Murakami Haruki: Stories 1982-1984

“THE LAST LAWN OF THE AFTERNOON”  8/1982 (in EV, and Slow Boat to China)

In the intro to Slow Boat, Murakami specifies that he wrote this after Wild Sheep Chase.  That’s where the break comes. 

This is close in spirit to “Slow Boat to China.”  A totally realistic story, involving flashbacks to the college years, heavy on the nostalgia, zeroing in on a moment in growing up, ending with a kind of mystification at the world.  A light touch on deep things.

Here the I talks about a summer job he had once mowing lawns.  His girlfriend breaks up with him for reasons he can’t fathom, and since he doesn’t need the money, he quits the job.  On the last job he has an encounter with a middle-aged housewife, an alcoholic, who takes him up to her teenaged daughter’s bedroom and…just shows him her things.  Why does she do this?  Is the daughter dead?  Are they estranged?  There’s about a month’s worth of dust on everything…

What’s striking is the narrator’s restraint:  he doesn’t ask why she’s showing him all this.  He doesn’t want to make that connection.  And the woman can’t tell him unless he asks, evidently.  But neither does he flat-out refuse to go in with her.  It’s a delicately balanced scene.  We can feel the nervousness of the guy who doesn’t want to be unfriendly, but doesn’t want to get involved, and the hopelessness of the woman with her private grief, wanting to reach out, but not wanting to break down.

It’s perhaps the most vivid piece of writing Murakami had produced yet.  Amazing detail.  And nothing surreal at all.  A 180 degree turn from Wild Sheep Chase.

“FIREFLY” 1/83 (in BW, and Firefly, Barn Burning and Other Stories)

Another wholly realistic, utterly vivid story.  And again it takes us back to college years, end of the ‘60s.  This time the disaffection from the student movement, and the feeling of being caught between hard left and hard right, is brought out.

But basically, of course, it’s a love story.  I starts out by describing his dorm, run by a right-winger, and his funny nerdy roommate with the Amsterdam canal photo on the wall.  But then it’s all about his strange relationship of the year, with the girlfriend of his late best friend from back home.  His suicide, their awkwardness together.  His long walks around Tokyo with the girl.  Her inability to express herself.  His unwillingness to think too deeply about anything.  PTSD, both of them.  Then the night they sleep together, and then she disappears.  A letter from a mental hospital/retreat.  And he goes up to the roof and lets go a firefly. 

This is, of course, the kernel of Norwegian Wood.  And I don’t think it does anything that novel doesn’t do, or does it any better.  But it’s still a very nicely realized short story, and it’s great to have it in English so we can see how he takes a short story and turns it into a novel.  He does this more often than we can know in English.

“BARN BURNING” 1/83 (in EV, and Firefly, Barn Burning and Other Stories)

In the afterword to Firefly etc., he says that he wrote this in November ’82, and that it’s the earliest of the stories in that volume.  So in conception, at least, it predates “Firefly.” 

I’s a novelist and married here, and the story takes place in the present, within the last three years.  It starts with I relating how he met a girl at a party and they became friends.  Then she goes off to tour Algeria, and then she brings back a boyfriend – a Japanese guy she met there.  The real story starts when one day, while I’s wife is out (we never meet her), the girl brings the guy to his house for an impromptu party.  They drink.  She goes to sleep on the bed, and the boyfriend brings out some grass, and he and I get stoned.  While smoking, the guy mentions that he burns barns.  Just burns them right down, when the urge takes him.  In fact he’s scouted out his next barn, and it’s near I’s house. 

After that I becomes obsessed with figuring out which barn it is.  He works out where the barns in his neighborhood are, which are the likely candidates, and then every morning on his run he makes the rounds.  Does this for a year, but none of them ever burn down.  Then he runs into the guy in town one day and asks him when he’s going to burn the barn.  He already did.  But still won’t say which one. 

Which bothers I – he’s kind of obsessed.  But there’s nothing he can do.  And the girl has disappeared – neither of them can find her.  And I just keeps getting older.

