euro edition of this work, which has illustrations by Kat Menschik, like Pan'ya o osou;  her version of the library story has also been published in Japanese, and as the blog makes clear, in that edition the earlier title was used.  I don't know if that means that (a) the German (and non-English Euro) version of this picture book used the older version of the story or the newer, or (b) if the Japanese edition of the Menschik-illustrated volume (which I haven't seen yet) uses the older or newer version of the story.  But it is clear that the English version, translated by Ted Goossen, uses the 2005 revision of the story, the one made for publication as a picture book.

I suspect that what is happening is that, America always being a little insular, xenophobic, and therefore late to the party, this translation of The Strange Library represents Murakami's English publishers finally deciding to invest in the Murakami picture-book boom that has been taking place on the continent for several years, but also deciding that Menschik's illustrations are less saleable in the US than Kidd's, since Kidd has done Murakami work in the past.  I also suspect that a Japanese edition using Kidd's illustrations is going to appear.  And won't that be interesting?

There are two issues I want to briefly talk about in the rest of this post.

First, the differences between the two versions of the story.  I can't think offhand of a way to render the titles that makes the difference clearer in English, but the original title feels old-fashioned, Sinified, and above all grown-up, while the 2005 version's title sounds like the title of a child's picture book.  Kitan 奇譚 doesn't actually mean horror, but something approaching the effect might be achieved if you imaged the original title as being "The Library Horror" and the the revised title as being "The Scary Library." 

That pretty well indicates the direction of Murakami's revisions.  The revised version is at least masquerading as a picture book for kids, and so he rewrites the story so that it feels like one.  Not completely - I doubt anybody would read this to kids, and I'm sure he doubts it too, so instead it's more like a normal Murakami story cosplaying as a kid's story, for normal Murakami readers who want to cosplay as children.  But still, he simplifies the language slightly, cuts out a few of the more ornate descriptions, and adds a few more references to the child-narrator's mother in such a way as to make it clear that the narrator is a child.  In the original it's not quite so clear - he may be an adult still living with his mother. 

Interestingly, however, the revised version contains more of a sense of loss at the end than the original - in the original, the narrator's pet starling is restored to him at the end.  But there's still a palpable sense of loss at the end of the original version, because (splr alrt) the final paragraph, where the narrator says his mother has just died, is already there.  That is the original ending of the story, not something added in revision.  And, while we're on the subject, I'm disappointed that the English translation prints this final paragraph in a smaller type size, suggesting (with no basis in the original) that it's to be taken as by a different voice, or as referring to a different narrative level, than the rest of the story.  I.e., the translation sets this paragraph off in such a way as to imply that it's by an older version of the narrator, or a different version, or by the author himself (as opposed to the narrator);  this may be the case, but it's not something indicated in the original.  It's an artifact of the translation's book design.

Which brings us to the second point, the illustrations.  I don't see why they didn't just use Sasaki Maki's original illustrations.  Murakami and Sasaki go way back, with Sasaki's illustrations appearing on the covers of many of his early works.  If you read Murakami in the '80s, Sasaki's vaguely Keith Haring-esque illustrations probably influenced your understanding of Murakami's work.  They help to situate him in the realm of pop art, a la Haring.  Sasaki's work for the library book is in the same style, cartoony, childlike, fun.  Murakami's revisions to the story are obviously made to fit just this kind of illustration.

They don't fit Chip Kidd's style of illustration.  Now, I like Kidd's work, as a rule.  His irony-laced appropriative graphic style is great for certain things.  I've never thought it very appropriate for Murakami, however;  Kidd favors a kind of triple-lutz Orientalism that puts the East Asian subject in so many quotation marks that you can't quite parse it (is it ironic? is it ironizing irony? is it ironizing the ironization of irony?).  The problem with this kind of thing is that irony is a fugitive pigment, and can evaporate over time, so that what might have been meant as a daring, meaning-laden appropration of an Orientalist image ends up being just another Orientalist image...  The problem with this kind of thing for a Murakami cover is something different:  it's that Murakami himself doesn't engage in this kind of thing.  He famously, obviously has little time for thinking about "Japaneseness."  The issues that Kidd's covers think about have nothing to do with what Murakami writes about - all they relate to is an American reader's cramped inability to forget that this is a Japanese writer, a member of the Other. 

And that's what's going on here.  There's nothing in The Strange Library that relates in any way to the found-image arch-ironical Orientalism of the images Kidd provides for the American edition of the story.  On their own, they're quite attractive images, and Kidd treats them, crops them, manipulates them, and transforms them in beautiful ways, and then juxtaposes them with the text in intelligent ways.  But they strike notes wholly dissonant with the story, unlike Sasaki's wholly consonant original illustrations.  And fairly frequently the irony just fails - when you read about an old man and turn the page and see a photo of a noh mask, all the careful photoshopping in the world can't distract from the fundamental equation being made.  Japanese old man = noh mask.  Reductive, essentialist, bad.

Murakami Haruki: Pan'ya o osou

I've been on a Murakami Haruki kick last couple of weeks.  Catching up with a couple of recent things I hadn't read yet, and delving into some of his older stuff that I hadn't yet touched.

One of these was a curious publication from 2013 called Pan'ya o osou パン屋を襲う (To Raid a Bakery).  Murakami fans reading English will know of his short story "The Second Bakery Attack" (Pan'ya saishūgeki パン屋再襲撃), translated in The Elephant Vanishes.  They may also know, because it's mentioned in Rubin's book, that there actually was an earlier story called "The Bakery Attack" (Pan'ya shūgeki パン屋襲撃), which hasn't been translated into English.  As Rubin notes, the second story summarizes the first story as part of its plot, so if you've read the later one you more or less know the earlier one - but still, I'd like to see it translated someday, for reasons that will become clear below.

In German, both stories have been published together as a book entitled Die bäckerieūberfälle, with illustrations by Kat Menschik.  Since the Japanese Murakami industry loves to keep track of his international reception, this book was recreated in Japanese in 2013.  That is, the two stories were published as a single book with Menschik's illustrations.  At the same time Murakami decided to revise the two stories slightly, changing the titles (thus "To Raid a Bakery" instead of "The Bakery Attack").  (Menschik has illustrated other Murakami, which you can read about here.)

The illustrations are nice.  Beautiful, even, all in forest green, gold, and white.  Not necessarily the way I imagine the stories, but they add a real stylishness that complements the stories' inventiveness without disrupting them with a contradictory aesthetic (which is the problem with the English version of The Strange Library, which I'll get around to discussing soon, hopefully).

Murakami's revisions are fairly minor, to the point that if I hadn't been going back and forth between the new versions and the originals I only would have noticed a couple.  He adds a descriptive phrase here and subtracts one there, but not really the kind of thing that makes much difference.  The substantive changes I noticed seemed to be geared toward (a) making the two stories work together as if the second one was a sequel to the first, and (b) making the second one feel as if it's taking place in the present, rather than in the early '80s. 

The latter is accomplished by changing a few cultural references.  The famous Betamax ad at the end of the second story is now an ad for Blu-Ray - a canny change.  A Bluebird in the original is now an Accord.  Did he have to make the second story take place in the present?  Well, sort of.  Given that it's supposed to be taking place over a decade after the first bakery attack, and that the first bakery attack is taking place at a moment when "God, Karl Marx, and John Lennon are all dead," the second bakery attack couldn't be taking place in the early '80s.

Which leads us to the former goal, making the two stories work together as if the second one was a sequel to the first.  Because, when you read the originals, you realize that this is not the relationship between them.  The time scheme doesn't work, but there are other inconsistent details.  In the first bakery attack story we're very specifically told that the baker is listening to Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" on a radio cassette player, while in the second story we're told that he had been listening to Wagner overtures (including Tannhauser) on lp.  A small inconsistency, but one that tells us that the second story, as originally written, was less a sequel to the first than a rewriting of it, one that moved the events of the first into the past and thereby recontextualized them against the end of the '60s counterculture rather than early '80s malaise.