An entertaining story.  Kind of light, but still with those mysterious depths, or depths created by mystery, half hinted at, that you’re coming to expect from a Murakami short story.  Is it about obsession?  Suggestion?  Is it just a comedy about a normal guy whose life and mind are taken over by rowdy partiers?  An oblique way of saying that we keep getting older and never figure anything out?

“THE MIRROR” 2/83 (in BW, and A Perfect Day for Kangaroos)

I is in some kind of group that’s trading scary stories.  His is about when he was 19.  A hippie, he didn’t go to college and instead traveled around working odd jobs.  Once he was a night watchman at a junior high school.  One October night he woke up with a fright – something was wrong.  Found a new mirror on the wall in the entrance hall.  Realized the reflection was him, but not him:  it hated him. And then it was starting to control him.  So he smashed the mirror.  Next morning he found – there had never been any mirror.

So this series was going on during Wild Sheep Chase and after.  Kind of an anomaly in his oeuvre, then.  This clearly relates to one of the late scenes in that novel, though:  I encounters a mirror in the Rat’s house in Junitaki, and feels that his reflection both is and isn’t him.  Of course, there he also realizes, by the lack of reflection, that the Sheep Man is a ghost.  Here Murakami takes the mirror stage in a different direction:  it’s just confronting yourself, or what lies deep within.  By this time he’s become fixated on the idea of the subconscious, what lies hidden in the deep wells of the self.  And this is a light, ghost-story-styled riff on that.  Nothing more, I guess.

“THE RISE AND FALL OF SHARPIE CAKES” 3/83 (in BW, and A Perfect Day for Kangaroos)

I reads a newspaper ad one day about a meeting to solicit new product ideas for Sharpie Cakes.  He has no idea what these are, but goes to the meeting.  Turns out they’re age-old sweets with a heritage that goes back to the Heian period – even mentioned in Kokinshū.  But they want to come up with a contemporary version.  Big cash prize.  He’s a talented baker, and could use the money, so he comes up with an entry.  All the young people in the firm like it, but a couple of old ones don’t, so they let the Sharpie Cake Crows decide.  This is a flock of crows kept in a room at the company and fed, for centuries, on nothing but Sharpie Cakes.  They’re quite finicky.  They throw I’s cakes to them.  A free-for-all – some of the crows will eat them, others spit them out, and others attack the ones eating them, and soon there’s blood everywhere.  I storms out saying, fuck it:  I’ll just bake what I like. 

Hilarious.  I take it as a thinly-disguised denunciation of the literary establishment that was, in 1983, arguing about him.  Is he literature or is he not?  Do we give him prizes or do we not?  To which he says:  fuck it, I’ll just write what I like. 

But there could be other interpretations.

“THE DANCING DWARF” 1/84 (in EV, and Firefly, Barn Burning and Other Stories)

I dreams of meeting a dwarf in the woods, dancing to a Charlie Parker record.  Just before he wakes up, the dwarf tells him they’ll meet again.  Awake, he goes to work in the elephant factory.  His coworker tells him someone else once mentioned the dwarf – an old guy in a different section.  I finds the old guy in the tavern and the old guy tells him about when the dwarf used to come dance in the tavern regularly – before the revolution.  In fact, the dwarf might have had something to do with the revolution – he went to dance before the king and then a year later, boom.  Revolution.  Now the revolution are looking for the dwarf.  Later I learns of a cute new female worker and asks her out dancing.  She says she’ll be there dancing alone;  if he wants to dance it’s his business.  In another dream, the dwarf says the only way I can win the girl is to let the dwarf in his body to dance through him.  Which he’ll do, on one condition:  if I makes it through the evening without making a sound, the dwarf leaves his body, but if he talks just once, the dwarf gets his body forever.  Deal.  On the night, the dwarf dances I’s body brilliantly, seductively, and the girl leaves with him.  They walk into the hills, but just as they start making love, she turns into a mass of maggots and rotting flesh.  I is just about to scream when he realizes this is a trick of the dwarf’s:  he closes his eyes and kisses the girl and the dwarf says, you win, and leaves his body.  Victory!  He gets the girl.  But now he’s on the lam – the revolution heard the dwarf was dancing in his body and is hunting him.  And the dwarf won’t leave him alone – says the only way for him to escape is to give his body to the dwarf.  I can’t.  But he can’t run forever…

Nothing can prepare you for this story.  It’s surreal on a level that nothing previous had been.  Up until now we’ve had, at most, magical elements in an otherwise recognizable world.  Here we’re in a fairy-tale land that is, at most, described realistically.  Kings, revolutions, elephant factories – none of these are any more “real” to us than a dancing dwarf that can possess your body.  And fairy-tale logic obtains, too:  the final test, where the hero has to see through a glamor that tries to convince him his fair lady is foulness itself, is straight out of Konjaku monogatari, if not Brothers Grimm. 

What’s it mean?  I have no idea.  This one I just accept.  It’s a masterpiece.

“NAUSEA 1979” 10/84 (in BW, and Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round)

This collection is the one where he pretended to just be relating stories that actual people, acquaintances or readers, had related to him.  Nothing made up.  Later, of course, he admitted it was all made up, but the nonfictional frame was part of the deal.  That’s why the interlocutor here addresses I as “Mr. Murakami.”  This device is somewhat obscured in the first of these stories to be translated, but it’s preserved here.

The interlocutor here is a free-lance illustrator who occasionally works with “Mr. Murakami” and also shares a love for old jazz records and whiskey.  They get together occasionally, and once the man told I about his 40 days of nausea in the summer of ’79.  For forty days, he’d feel otherwise fine but throw up after nearly every meal, and every day he’d get a phone call from a man he didn’t know who’d say his (the illustrator’s) name and then hang up.  No doctor could help him, and neither psychiatrists nor the police took his complaints seriously.  The only possible explanation is that it had something to do with his other hobby, which was sleeping with the wives of his friends – but he swears he feels absolutely no guilt about that, and besides, he’d recognize the voice if it were one of them.  And, the nausea and phone calls stopped for no reason, while he still seduces friends’ wives.  The story ends with both of them wondering if the condition will return, and the friend saying, maybe it’ll hit you next.  You’re not exactly innocent.

The title plainly refers to the Sartre novel, and so maybe we’re supposed to read the nausea as a manifestation of existential anxiety – but the guy hardly seems angst-ridden.  And the details of his sex life certainly seem to point toward grief – at least, we’re supposed to suspect that.  But the guy rejects that out of hand.  We’re left wondering:  can someone live totally free of guilt? 

“HUNTING KNIFE” 12/84 (in BW, and Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round)

So the Dead Heat stories were mostly serialized in 1984, and really only two of that series have been translated, this and “Nausea 1979.”  “Lederhosen was written for the book version of Dead Heat in 1985.  “Crabs,” which shows up in BW, was essentially written for that book (first J. publication was the J. version of that collection), but it’s a drastic expansion and revision of a segment of one of the Dead Heat Stories, “Baseball Diamond.”  Still, I’ll treat it as a new story for 2003. 

In this one I and his wife are at a beach resort next to a US base;  it could be Okinawa or Hawaii.  Probably the latter, as all the other characters in the story are Americans.  But that could be Okinawa, too.  After some description of the beach and a brief encounter with an overweight former United stewardess, we zero in on I and his wife’s neighbors in the beach cottage, an American mother and her adult son.  The son’s in a wheelchair.  I sees them every day, but never speaks to either until the night before I checks out.  He wakes up in the middle of the night and takes a walk, and meets the son.  They have a conversation on the beach.  The son mentions that he just bought a fine hunting knife, and shows it to I.  Asks I to cut something with it.  I does, then kind of goes wild slashing it around.  The American tells him he dreams of a knife stabbing painlessly into his memory centers, and he can’t get it out, and then everything fades away but the knife, like a prehistoric bone on the beach.

I find this story almost haunting, but in the end I haven’t really found a way to connect with it.  Still, it’s a fine and evocative description of the beach scene – the Dead Heat stories for the most part impress with their casualness.  I think that’s what he was trying to go for with the nonfictional frame device.  Take away some of the expectation of profundity or dazzling surrealism.  They’re experimental in that sense – maybe trying to be like Raymond Carver, one of his favorites, who he had first translated in 1983.  Psychological explorations.  They don’t really get that deep, though.  I mean, not like “Firefly” or “Last Lawn of the Afternoon."