Murakami resolves that inconsistency in the new versions of the stories.  In both references the baker is listening to "Tristan and Isolde."  Which means that this book gets to read like a book, a kind of double coming of age story, the imposition of a curse and its resolution, a comparison of friendship to marriage, and a whole lot of other things.  But it also means that the critique of the boomer generation that had been implicit in the original "Second Bakery Attack" ('60s radical compromises his ideals, goes straight, tries to recover some of his outlaw essence with his new wife) is gone, or at least muted, here.  An interesting change.

Murakami Haruki: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013)

I've been intentionally avoiding reviews of Murakami Haruki's new book until I had a chance to read it and put down my own thoughts on it.  I didn't want to be influenced by anybody else's opinion - didn't want to be arguing against anybody in my head while I read it.  (And I usually don't bother to point this out, but I will here:  this essay will contain spoilers.)

Tazaki Tsukuru is a 36-year-old train-station construction engineer in Tokyo in the present day.  He's from Nagoya.  Single, living in the same condo he's been living in since he came to Tokyo for college.  All but friendless.  Lives a quiet, industrious life colored by a little classical music (the theme for this book is Liszt's "Le Mal du Pays," from the series Years of Pilgrimage), a little Cutty Sark, and a lot of introspection.

The introspection mostly centers around his ostracization from his circle of high school friends.  There were five, including Tsukuru, and other other four all had last names that included color-words;  Tsukuru didn't, so they would joke that he was "colorless," which explains the rest of the title.  They were inseparable in high school, but after he went to college, they abruptly told him not to try to see them anymore.  Uniformly, the other four rejected him, with no explanation.  This sent him into a fugue of depression - for months, as the narration puts it, he thought of nothing but death.  Came this close to offing himself;  never quite knew why he didn't.  Even now, sixteen years later, he's still nursing wounds from that rejection - he's only had one serious friend since, only a few girlfriends, and none of these relationships lasted either.  Now he has a new girlfriend, or almost-girlfriend, and she encourages him to seek out the four old friends and find out what happened;  she suggests that unless he deals with his old hurt, he'll never be able to move on.

Much of the book concerns Tsukuru's meetings with three of his old friends, Blue, Red, and Black.  When he meets Blue (Ao - so it's possible that when this is officially translated this character may show up as Green, but since there's also a Midorikawa character, which can only be Green River, I suspect Ao will be Mr. Blue), he learns that the fourth, White, is dead.  He also learns that the ostracization was the result of White, the Pretty Virginal Girl of the group, saying that Tsukuru had raped her.  They never told him of this accusation, just cut him off;  many years later, living on her own, she was strangled in her apartment in a crime that was never solved.  Tsukuru knew of none of this.

Blue and Red are both men.  Both are in business, and still live in Nagoya.  Blue, an ex-rugby player, is now a very successful Lexus salesman, while Red, a former intellectual-in-the-making, is a kind of management/training guru running his own consulting business.  Both of these occupations are explored in somewhat more depth than is typical for Murakami;  Tsukuru's own occupation isn't totally fleshed out until very late in the book, but it's clear that he's setting up a contrast between Tsukuru, who makes things (which is, of course, what his name means), and Blue and Red, who don't;  Blue just sells things, while Red does something that the other characters in the book, and even Red himself, regard as little more than a con.

Black, the other female in the group, the Witty, Sarcastic Second Fiddle girl, is married to a Finn and living in Helsinki with her husband and two daughters, Tsukuru learns.  The climax of the book is a visit to her at their summer house south of Helsinki, where she tells him all there is to know about White's accusation, breakdown, and death.  Incidentally, Tsukuru didn't do it, and at least sixteen years later, none of the others actually believe he did either.  It was just that White was so insistent that they had to believe her, or act as if they did;  either she or Tsukuru had to be sacrificed, as Black puts it, and Tsukuru seemed more able to take it.  As is, White never psychologically recovered from the rape (which was real, even if her accusation of Tsukuru wasn't).  Her death wasn't related to the rape (it seems), but it somehow strikes everyone as the natural endpoint of her downward spiral.

Tsukuru, meanwhile, seems to achieve some closure by learning all this;  he comes to see White as more of a victim than himself, is reassured by the others that they always admired him (he had suffered from low self-esteem ever since their rejection), and in the end realizes that he needs to stop being passive, and embrace life, in the person of his current almost-girlfriend Sara, whose urging sent him off on this sentimental journey to Nagoya and Finland in the first place.

*

The book is written in the third person, and without any of the alternating-perspective business that marked 1Q84 and Kafka on the Shore.  It's his most conventional third-person book, and in some ways his most conventional book yet.  Precious little surrealism to it, although there is mystery, and there are quite a few narrative cul-de-sacs and loose ends that keep it feeling like a Murakami book.

Despite those cul-de-sacs, it's basically a linear narrative, too.  For a while in the early chapters it jumps back and forth between the present and his post-rejection college years, but then it settles down in the present.  Its closest cousins in his oeuvre are Norwegian Wood and South of the Border, and it shares with those books (and, of course, with the third part of 1Q84) a concern with the heart above all, love and what may make love possible or impossible, the roots of which usually lie in memory.

I don't think it's as good as Norwegian Wood - I don't think anything is.  But I might as well deliver myself of an opinion here:  I liked it, mostly.  I enjoyed parts of it a great deal, and overall I think it's more successful than 1Q84 (although if 1Q84 had ended at Part II it would have been better than this).  But I think it suffers from some of the flaws of that book, and I think they both could have been remedied if Murakami was the type of author to rewrite and revise, but it seems he's not;  he sits down to write and writes until he's done, and then he's done, is the way I hear it, and so in this book we get character arcs that are unnaturally truncated, character development coming as he thinks of it, not as it's needed, subplots and subtexts coming and going seemingly at random;  and we get passages of flabby prose, where he's clearly riffing, trying to find the melody that will carry him to the next plot point or epiphany.  The last fifty pages of the book were positively maddening in this respect:  anticlimactic, repetitive, aimless, but including passages of great insight and beauty that, if they'd been placed elsewhere in the book, would have made a great deal of sense.

I'm thinking, for example, of the extended meditation on Shinjuku Station and Tsukuru's job that begins Chapter 19.  It's one of Murakami's great hymn-to-Everyman passages, some of his best writing on that post-'95 theme of his, but it's misplaced.  It fleshes out Tsukuru's character, and the significance of his job, beautifully, and if it had come two or three hundred pages earlier it would have given us a much deeper understanding of this guy.  It may be that by placing it at the end, Murakami's trying to suggest that only now is Tsukuru coming to understand himself to this degree, but that's not quite how it reads, to me.

*

The lack of surrealism is another area that feels to me like the result of improvisation, not planning.  For most of the book, I submit, it's not clear whether or not Tazaki is a reliable point of view character.  (He's not the narrator, but we're so locked into his p.o.v. that he might as well be - we only know what he knows.)  And early on he has a sexual dream about Black and White that, while reminiscent of other dreams he's had, is not quite a dream, or at least doesn't seem to be one at the time - it's presented as if he's awakened into Another Space, that very typical Murakami alternate reality or dream world.  As it happens, we never go back there, but when he learns that White had accused him of rape, and then that she had been murdered and her murderer never caught, we the longtime Murakami readers can't help but wonder if maybe Tsukuru did it after all, but only the world of dreams.  Murakami's done this before, right?  He seems to be laying the groundwork for it here, but then he doesn't go there;  he so doesn't go there that in Tsukuru's climactic conversation with Black in Finland, he has Tsukuru imagine having done it, and tell Black that maybe he did do it, and then has her tell him they all felt like they did it.  It's just his guilt over not being able to save her talking.  And nothing else in the narrative contradicts that.