Murakami Haruki: A Wild Sheep Chase (1982)

My current reading of this book is an entirely political one.  It starts with an invocation of November 25, 1970, the day of Mishima’s death in a blaze, or a squib, of right-wing glory;  the I, though, barely registers this in the background of the day, so intent is he on getting laid, there in his disillusionment in the aftermath of the death of the student movement.  This is all by way of describing his relationship with a girl who, in the present moment of 1978, has just died;  so once again I’s story seems like it’s going to revolve around his college loves (although how this one fits in with the ones in the first two books is a bit unclear – timeline-wise he would have had to be hooking up with this girl just as he was getting hooked on pinball – unlikely – if you’re getting laid, why would you waste time on pinball?).  But:  this is the last we hear of her.  Instead, this whole prologue is there just to prime us to be thinking about the connection between post-Movement disillusionment and fascism. 

Now, dig what the sheep is after.  It’s only described in the vaguest way, but it’s always expressed in terms of a dissolution of self into something of great and impersonal glory – “consciousness, values, emotions, pain, everything. Gone” (Vol. 2, p. 204).  Not specifically a nationalist thing, but definitely in line with the strength-through-unity ideal at the heart of fascism – losing yourself in something greater than yourself.  Surrender.  And of course the way the sheep’s will has manifested itself in 20^th century Japan is right-wing politics, fascism, secret control of the levers of power both political and economic. 

Specifically, the sheep has been inhabiting/controlling/constituting a Sasakawa Ryōichi-type figure, a kuromaku at the head of a vast conspiracy that controls Japanese politics and business, and the very flow of information, and that has clear ties to prewar and wartime right-wing ideology.  Now the Boss is dying and the sheep has jumped to a new host, the Rat.  And the Boss’s secretary is trying to ensure that the Rat comes out of hiding and joins the organization – he’s the perfect person to be the new head.

Now think about that:  what makes him perfect?  We’ve never seen the Rat have particularly right-wing ideas before this.  In fact, he seems resolutely apolitical – disillusioned, we might well imagine, by the same things that disillusion I.  I and the Rat have always been kind of mirror images of each other, and in Pinball it was the Rat’s epic melancholy that, by association, helped us realize just how much pain and misery was lurking beneath the surface of I’s cool façade.  This, coupled with Rat’s confession at the end of this book, helps us see what set the Rat up to be a likely candidate for right-wing kuromaku.  He’s rich, but all his wealth has never bought him anything but the leisure to truly appreciate how meaningless life is.  He was probably inspired by the student movement in 1969, but as it collapsed he was left bitter and aimless, drinking his way through an endless succession of half-hearted affairs.  He thinks the answer lies within himself, so he tries to become a writer, and then embarks on a kind of journey of self-exploration, wandering from town to town.  But this doesn't make things any better.  He’s searching, but hasn’t found anything.  A perfect specimen of late ‘70s Boomer malaise in Japan. 

There’s one more factor:  the Rat talks about his weakness, his uncommon, abnormal, almost superhuman weakness.  But as I notes, we’re all weak.  The Rat maintains that he was uniquely susceptible to the sheep, but maybe I is not so sure.

In short, I think what Murakami’s doing here is saying that the ennui he detailed so perfectly in his first two books has a sinister potential:  it leaves his generation open to the temptations presented by fascism.  The Rat is tempted.  Is I tempted?  No, but maybe just because he’s lucky:  he and the Rat are a lot alike.  And in the end if I doesn’t quite share the Rat’s weakness, still he may be close enough. 

What leads the Rat to heroism, to rejecting the sheep and ensuring its destruction?  His attachment to his weakness:  his attachment to his own atomized oversensitive self.  And that, by implication, is something that I has embraced all along.  He’s never been happy, but he’s always been extremely determined to live by his own code, to guard his own pleasures.  Maybe he is strong.  And maybe, in that way, he’s suggesting that desire, while perhaps something that can blind us and let us play into the hands of the conspirators, can also be a site of resistance to their blandishments.  He is resolute in his refusal to be folded into something larger than himself, and while that’s ego, it might also be wisdom. 

It’s a very political book, I think.  Contrary to what certain of Murakami's early critics thought in the ‘80s when they were dismissing him as a non-thinking novelist. 

Other things I noticed this time through that I couldn’t have before. 

The end is a gloss on (the book version) of The Shining.  Isolated mountain house (not hotel), where the hero is faced with the prospect of being snowed in all winter with ghosts.  Evil spirit lurking there (for decades), trying to possess just the right visitor.  Blowing up the house being the only way to definitively kill the evil. 

The first half is more hardboiled than the second half:  the Raymond Chandlerisms drop off once we get to Hokkaido.  Interesting in light of what Rubin reveals about (a) the way Murakami made the book up as he went along, and (b) the way his research trip to Hokkaido resulted in his embrace of a healthier lifestyle. 

The fact that the surreal turn here is new in the novel series, and clearly the result of experiments in the intervening short stories. 

The suggestion that the ex-wife here is the secretary from Pinball. 

The difficulties in fitting all the 1969-1970 details from the three books together.  Clearly they’re meant to be about the same people, but it might be forcing it to try to make a single coherent narrative out of them.  Maybe the details don’t quite square.  If so, then my reading of Pinball might be on shaky ground.

Still, as a single narrative it really does take on great symbolic power as a portrait of a generation, seen through the eyes of a defiant individualist.  It’s hard to argue that this isn’t Murakami’s epic.  

Murakami Haruki: Stories 1980-1982

(Read the first post in this series for an explanation of why I'm writing about the stories in this order and format.)

“SLOW BOAT TO CHINA”  4/1980 (in The Elephant Vanishes, and Slow Boat to China)

Memories of three Chinese people he’s met in his life at various times.  One was a teacher at a Chinese school he went to for a test once, one was a girl he worked a part-time job with in college, and the other was a high school acquaintance he ran into in a coffee shop once recently.  Recounting these three incidents in a desultory fashion, the narrator concludes with a meditation on China as an unknowable thing for him, an entirely imaginary land.  It’s implied that it’s partly so because he failed to learn anything significant about China from these three Chinese, but that’s plainly because he knows that they were individuals, not representatives of their race, and so whatever secret unknowable lives they had were theirs alone, and not instructive about any larger entity called China.  Chinese are people, same as anybody else, and that means that “China,” as talked about in books, as represented to the mind, is nothing but an abstraction.  A dream.

It’s a great story, and amazing that it’s his first short story.  Each of the three scenes is depicted with amazing vividity and sensitivity, and in addition to contributing to the theme each has its own subtle character and moments of humanity.  Like the second one, about the girl:  the college-aged I was sort of interested in her, but accidentally disses her twice, and is never able to find her again.  Left unsaid is her suspicion that he’s mistreating her because of race, and his desire to make it plain that he isn’t;  his failure in the end is not just to win the girl, but to show that he’s not racist.

Murakami shows himself here to be a great humanist and a great anti-essentialist in matters of culture.  A must-read.

A “POOR AUNT” STORY 12/80 (in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, and Slow Boat to China)

Narrator and his companion are in a park on a summer’s day, and the phrase “poor aunt” occurs to him.  He’s a writer, and he considers writing a story about one.  Next thing he knows, he’s got a poor aunt attached to his back.  She appears as someone different to everybody, and he can’t see her at all.  It makes him a minor celebrity, but his friends get creeped out.  Finally one day on the train he sees a girl scolded by her mom, pities her, and the aunt disappears.  He phones his companion, but she’s too tired to talk.

And so we get our first dose of Murakami’s patented surrealism.  Previous stories have had weird moments, but nothing actually impossible;  but the poor aunt here is plainly a bit of magic.  Allegory?  Symbol?  Or conceptual sign, as he puts it in the story?  I lean toward the latter, because as the narrator explains it, that leaves room for reader interpretation.  Signs, at least in this conception, and I don’t know how semiotically sound this is but symbolically it’s solid, mean at least partly what the receiver thinks they mean.  All the things people think the poor aunt are, are related, all varieties of sad-sackness, suggesting that there’s a kernel of unified truth stuck to the narrator’s back – but they’re also all different, suggesting that the final manifestation of the poor aunt really isn’t under his control.