I'm not actually sure if this is a strength or a weakness in the book.  It's a path not explored, a narrative cul-de-sac, but I do allow that a certain amount of narrative messiness increases the sense of mystery and makes it an enjoyably offbeat book.  And although Murakami drops the dream-communication motif, he comes back to sleep as an important process, late in the book.  In fact, the book ends with Tsukuru turning off the light and committing himself to sleep, the night before he's to meet Sara and (he hopes) commit to her forever.  It's a nice moment to end the book, and a nice note of irresolution - we don't know if he actually gets the girl, just that he's made up his mind, and now that he's made it up, he goes to sleep.  What does sleep do?  What will he do in sleep?  It's a suggestion that, if nothing else, there are things going on beneath the surface of Tsukuru's life even now that he's supposedly come to terms with his past.  It's a beautiful moment, and it goes a long way toward recuperating the letdown that (I'll admit) I felt when White's whole situation is left so unresolved. 

*

There's more going on in this book.  For example, there's a whole subplot I haven't mentioned involving his one post-rejection college friend, Mr. Gray (= another color).  Gray comes into his life, all but moves in with him - they become swimming buddies, reading buddies, music-listening buddies (it's Gray who educates him about Liszt), and almost sexual partners.  The is-it-a-dream that starts with White and Black ends with Tsukuru coming into Gray's mouth - in the dream.  Evidently.

And then, not immediately, but not too long after, Gray disappears from the narrative.  There's a suggestion, much later, that this loss too is something Tsukuru's going to have to resolve, but he never does;  another narrative cul-de-sac.  But a very interesting one, not least because of its wonderfully confusing incorporation of homosexual desire into the Murakami protagonist's mental life.  In fact this book is another in a long line of Murakami works to deal, not completely unproblematically to be sure, with homosexuality.  I'm going to be really interested to see how this aspect of the book goes over in translation (and how it's handled in translation), because at first read it doesn't seem to be quite as enlightened a take as he's provided in the past. 

There's also the whole color thing, right?  The characters aren't quite as schematized as my summary makes them sound - they have real, plausible, normal Japanese names that just happen to contain color elements, and so in the narrative there's never the sense that we're just talking about types, or allegories.  But there's no escaping, on the broadest level, the fact that he is schematizing these people;  I find it elegant and playful, especially because he makes the characters themselves conscious of it.  Tsukuru's fear that he's "colorless" begins as an entirely plausible joke, but then comes to dominate his self-image, as he sees himself as a drab, boring drone.  Meanwhile, as they reminisce, the other characters come to feel that they were playing simplified roles in their five-person group - that they were types, not quite individuals.  Part of the story is about how when we play roles in relationships, but can be fully individual when alone, and how growing up is partly a process of leaving behind community for solitude - we lose warmth but gain personal authenticity. 

*

For me, personally (and I know that other readers have reached this point sooner), this is the first Murakami book where I've really felt that his method lets him down.  I pretty much hated the third volume of 1Q84, but that wasn't because of how he wrote it, but because of what he chose to write about.  Here I think he's got the makings of a really nice novel - minor Murakami, but that's often the best Murakami anyway.  But it would have benefited from a careful rewrite.  He's telling a relatively conventional story, and I think it might have benefited from being told in an even more conventional way - he's got his character development inside out a lot of the time, and if he'd straightened it in a rewrite out the novel might have been more satisfying.  And if he'd gone back and struck out a lot of the verbal riffing that, in his draft, he needed to go through to get from point A to point B, just tightened the whole thing up, I think it would have made the whole thing much more effective.  Of course, the fact that he doesn't do that is what we've come to expect from Murakami.  And I'm on record as liking the shaggy-dog-tale aspect of a lot of his books. 

But this time he lost me.

Murakami Haruki: 1Q84 (revisited)

My earlier thoughts on the book are here.

Now, after having read the work again, I’m prepared to revise my earlier judgment on it somewhat.  The skinny is that I still didn’t enjoy the third part very much, but I do see how he was probably planning it to go in that direction from the start.

That is, reading the first two parts with knowledge of what’s in store in the third part, it was easy to see how he was laying the groundwork for the Aomame-Tengo love story right from the start.  Indeed, it was possible (I’m assured by my wife) to see that coming a mile away – what other reason would there be for paralleling a single man and a single woman of the same age like that?  Of course they’re going to get together.  To which my response is, well, Kafka and Nakata didn’t “get together” in Kafka on the Shore, and I and the Rat didn’t in Pinball, 1973, so I think (protecting my ego) that there was good reason, grounded in a careful reading of Murakami’s oeuvre, not to assume that this was going to end up as a love story.

But in fact it did, and hey:  rereading it, I can see him telegraphing it pretty clearly.  From the beginning, this was always going to be that kind of novel.  And this telegraphing comes on the subtextual level as well as in terms of the plot.  It was that kind of novel all along not just because structurally it had to end with the two storylines being united, the two would-be lovers consummating it, but because one of the deep themes of the book is solipsism and its discontents.  As the Homeric taxi driver warns Aomame at the outset, there’s only one reality, despite appearances – this isn’t a parallel worlds novel – but at the same time, we know that not everybody perceives the world the same.  For some people, it’s a world with two moons;  for others, it’s not.  Each of us lives in our own world, intentionally or not, and we can never know completely how much that world is “real,” that is, how much it overlaps with the individualized worlds those around us are living in.  There may only be one reality, but who can access it, and how can they know if they do?  The 9/Q business is setting this up for us:  but the movement of the novel is inexorably toward the merging of Tengo’s and Aomame’s separate worlds.  I can see that now.  The climax of the thing was always going to be two people (two separate worlds) agreeing to commit to each other (to merge their worlds into one).  I get that.  I can appreciate that he’s doing that.

And I can see how that fits in cleanly with the rest of his career.  Withdrawal into one’s own private world vs. getting out and engaging with everybody else’s world.  Solitude vs. commitment to a relationship.  Self vs. non-self.  This is his big theme, and he’s revisiting it here.  Okay. 

None of that new appreciation fundamentally changes how I feel about the book, though.  The love story he chose to tell is still a retelling of the Hajime-Shimamoto story, only this time Hajime is right to be saving himself for his mostly-imaginary childhood crush.  And so is Aomame.  Granted that this works better on the fantasy level on which this story takes place, still it’s a retreat from the mature, realistic, even cynical take on adult relationships that has characterized his work so far.  Gone is the messiness of actually trying to make a relationship work (and usually failing), gone is the tension between real-life relationships and fantasy perfect lovers.  Here the triumphal commitment is to the ideal lover of memory and imagination.  In 1992 Murakami knew that this could not actually bring resolution or happiness.  Hajime was doomed the moment he embraced Shimamoto, because she wasn’t real.  Here we’re supposed to rejoice over Aomame and Tengo getting together after twenty years, never yet having had a real conversation, but already committing to starting a family together…  It just doesn’t work for me.  It’s a fantasy, and maybe if you can find it beautiful on a fantasy level it works for you, but that particular fantasy doesn’t really appeal to me.  So.  There.

There have been hints and rumors about a fourth book.  I’ll believe it when I see it.  I can imagine a fourth book that would redeem the series somewhat.  Volume 3 is still, aside from all of the above points, a dull read, and nothing can change that.  But a fourth book could return to the blithely-abandoned Little People/Sakigake storyline and wrap things up in a more satisfying manner.  After all, the end of Vol. 3 drops strong hints that Aomame and Tengo’s little one is more than just the signifier of their true love, it’s somehow the new Sakigake prophet, or more.  And Sakigake is after it.  Maybe in Vol. 4 Fukaeri and Komatsu and Buzzcut and the Little People all come back and it all builds to a rousing climax that follows through on the social critiques begun in the first two volumes.  Maybe.  But at the moment, that hasn’t happened in this reality.  We’re left with Vol. 3 as the final word on this fictional world.  And it feels pretty final, if not satisfying.