It’s a story about the fiction writer’s art, I think:  the narrator admits he’s a writer, and while he doesn’t say that writing the story is part of the exorcism of the aunt, the title sort of suggests that.  In any case, if it’s about the fiction writer’s art, it suggests that Murakami sees himself working in symbols in perhaps the Yeatsian sense, archetypes really that mean whatever all his readers think they mean and more – rather than in allegories, or whatever you want to call the kind of readily-decipherable symbolism that creates fixed Meaning.  He’s denying that here – he’s even denying fixed identity, fixed consciousness – once the poor aunt is gone he feels like he’s not the same person anymore, just a copy or echo of his original self. 

But if it’s a story about the fiction writer’s art, then I think it’s also about the part empathy plays in that art:  what he produces may have no fixed meaning, but he produces it by careful observation of, and more importantly emotional understanding of, or at least empathy with, reality.  There’s an emotional truth to his description of poor aunts that resonates with the reader, and that also helps explain why everybody who meets the narrator can see their own version of the poor aunt.  The writer may be dealing in surreal abstractions, but he’s also dealing in lived and felt experience.

NEW YORK MINING DISASTER 3/81 (in BW, and Slow Boat to China)

For some reason, Phil Gabriel cut the Bee Gees quote that starts the story…

This one is in three parts.  Narrator describes his friend, who likes to go to zoos when there’s a typhoon to watch how the animals react.  Then he notes that the friend has a great suit for funerals, and this year the narrator has had occasion to borrow it fives times.  Reflections on premature death.  Then at New Year’s narrator goes to a party and meets a woman who says he looks just like someone she knew who died five years ago – she killed him, she says.  But she’s not morally or legally responsible.  We don’t know if she’s joking or not.  Then, as a coda, we get a scene of miners trapped underground, trying not to breathe, wondering if rescuers are coming or if they’ve given up already.

It’s impressionistic, above all.  The crazy friend who changes girlfriends every six months like clockwork, the mysterious woman at the party, and the dramatization of a scene from a Bee Gees song.  It’s moody, thoughts on death that don’t really go anywhere but might be poignant just the same. 

By this point Murakami’s already perfected his short-story art, I think.  It’s a minor story, I think, but still memorable and moving and somehow perfectly poised. 

Has elements that he’ll reuse, too.  The friend, to stave off depression and keep himself from thinking too much at night, cleans and irons.  Perfectionism in quotidian tasks as a way to assert control over a chaotic world.  The Murakami cool takes on another of its characteristic details.

THE YEAR OF SPAGHETTI 5/81 (BW, A Perfect Day for Kangaroos)

The first three were in Slow Boat to China, and that was a collection of standalone stories, each one fairly substantial.  This is part of A Perfect Day for Kangaroos, which is a collection of stories that partly cover the same period as Slow Boat, but appeared at regular intervals in the same magazine.  A series, in other words.  And he published them together in book form, although he changed the order.  Anyway, they’re shorter, and if this is an indication, they’re uniformly of a different tone.

This one talks about a spaghetti-making phase the I went through in 1971, when presumably he was a college student.  Every day for a year he made spaghetti and ate it – alone.  All kinds of spaghetti – and as he describes it, we’re in what we’ll soon realize is typical Murakami culinary heaven.  Or so we think.  But then we get to the second half of the story, describing one day when he’s lying alone on his back on the floor, and a girl calls, trying to get in touch with her ex-boyfriend, both of whom are friends of I’s, and he doesn’t want to get involved, so he says he’s busy cooking spaghetti and can’t talk.  After, he ends with the admission that he spent that year cooking spaghetti so he didn’t have to get involved with anyone.  Spaghetti was really loneliness.

So it’s an obvious story – he comes right out at the end and says what he means.  But that doesn’t mean it’s unpleasant.  The directness is refreshing, and of course the fact that he’s presenting loneliness as a desirable commodity is counterintuitive – he’s presenting us with a young man cultivating his alienation.  For whatever reason.

Anyway, it’s polished and very readable, light but not featherweight.  A different kind of thing.

ON SEEING THE 100% PERFECT GIRL ONE BEAUTIFUL APRIL MORNING 5/81 (EV, A Perfect Day…)

Yeah, they’re short and direct.

One morning in April 1981, I sees the perfect girl  Walks right on past her, not knowing what to say.  Later, he figures out what he should have said.  Should have told her a story.  And then he gives her the story. A fairy tale about two young lovers, 100% perfect for each other, who decide to test their fatedness by parting.  While parted they get sick and lose their memories.  Later they pass each other in the street, and feel the impulse that they’re 100% perfect for each other, but age (they’re now 32 and 30) has dulled their memories and their thoughts, and they pass on by.  A sad story.

Here is where Murakami outs himself as one of the great romantics, as well as the existentialist we already know him as.  This is what completes his cool, I think.  The knowledge that underneath that hard exterior there’s a classic wounded romantic. 

An important one. And beautiful.

DABCHICK 9/81 (BW, A Perfect Day for Kangaroos)

I is wandering through a seemingly endless set of hallways, dank and dim, looking for a door.  He’s here for a job – he’s desperate to break out of his poverty.  Finds a door, the doorman says he can’t let him through without the password.  Guy begs for a hint.  Something with eight letters, fits in your hand, starts with D, has to do with water, but you can’t eat it.  The guy’s guess is “dabchick.”  The doorman says no, but they argue about it, and I finally bullshits the dorman into telling the boss he’s here.  Cut to the boss – who is a dabchick, sitting in his CEO chair thinking about his death.  The doorman comes in, says the guy knows the password.  Dabchick growls, he’s late.

Trick ending. No explicit moral, but a clear lesson to be persistent.  It’s like a Kafka story with a happy ending.  As vivid and funny and strange and existentially resonant as a Kafka story, too.  Kafka goes pop.

A PERFECT DAY FOR KANGAROOS 10/81 (BW, A Perfect Day for Kangaroos)

I and his girl read in the paper about a baby kangaroo born at the zoo.  Finally, a month later, they get time to go – a perfect day for it.  They go and see the baby kangaroo, the mother, the father.  Finally what the girl wanted to see – the baby in the pouch.  Mother and child in perfect unity, father looking lost and useless, and another female hopping around mysteriously.  I and girl go off for a beer.  It’s going to be a hot day

An uneventful story that hints at some gender-essentialist depths.  Is the couple contemplating marriage and/or starting a family?  Trying to avoid contemplating it?  At the end are they avoiding the issue, or about to talk about it?  The slight sexist tone of the narrator – “I’ve never once won an argument with a girl” – fits the final vision of gender roles.  Useless dads, mother-and-child divine harmony.  But what’s with the mysterious extra female?  Is that what the narrator’s girl is afraid she’s going to turn into?  Is this about a woman feeling her biological clock ticking, and a guy being studiously oblivious?

THE KANGAROO COMMUNIQUÉ 10/81 (EV, Slow Boat to China)

I bet if you looked you’d find that a baby kangaroo was born in the summer or or early fall of 1981 in one of the zoos around Tokyo.  This story takes place two months after the birth, so one month after “A Perfect Day for Kangaroos,” and it was published at the same time.  Fun.

This one’s a little more involved.  It takes the form of a letter dictated into a tape player, from a guy who works in the complaints department of a department store to a woman who wrote a letter of complaint.  Something about her letter struck him as ineffably perfect, and he wanted to reach out to her.  Inspired by seeing the baby kangaroo at the zoo – the same foursome as in the other story – he decided to write to her, or actually to dictate this letter.  But it’s not quite love, not quite lust, that he’s trying to satisfy.  It’s something more inchoate, a dissatisfaction with himself, but not self-loathing – a dissatisfaction with being himself, with being any individual.  He wants to transcend, somehow, although he doesn’t put it in spiritual terms.