Murakami Haruki: 1Q84 (2009-2010)

Parts 1 & 2 came out in 2009, and Part 3 came out in 2010.  Thus this follows the publication pattern of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (without the magazine serialization of the first part).  In this case, I think the two installments (counting Parts 1 & 2 as one unit) bear separate consideration, for reasons I’ll go into below.

Parts 1 & 2 consist of two intertwined storylines told in alternating chapters:  an “Aomame” storyline told from the point of view of a character of the same name, and a “Tengo” storyline told from the p.o.v. of that character.  Both are in the third person – the whole book is, which for Murakami is a landmark in and of itself.  One of many to be found in 1Q84.

Aomame’s full name, which we only discover in Part 3, is Aomame Masami.  She’s a 30-year-old single gym instructor and personal trainer who focuses on women’s self-defense, and in her spare time she’s an assassin working for an older woman known only (until Part 3) as the Dowager.  We first meet Aomame in a cab on the expressway, stuck in gridlock.  The cab driver tells her that if she’s in a hurry, there’s a short-cut off the expressway:  she can climb down the emergency stairs.  She does, and when she gets to ground level she starts to notice odd things about the world.  Cops are in different uniforms, carrying different guns.  Eventually these differences multiply to the point that she realizes that somehow she’s stepped into a different world – it’s almost but not quite identical to her own.  Since the year in her own world is 1984, she decides to call this one the phonetically identical (in Japanese) 1Q84.  The biggest difference is that here there are two moons.

The appointment she’s on her way to is an assassination.  She shows up in a swanky downtown hotel, talks her way into the guy’s room, and stabs him in the neck with a needle she made herself – it hits the instant-death spot in the brain while leaving no perceptible mark on the skin.  Why does this guy need to die?  He beats his wife.  The Dowager, we come to learn, runs a battered-women’s shelter, and Aomame works for her taking out the most egregious husbands of these women. 

The Dowager does this because her daughter married an abuser and killed herself;  she sees Aomame as a kind of surrogate daughter.  The Dowager lives in a mansion in Azabu surrounded by willows;  we first meet her in a greenhouse filled with exotic butterflies, guarded by her burly, well-read, Korean-Japanese, gay bodyguard Tamura.

Aomame does this because her first and best friend in high school, Tamaki, also married an abuser and killed herself.  Aomame’s relationship with Tamaki was deeper than ordinary friendship – it dabbled in the physical, and although Aomame doesn’t consider herself a lesbian, her emotional attachment to Tamaki was deep and passionate.  Her first kill is Tamaki’s husband. 

Aomame, again, does not consider herself a lesbian, and in fact has a habit of picking up men in bars for one-night stands to satisfy her sexual urges.  Always older men, who she has a thing for.  But in the course of one of these adventures she meets a cute policewoman named Ayumi;  they begin to go out on foursomes, but Ayumi harbors a secret passion for Aomame that Aomame almost, but doesn’t quite, reciprocate.  Then Ayumi turns up strangled by a date in a hotel.  But Aomame doesn’t vow revenge – she’s in the midst of another, more dire, mission…

Meanwhile, Tengo’s storyline is much more peaceful.  He’s a part-time math teacher in a cram school, and on the side he’s an aspiring novelist.  His mentor and editor, Komatsu, also has him screening entries for a new-writers contest, and in the process they come across a peculiar work called “Air Chrysalis.”  It’s a work of fantasy by a 17-year-old calling herself Fuka-Eri (short for Fukada Eriko), and while it’s borderline illiterate there’s something about it that’s unforgettable.  The mischievous Komatsu hatches a scheme to have Tengo rewrite it, sure that the result will win the prize.  Komatsu’s original intention seems to be nothing more than to have a goof at the expense of the literary establishment.

It works, though, and there the trouble begins.  Because the story turns out to be a barely-fictionalized account of Fuka-Eri’s upbringing in a strange and secretive cult in the mountains of Yamanashi.  Sakigake, as the cult is named, was originally a left-wing commune, a holdover from the 1970 student movement, founded by Fuka-Eri’s father.  But then it evolved into a religious organization centered around a shadowy figure known only as the Leader, and Fukada pere has never been heard from again.  Fuka-Eri ran away at age ten and now lives with Fukada’s old friend and academic colleague Professor Ebisuno.  Ebisuno signs onto the rewriting scam, but he has his own agenda:  he’s concerned about Fukada’s disappearance, and hopes that if “Air Chrysalis” wins the prize it will stir some shit up with Sakigake.

And what about Fuka-Eri?  She’s a strange one:  speaks in a monotone, and largely in monosyllables, has lifeless but hypnotic eyes, is dyslexic but turns out to have a fantastic memory, has great but odd physical allure, and all in all seems not to be quite of this world.  She goes along with the plan because, basically, she likes Tengo – and because she doesn’t consider herself a fiction writer to begin with.  She insists the story is true.

But it can’t be, Tengo thinks.  Because it’s about a little girl in a commune who is assigned to guard the goats, and when one dies, she’s punished by being locked up with the corpse, and she sees six Little People from another dimension crawl out through the goat’s mouth and start building an Air Chrysalis.  I.e., a kind of cocoon made of filaments that they pull out of thin air.  When it’s done, it’s meant to help them communicate between their world and this;  it contains a homunculus of the girl herself, called a dohta – and she, the original, is called the maza.  Clearly it’s fantasy, right?

The first hint of convergence between the two storylines comes with Aomame’s new mission, the one that precludes her avenging Ayumi.  The Dowager has taken in an abused child who has run away from Sakigake with tales that the Leader is having sex with underage shrine maidens.  Including his daughter (they’re unaware of Fuka-Eri at this point).  I.e., we realize that the Leader and the former leftist guru Fukada are one and the same, and also that part of Fuka-Eri’s shellshocked demeanor might come from being sexually abused by her father.

Meanwhile, the rising tension in Tengo’s storyline comes first from fears that the media furor around Fuka-Eri’s winning the prize (sexy 17-year-old wins literary prize – who can resist?) will reveal his part in the hoax, and then from the fact that she disappears.  And while the police are searching for her, she shows up at Tengo’s apartment and asks him to shelter her.  It turns out that her disappearance was engineered by Ebisuno as a way of getting the cops to raid Sakigake.

We get further convergence of the two storylines the more we learn about Aomame and Tengo’s childhoods.  It turns out they knew each other as 4^th- and 5^th-graders.  Aomame was raised in a strict Christian sect called the Society of Witnesses (obviously modeled after the Jehovah’s Witnesses – they refuse blood transfusions, for example), and was traumatized as a child by being dragged on door-to-door proselyting by her mother.  Tengo was raised by a single father who worked as an NHK fee collector and was similarly traumatized by his father dragging him along on his rounds every Sunday, on which he would browbeat and harrass people into paying up.  At school, Tengo compensated for his loneliness by excelling in math, in judo, and in just about everything else he tried;  as a tall, strong kid he was always popular, although he never felt like he belonged.  Aomame, meanwhile, was isolated and bullied until one day Tengo stood up for her.  She couldn’t say thanks, but one day she held his hand – and that was the last contact they ever had.  But they’ve remembered it, each separately, ever since.

As Part 2 draws to its climax, Aomame embarks on her mission.  The Leader is seeking a new physical therapist for his terrible muscle aches resulting from his spiritual transports, and Aomame gets a try-out.  She goes to his hotel suite in Tokyo and, in the midst of a terrible thunderstorm, has a one-on-one session with the Leader in a darkened room, with his bodyguards just outside the door.  The Leader knows why she’s come and in fact begs her to take his life.  He speaks of his pain as coming from spiritual possessions that come upon him and utterly paralyze him, then leave him with horrible aches for days afterward.  He also confesses that during his paralyses his ten-year-old shrine maidens mount him – he swears it’s their idea, not his – that they want to bear his children.  But none have.  He also speaks of the Little People – says he’s a Receiver, getting revelations from them, and that his daughter was the Perceiver, part of the revelation-communicating process.  And he also reveals to Aomame Tengo’s role in disseminating word of the Little People, which has angered them.  Thus the thunderstorm.  The Leader seems genuinely weary of the whole thing, and willingly submits to Aomame’s ministrations.  She debates leaving him alive to suffer, but in the end kills him, because he says that if he’s allowed to live, Tengo will be in danger, while if he dies, Aomame will be in danger, but Tengo will be out of danger.

She gets away with it, too – that is, she makes it out of the suite, and then immediately goes into hiding under arrangements made by Tamura.  Goes to the mattresses in an apartment in Koenji, where she broods over what the Leader has said.  Begins to be obsessed with her memories of Tengo, and in the last scene in her storyline in Part 2, goes back onto the expressway and holds a gun to her head…

Meanwhile, Tengo twice goes to visit his father in a nursing home in Chiba.  He’s always wondered if his father is in fact his father – he has a single memory of his mother, and in the memory she’s making love with another man.  In any case, he’s never gotten along with his father, but now he takes a whim to visit him.  His father, only half-lucid, seems to deny that Tengo is his son, and Tengo, somewhat relieved, goes back to Tokyo.  He tells Fuka-Eri of the visit, and how it strangely resembled a story he was reading on a train about a Town of Cats:  the protagonist of the story got off the train in the town, found it was inhabited by cats, was enchanted, and stayed until he could no longer catch a train to leave. 

Fuka-Eri insists that he needs to undergo a purification – the Little People are after him.  That’s the night of the thunderstorm, and Fuka-Eri comes into his bed.  Without being at all sexually attracted to her, Tengo slips into a dream-state accompanied by paralysis, including a priapic state, and Fuka-Eri mounts him.  In a moment of supreme spiritual transcendance, he comes inside her like he’s never come before.  This was the purification.

His storyline, in this volume, concludes with another visit to his father.  This time the man’s dying – he’s in a coma.  Tengo visits him, and while some tests are being run, he sees an air chrysalis floating in his father’s empty bed.  He peeks inside and sees the 10-year-old Aomame.

Thus ends Part 2.

Part 3 introduces a new p.o.v. character.  This is a private eye named Ushikawa – we’ve already met him, but now he takes a major role.  Chapters from his perspective now alternate with those from Aomame’s and Tengo’s.  Ushikawa is working for Sakigake, although he’s not a believer.  First we met him harrassing Tengo, but now that the cult’s attention is on catching the murderer of their Leader, he’s on the trail of Aomame.  In his chapters we follow his investigation in painstaking detail as he uncovers Aomame’s connections with the Dowager and ultimately with Tengo (this is where we learn everybody’s full names).  Finally he stakes out Tengo’s apartment, hoping this will lead him to Aomame.  Tengo, by coincidence, also lives in Koenji, so this is a better guess than Ushikawa realizes.

Meanwhile both Aomame and Tengo spend most of Part 3 alone in their respective Koenji apartments waiting for something to happen.  Aomame is in hiding, while Sakigake looks for her;  the Dowager and Tamura want her to go to a safer place and have plastic surgery, but she vows to wait out the year where she is, hoping against hope to run into Tengo, though she has no idea where she is.  In fact, one night, looking down from her balcony, she sees him sitting on a slide in a playground, gazing at the sky, but by the time she gets down there he’s gone.  After that, she watches for him every night.

Tengo, meanwhile, is just kind of spinning his wheels.  He discovers that he can see two moons now – just like in the story “Air Chrysalis.”  He goes back to Chiba when his father takes a turn for the worse and spends nearly two weeks at his bedside, but he’s really just hoping for another glimpse of Aomame’s air chrysalis.  He doesn’t see it.  Has a brief dalliance with a nurse named Adachi – no sex, but she gets him high on hashish.  Fuka-Eri disappears again, warning him that his place is being watched.  In fact he never sees her again – she goes back to Ebisuno, who calls off the search.  The police raid of Sakigake turned up nothing – not even the death of the Leader, which the sect is keeping under wraps.

Aomame discovers she’s pregnant, and deduces that it must have been the night she killed the Leader – although there was no sex involved – and on a hunch she decides the baby must be Tengo’s.  We, the readers, know that he did in fact come that night, into a strangely transfigured Fuka-Eri, so we’re ready to suspect that somehow this was in fact a mystical union with Aomame.

Ushikawa closes in on Aomame, until finally she spots him, and Tamura visits him and whacks him.  Sakigake comes and gets his body, and while they’re trying to decide what to do with him, Little People crawl out of his mouth and start building an air chrysalis.

Meanwhile Ushikawa under torture had revealed where Tengo was, and his old connection to Aomame, and Aomame gets Tamura to take a message to him.  Meet her tonight on the slide.  He does, they’re finally reunited after twenty years.  She leads him up the emergency staircase onto the expressway, and when they get to the top they see – one moon.  They’ve escaped.

End of summary.  And yes, even at that, I’ve left out a lot of stuff.

Simply put, the reason why I want to consider Parts 1 & 2 separate from Part 3 is that Parts 1 & 2 are brilliant, or damn near, while Part 3 is a disaster.  Now, to save wear and tear on the ampersand I’m just going to call them “the first part” and “the last part” from now on.

The first part reads like everything you’ve ever hoped Murakami would do.  It’s his deepest dive into genre fiction since Hard-Boiled Wonderland, this time embracing some of the juicier elements of hit-man/crime fiction, and up to the end of the first part he pulls it off with, if anything, even more aplomb than he did with the cyberpunk elements back in 1985.  Aomame the feminist assassin is quite simply one of the great characters in his ouevre.  And not just because of her ingredients:  she comes alive on the page.  Whether she’s hitting the bars with Ayumi or communing with the Dowager among the butterflies, she’s well-written, with punchy dialogue and great details of personality (her frightening scowl) and physique (her lopsided bust).  Her last mission against the Leader is depicted with great tension and atmosphere (even if the final confrontation owes a little too much to Apocalypse Now – right down to the presence of The Golden Bough). 

Meanwhile, the Tengo storyline is a glorious parody of the literary world, something Murakami hasn’t essayed since Dance Dance Dance.  Tengo himself is a little reminiscent of Junpei in “Honey Pie” and/or “The Kidney-Shaped Stone…,” but here he’s used for comic effect, a naif at the mercies of the scheming Komatsu.  But then his storyline veers into classic Murakami surrealism, as Fuka-Eri shows up and begins insisting that all this business about the Little People is real.

The themes are really solid in the first part, too.  First and foremost there’s Sakigake itself.  Clearly this is Murakami’s long-anticipated fictional depiction of Aum, and it’s fascinating that he plugs it into his lifelong obsession with the failure of the student movement.  Without necessarily saying that Aum itself was a hangover of the ‘60s, he makes an excellent case for how one strain of that kind of idealism could turn cultish.  It’s kind of the mirror-image of the would-be Sheep/Rat nexus in A Wild Sheep Chase. 

The keynote theme of the Aomame storyline is violence against women:  she’s an avenging angel, and in this, too, she’s an unforgettable character.  Kind of the culmination of the gradual feminist awakening Murakami’s been undergoing since that spate of female-p.o.v. stories in ’89-’91.  Her own life, and her interaction with the Dowager, are effective devices for exposing the frightening prevalence of violence against women in Japan.  Even Tengo, it turns out, is touched by it – we learn, although he never does, that his mother in fact ran away from his father (the guy in Chiba is in fact his real father) with another man, who then strangled her.

The childhood parallels between Aomame and Tengo are rich, too.  Aomame is scarred by an upbringing that sets her too much at odds with mainstream society, and claims her childhood in the process;  Tengo’s father, meanwhile, is kind of the uber-salaryman, and in that sense is the epitome of mainstream society, but that claims his childhood no less completely.  The NHK fee collector is in some ways Murakami’s most damning portrait of work-obsessed straight society (and one of the few wonderful things in the second part is how Tengo’s father’s spirit wanders from his body to manifest as a phantom fee collector harrassing Aomame, Tengo, and even Ushikawa). 

All of this thematic complexity and narrative tension glides to a halt in Part 3 as Aomame and Tengo both turn into Okada Toru, and as Ushikawa comes, inexplicably, to consume a full third of the narrative. 

Well, almost inexplicably:  he does have that brief denouement as the new dead goat.  Otherwise, he’s just a loathsome character to have to inhabit.  In the first part, Murakami had introduced him as such – physically misshapen, unclean, abrasively unctuous, morally deficient, and on the wrong side.  By making him a point of view character in the second part I suspect Murakami’s trying to get us to see him as a successor to characters like Katagiri in “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” an outwardly-repulsive but inwardly-noble salt-of-the-earth type.  But it just doesn’t work that way, because he forgets the inwardly-noble part.  He nearly ruins Part 3 single-handedly.

But he has help.  As I say, Aomame and Tengo both turn into utterly static characters.  Aomame’s transformation is particularly disappointing, as she goes from being decisive, self-directed, and cool to being hopelessly devoted to her girlhood crush.  Without particularly undergoing any form of repentance for her murderous past, she has a kind of ambiguous spiritual awakening, and sees her childhood love for Tengo as her only chance at redemption.  Tengo, too, goes from being a relatively well-adjusted adult – a bit disaffected, a bit of a loner, but still basically happy – to moping about his boyhood crush.  And all those wonderful plots that they’d been involved in in the first part are downplayed or dropped in favor of a love story. 

And, I may say, the weakest kind of love story:  the pre-sexual-awakening childhood-innocence kind of love story.  In South of the Border, West of the Sun he used this motif (which, to be sure, has a long pedigree in Japan), but he couched it in terms of the main character’s midlife crisis.  It made sense for a self-centered Man Who Has Everything to long for a ten-year-old rosebud;  here it makes much less sense, and it’s presented with no ironic distance at all, in the second part at least. 

I find it hard to believe this is where Murakami had originally intended the story to end up.  But it’s hard to say.  The first part feels utterly planned out – most plot developments feel carefully calculated, in a good way.  Instead of the improvisational feel of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, we get the architectural solidity of Kafka on the Shore, but with much stronger narrative elements.  But the second part goes off the rails in the same way that the last third of Wind-Up Bird did, only it doesn’t recover like the earlier book did, and it doesn’t have the improvisational feel to contextualize it.  That is, it was okay that Murakami felt like he was vamping in search of a theme for a while in Wind-Up Bird, because it was that kind of novel;  this isn’t that kind of novel, so when he drops everything that’s been working in search of something else it’s just a really jarring move.

And the amount of stuff that gets dropped is unbelievable.  The whole sociopolitical critique aspect of Sakigake is dropped, and so is their peculiar spiritual outlook;  instead they become mere antagonists in Aomame’s search for Tengo.  And as Sakigake is moved to the back burner, so is the Komatsu-Ebisuno conspiracy.  Murakami had laid the groundwork, in the third part, for some tasty revelations about them – Komatsu had once been Ebisuno’s editor, and we know that Ebisuno had long been in touch with Fukada, so I figured that we were going to learn that Ebisuno was still Sakigake’s man on the outside, and that Komatsu had been in cahoots with him, manipulating Tengo, from the beginning.  As a cultural anthropologist, it would make perfect sense for Ebisuno to see Sakigake as an interesting experiment in atavism, or even to be a secret participant in their mystery cult.  But instead, Ebisuno is completely dropped as a character.  And Komatsu gets one brief appearance when he tells Tengo that he was kidnapped and threatened by Sakigake and told to cease publication of “Air Chrysalis” or else….

As I say, the spiritual outlook of Sakigake is also largely dropped.  Fuka-Eri hardly appears in the second part, and so all that juicy mystery surrounding her is muted.  We get some speculation about her nature (is she mother/maza or daughter/dohta?), but basically she seems to have served her purpose in funneling Tengo’s sperm into Aomame…

The Dowager is basically dropped as a character.  There’s no follow-up on Ayumi.  No follow-up on Tengo’s older married girlfriend from the first part, who also disappeared mysteriously.  In short, almost everything good and intriguing from the first part is jettisoned to make room for the love story.

It’s hard to overstate how disappointing I found Part 3 of this book.  For long stretches of Parts 1 & 2, I thought it was his masterpiece, hands down;  but Part 3 is probably the worst thing I’ve ever read by Murakami.  Absolutely a train wreck.

And a train wreck in ways that reach back to weaken Parts 1 & 2, unfortunately.  About those Little People.  What are they doing in this book?  It’s hinted that they’re part of the Murakami’s playful take on Orwell’s 1984:  instead of Big Brother we get the Little People.  But (that's not funny and) they don’t seem to be set in thematic dialogue with Big Brother in any particular manner.  They don’t control people’s thoughts, or even their actions in much more than a very oblique way.  They’re not an overwhelming presence.  (In fact, I can’t see much of an engagement with Orwell’s book here at all.  The world of 1Q84 certainly isn’t an imagined totalitarian Japan – the whole point is that it’s largely indistinguishable from real 1984 Japan.  And while somebody could doubtless make the case – some intellectuals did, at the time – that real 1984 Japan was subtly totalitarian, this book doesn't say that.)

Elsewhere they’re associated with primeval human religion, with the prophet-king motif in The Golden Bough, the kind of king who had to be killed ceremonially by his people.  But this theme, introduced late in Part 2, isn’t followed up on in Part 3, and so it doesn’t go anywhere.  We’re meant to see them as somehow active in this alternate world, connecting it to their world, and somehow manipulating Sakigake – but into doing what?  Are they good or bad?  Are they a threat or a goof?  We don’t know.  They’re just a faintly ridiculous oddity in the mist of all this other sturm and drang.  Unrealized possibilities, just like so much else in this book.

As of summer 2012 this is the most recent fiction we have from Murakami.  The sheer scope – almost 1200 pages in translation – augured for this to be his magnum opus.  But if so, it’s a deeply flawed one, a work that builds up tremendous momentum and potential, only to squander it all.  One can only hope he’s deep into his next work by now, and that it’s as much of a redemption as After Dark was.    

Murakami Haruki: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007)

I’ll confess to this:  the first time I read this I couldn’t forgive Murakami for making me read a book that had a cover blurb on the back from Sports Illustrated. 

This time around, I came to terms with it a little better, and started to appreciate more what he was trying to do with it.  The title makes it plain:  he’s using running as a way of talking about other things, by noticing that talking about running in his life necessitates talking about other things.

What are those other things?  Getting older is a big theme:  most of the details he gives about his marathon training have to do with preparing, in his mid-‘50s, for another stab at the NYC Marathon, and confronting the fact that times he used to take for granted are now all but unattainable.  Writing is of course another theme:  he famously took up running to increase his stamina so he could write more and better, and so running comes to be kind of a metaphor for regular effort at writing.  Not even a metaphor, since he usually comes right out and makes the connections;  but knowing that two years after this he came out with 1Q84 makes me wonder now if all this talk of marathons and triathlons, one last push, was his way of saying he was working up to his longest literary performance (to date). 

But what I felt he was most addressing in this book was individualism.  He takes great care to make sure the reader doesn’t feel this is a health and fitness book – he’s not out to preach the benefits of running, or even of staying in shape, although he’s not shy about noticing them in his own life.  Instead he puts the emphasis on how running fits his life, his personality – how its solitary, mostly noncompetitive nature suits him, how it parallels the career choice he made in mid-life, and how the constant self-attention that training requires is a lot like the constant mining in the mind and heart that his particular kind of fiction requires.  I’m starting to think of this as Murakami’s version of Sōseki’s famous speech “My Individualism.”  Like Sōseki, Murakami is a deeply humanistic writer who pays careful attention to society, but he does that from a place of zealously guarded and exultant individuality:  his biggest concern is being fully himself, with the faith that by doing so he can best contribute to society.

I’m still a little puzzled as to why, out of all the scads of nonfiction books Murakami’s written over the years, this is the one that first appears in English (not counting Underground).  He does insist that it’s kind of different, more polished, more focused, more of a memoir.  Was it his choice to make this available to his international audience?  Or did an editor at Knopf decide that the running angle would appeal to his international audience more than, say, his writings on whiskey or jazz?

Murakami Haruki: Stories 2005

“CHANCE TRAVELER”  3/2005 (BW, and in Strange Tales from Tokyo)

Strange Tales from Tokyo is the second of Murakami’s short story collections to be translated in its entirety.  It’s buried at the end of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, but it’s all there.

This story opens with a frame device in which Murakami identifies himself as Murakami and says that strange things happen in life.  He’s had a few happen to him.  He tells about two that happened the first time he was in Cambridge in the mid-‘90s, both jazz related.  So, see:  it happens.

Then, the story proper, in the 3^rd person, as related to him by an acquaintance, the guy who tunes his piano.  The guy is an out gay man who had once aspired to be a concert pianist before becoming a piano tuner instead.  He’s much in demand, makes a good living at it, and is in a longterm relationship. 

Every Tuesday he drives to a big-box mall in Kanagawa because there’s a coffee shop there that’s just perfect for reading.  He spends a couple of hours there.  One day he’s there reading Dickens when a woman about his age approaches him.  Coincidence of coincidences, she’s reading the same Dickens book right then.  They talk and go out to lunch.  The next week she’s there again, and they go out to lunch, and she makes a pass at him.  He turns her down gently, explaining the situation.  She weeps, but then explains that she’s been diagnosed with breast cancer – they’re going to operate, and she doesn’t know yet if it’s spread.  He wishes her well and says he’ll always be happy to talk, but in fact he never sees her again.

But a mole on her earlobe gets him thinking about his sister, from whom he’s been estranged for ten years.  When he came out it almost caused her fiance’s family to break off the engagement, and she’s never forgiven him.  She’s been crying when he calls, and they get together.  She tells him that she’s just been diagnosed with breast cancer, and that very afternoon she’s scheduled for surgery.  What made him call just then?  He can’t explain.

She survived the cancer, and they were reconciled, and now he has a part in the lives of his niece and nephew, and even his brother-in-law is learning to deal with him.  Happy ending.  So:  he says to Murakami that maybe these kinds of messages are being given to us all the time and we just don’t notice it.  Murakami says he’d rather believe in a god of jazz.  And a god of gays, the other guy laughs. 

Murakami is a humanist, dyed-in-the-wool.  His earliest work is the chronicles of a conscientious objector to the salaryman life.  Later he realizes he needs to fight, to pick a side, and he comes out in favor of interrogating history, and serving society.  His early work is all about a straight Japanese guy’s perspective, but gradually he comes to see how limiting that is, and how privileged, and works overtime to try to account for the perspective of women, and of children.  Of foreigners.  And of gays:  after introducing the motif in Sputnik and Kafka, here he’s tackling it head on.  This is a story about chance, but it’s also a story that’s standing up for a gay man’s perspective in contemporary Japan, that’s normalizing what Japan in 2005 was not ready to consider normal. 

“HANALEI BAY”  4/2005 (BW, and in Strange Tales from Tokyo)

Sachi is a middle-aged woman who gets a call one day saying her son has died in Hawaii.  He was surfing in Hanalei Bay on Kauai and got his leg bitten off by a shark, and drowned.  She immediately flies there to claim his body, and spends a week in Hanalei Bay trying to get herself back together.  A kindly Japanese-American cop had advised her to accept it as part of nature’s cycle.

She ends up going back there for three weeks every year, at the same season, just sitting on the beach.  One year she meets a couple of Japanese surfers the age her son was, totally clueless, and she drives them to the bay and gives them some survival tips.

We then get a flashback to her life story.  She’s a boomer – the two surfers establish that – and it’s kind of an oblique boomer story.  She’d studied piano in high school, learned enough to fake it through jazz, although she was never much of an improviser.  Went to cooking school in Chicago for two years, but made more money and had more fun playing in jazz clubs – until she got deported for doing it on the wrong visa.  Back in Japan she ended up married to a J. jazz musician, and playing on her own;  that’s who fathered her son Takashi, but then her husband died in another woman’s hotel room.  With the insurance money Sachi opened her own jazz bar and has kept it running to this day.

With her own rebellious past, she feels she’s in no position to discipline Takashi much – she tries to point him right, but when he decides he wants to drop out and go to Hawaii to surf, she ends up letting him.  Should she have been stricter?  She wonders, but she doesn’t know how she would have gone about it – she’s so busy with the bar.

Back to the present:  on her visits to Hanalei Bay she sometimes sits in on the piano at a local restaurant, just for fun.  One night she’s in there and she runs into the two Japanese surfers.  They thank her for her help, and say they’re on their way back to Japan.  An American ex-Marine comes to their table and tries to bully her into playing something for him, saying the regular piano player is too much of a fruitcake to play anything he likes.  She refuses, and he starts to spout off racist rhetoric – but the owner comes and chases him away.  Then the two surfers ask if she’s seen the one-legged Japanese surfer hanging around on the beach.

That night she weeps because, try as she might, she doesn’t see the surfer:  he’s obviously the ghost of her son.  Why won’t he appear to her?  Then she recalls the cop’s advice:  just accept it.  She goes back to Tokyo.  Now she just plays piano there, thinking about her next trip to Hanalei Bay.

This is one of Murakami’s best stories.  His production of short stories fell off drastically beginning in the ‘90s, but what he wrote was golden.  This reminds me a lot of Tony Takitani, and not just because of the jazz element – although that’s an important link.  Murakami’s at his best when he writes about jazz.  He really gets it.  What the two stories have in common is this way of showing how life and music intersect, and of capturing the complexity of an entire life in a few short pages.  Sachi’s journey is epic, really:  you can just feel all her struggles, both in America and in Japan, all she had to sacrifice as a single mother, all she had to learn to survive as a musician and club owner.  Her estrangement from her son, and yet her deep understanding of him.

And it’s a deeply moving story.  That ending – not being able to see the ghost.  All that implies in terms of estrangement from her son.  He appears to those who love what he loves – not to those who love him.  And that’s one vision of life:  we try to love those bound to us by blood, but really we love those who love what we love. 

“WHERE I’M LIKELY TO FIND IT”  5/2005 (BW, and in Strange Tales from Tokyo)

I is not Murakami, but some kind of consultant or private eye.  This isn’t apparent immediately.  He’s listening as a wealthy middle-aged woman tells him about the mysterious disappearance of her husband, a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch.  They live on the 26^th floor of a high-rise, his mother on the 24^th, and one morning he went down to check on her, phoned his wife to say he was on the way back up, and never arrived.  Disappeared without wallet or anything but the clothes on his back. 

I takes the case, but refuses payment – that would invalidate the work he does, he says.  So he goes back to the apartment with her.  Her husband always took the stairs, so he hangs out on the stairs between the 24^th and 26^th floor.  Talks with the people he meets.  No clues.  Finally a little girl asks him what he’s looking for.  A door, perhaps.  But he doesn't know what it will look like – a doughnut?  An elephant?

The wife calls to say her husband showed up – on a train station bench in Sendai, missing his glasses, and with no memory of the last twenty days since his disappearance.  So he’s off the case.  Privately, though, he muses that his search will continue, for whatever it is.

So, what is it?  This is a very mysterious story.  Is this guy displaced in time or space, and looking for the portal back?  Or is he just bored?  There’s a lot of talk in this story about passing the time.  And how does he support himself (he says he has other means, but doesn’t say what)?  Very weird, very enigmatic.

Also very ‘80s Murakami.  The hard-boiled overtones, the freewheeling, lighthearted surrealism.  It reads like an outtake scene from Dance Dance Dance.

“THE KIDNEY-SHAPED STONE THAT MOVES EVERY DAY”  6/2005 (BW, and in Strange Tales from Tokyo)

Junpei is a short story writer – not a novelist, but reasonably successful with his stories.  When he was 16 his father made the sphinx-like pronouncement that a man only meets three women in his life who have real meaning for him.  In college Junpei met the first, but he was too late and she married his best friend.  Ever since he’s been on the lookout for the others, and fear of the resulting pain has led him to engage in nothing but light, disposable relationships.

Now, in his early 30s, he meets a woman at a party, Kirie.  She’s a few years older than him, and clearly a capable, professional woman, but she won’t tell him her job.  They sleep together, and then make a regular thing of it – they really have a lot to talk about.  She reads his stories and likes them, but still won’t tell him what she does, only that it’s the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.

One night in bed she has him tell her about the story he’s writing now.  He’s stuck with it, but as he tells her he realizes how it should end.  The story is “The Kidney-Shapes Stone that Moves Every Day.”  It’s about a woman doctor, professional and successful, having an affair with a surgeon.  One day on a trip to a mountain resort she finds a kidney-shaped stone – size, shape, color all perfect.  Brings it back to use as a paper weight.  Perfect for a hospital.  But then something strange happens.  Every morning when she comes into the office it’s in a different place.  It moves overnight.  Weird.  Gradually it comes to obsess her – she loses interest in everything.  Decides it must be telling her to change her life.  She breaks up with the surgeon (who’s married) and tosses the stone into the bay, thinking to make a new start.  Feels worlds lighter.  But when she goes back to the office, the stone is there…

When he finishes the story he tries to call Kirie but her phone is disconnected.  And for months he has no contact with her.  Feels more and more like she might have been No. 2.  He really misses her.  Then one day he’s listening to the radio and there she is – she’s a tightrope walker, it turns out, just back from a walk in Germany.  He tries to call her.  Still can’t connect.

Decides to count her as No. 2, and then has an epiphany:  the countdown itself is meaningless.  It’s the act of deciding to accept another person as truly important to one that’s important.  We cut back to the kidney story:  the woman comes into her office one morning to find it’s gone.  And she knows it won’t be coming back.

This story is a little more transparently allegorical than Murakami usually lets himself be.  But it’s still pretty effective as a meditation on love and commitment.  In that it feels a little like an outtake from Wind-Up Bird, actually.  But no less effective for that.

What’s more intriguing are the story’s other connections to Murakami’s work.  The idea of a father’s strange pronouncement casting a shadow over a son’s life is a direct repeat of the central motif of Kafka.  In this case, however, the consequences don’t seem to be as dire.  Rather, the curse seems to be there to teach Junpei what commitment really means.

The other connection is, of course, to “Honey Pie” in After the Quake. This is a fascinating connection.  Junpei here perfectly fits the description of the main character of that story – also named Junpei.  Same writing career, right down to the inability to complete a full-length novel.  Same love affair in college, failing in the same way.  But the earlier Junpei didn’t seem to be laboring under a curse, and this Junpei doesn’t seem to still be involved with his college love.  It’s as if this is an alternate way for that Junpei’s life to turn out.  Really interesting.  Is there a full-length Junpei novel in Murakami’s future?

“A SHINAGAWA MONKEY”  9/2005 (BW, and in Strange Tales from Tokyo)

A young married woman, Ando Mizuki, has started to forget her name.  Just her name, and just when people ask her about it.  At work she still uses her maiden name, Ozawa, for no other reason than because it’s too much trouble to change it.  Her husband doesn’t mind, as he sees the logic in it – he’s very logical.  Because of that logic he would no doubt conclude that her present problem indicates that on some level she’s unhappy with her marriage, but she doesn’t think that’s it.  She goes to a counselor who works for Shinagawa-ku, where they live, Mrs. Sasaki.

Over the course of their sessions they talk about her childhood and name-related incidents.  Mizuki went to a boarding school in Yokohama, far away from her home in Nagoya.  They had name tags at the entrance to the school dorm that you turned one way to show you were in the dorm and another way to show you were out.  One night, Yuko, the most popular and beautiful girl in the school, came to Mizuki and asked her to look after her name tag while she went home for a funeral.  Yuko also asks Mizuki if she’s ever been jealous.  No.  Yuko says she’s lucky – jealousy is like a tumor eating you up inside.  Yuko leaves and never comes back – turns out she committed suicide.  Mizuki’s left with the name tag, which in fact she still has.

Or thinks she does.  But when she gets home and checks the envelope where she kept Yuko’s and her own high school name tags, they’re both gone.  But at her next session Mrs. Sasaki says they’ve caught the thief.  Thief?  It’s a monkey – her husband, who works for Public Works, caught it.  The monkey says he has a bad habit of stealing names, when he finds ones he likes.  And he’d always loved Yuko’s.  Had meant to steal it when she was alive, but then she died.  It took him this long to track it down.  And in the process he took a fancy to Mizuki’s.  Now he gives them both back and begs for mercy.

He also says it might have been better for Yuko if he had stolen her name – when a monkey steals a name it accepts both the good and the bad, and that might have cleared some of the darkness from Yuko’s heart.  Mizuki asks what darkness attaches to her own name.  When pressed, the monkey tells her:  her mother never loved her.  Neither did her sister.  And her father couldn’t stand up to them.  That’s why they sent her away to school.  And, starved for love, Mizuki has never been able to truly love anybody else.  Mizuki recognizes that this is the truth.  Thinks she can deal with it herself now.

Classic Murakami pop surrealism, this.  The misdirection is what makes it work.  First we suspect it has to be a story about a woman dissatisfied with married life, who feels her identity subsumed into her husband’s.  Then we think it’s going to be a story about jealousy – and maybe Yuko was jealous of Mizuki, but if so we have no indication of how or why.  In the end it’s a story about – well, about a monkey that steals names.  About learning the truth of one’s own situation, too, although that really comes as a bit of an afterthought.  Is there some way in which her feelings of never having been loved, her inability to love, robs her of her name? 

But about that monkey:  the idea of a monkey living in the sewers of Tokyo because that’s the only place it can survive unmolested, a monkey that can talk and steal names but is ashamed and penitent when caught, a monkey that can filter the bad out of people’s names…  Very interesting.  Not to mention cute.  Ends the collection on a whimsical, funny note.

As a collection, it’s linked by the motif of strange happenings – but as Murakami himself says in the intro to Blind Willow, all his stories have something strange in them, so that’s really a pretty weak link.  One of them, “Hanalei Bay,” stands with the best of his work.  A couple of them are really interesting for how they connect to the rest of his recent work.  And a couple of them are just pleasant pieces of whimsy.  Certainly they could stand on their own more easily than, say, the After the Quake stories.  But there’s something very pleasing about being able to take them on their own as a unit.