Part of the fun of the story is in how unable the guy is to express what he wants – how often he contradicts himself, and how long it takes for him to get around to explaining what he’s doing.  It’s not until halfway through that we even realize we’re not reading a letter, but “listening” to a “tape.”  It’s something of a shaggy dog story in that, I think:  I’m less struck by where we’re being taken than by the weird journey that takes us there.  It’s an experiment in narrative voice, in ventriloquistic performance.  This narrative I is a little different than the others.

THE 1963/1982 GIRL FROM IPANEMA 4/82 (in Jay Rubin's Murakami bio The Music of Words, and A Perfect Day for Kangaroos)

“The Girl from Ipanema” brings back memories of high school in 1963, and a girl he used to talk to then over salads for lunch.  But in the story the narrator also encounters a vision of the Girl from Ipanema herself.  Her reality is, she confesses, only metaphysical, but she hasn’t aged a day, and he says he met her once, in 1963.  She allows it’s possible.  They share a beer on the beach.  She exhorts him to “live! live!” and takes off.  The story ends with I thinking about nostalgia and the way things like this seem to be “the link joining me with myself.”  If he can get to that place, “I am myself and myself is me.  Subject is object and object is subject.  All gaps gone.  A perfect union.”

This builds on “The Kangaroo Communiqué” more than on anything in A Perfect Day for Kangaroos.  It’s a vision of perfect dissolution of the self into a larger transcendence that may be only a deeper version of the self, but that still offers the absolution of ego dissolution.  The end of modern anomie, of the atomized subject.

And in true Murakami fashion it’s a pop-jazz song from 1963 that brings him there, or gives him the vision of where he wants to go.  Murakami is, at heart, an aesthetic writer – he creates worlds of beauty, in the faith that in that beauty, in the honest depiction of that beauty, there can be truth.  He holds out no hope of a religious transcendence, of absolute meaning in life, but he does hold that life contains pleasures, physical and emotional, and that these have a worth of their own.  And, at least in the early days, he’s content to take these pleasures where he can find them:  if it’s “The Girl from Ipanema” that does it for him, he’ll let it.

A WINDOW 5/82 (EV, A Perfect Day for Kangaroos)

The original Japanese title would translate to “Do You Like Burt Bacharach,” or possibly (since it’s meant to echo the title of the Francoise Sagan novel mentioned in the story) “Aimez-vous Burt Bacharach?”  Which, the Wikipedia says, is about an older woman-younger man relationship like that contemplated in the closing passage of this work.  Cute.

It starts out as another letter, hilariously precious.  Then we learn that the I is quoting from a letter he wrote while he was working a part-time job in college as a letter critiquer for a society that would teach you how to write better letters.  But under the surface it was actually a lonely-hearts club:  the critiquers were all of the opposite sex to the correspondents whose work they were critiquing. 

When he quits, he gets together once for lunch with one of the women, a middle-aged married woman, a lonely housewife type.  They listen to a Burt Bacharach record in her apartment and she cooks for him.  The story ends with I asking if he should have slept with her.  He just doesn’t know. 

It’s a great little story.  Mildly erotic, funny, melancholy.  And a great dig at whatever critics he might have had in 1982 when he defends liking Francoise Sagan:  “There’s no law requiring everybody to write novels like Henry Miller or Jean Genet.” 

Murakami Haruki: Pinball 1973 (1980)

The first of Murakami’s bifurcated narratives.  The book alternates irregularly between chapters narrated by “I” (the same “I” as in Hear the Wind Sing), and chapters concerning the Rat, narrated in the third person.  The twain never meet, which distinguishes this book from Hard-Boiled Wonderland, Kafka, and 1Q84, the other major bifurcated narratives in Murakami’s ouevre. 

This is a continuation of the previous book.  The year is (as the title tells us) 1973, and 24-year-old I and 25-year-old Rat are facing their respective early mid-life crises.  Otherwise known as Growing Up.  If Hear the Wind Sing was a kind of seishun (coming-of-age) novel, focusing on love and loss, with an undercurrent of enunciating the meaninglessness of life, this one is a coming-of-age novel where the action is about coming to terms with the meaninglessness of life, with a subtext of love and loss, mostly loss.  In other words, it’s kind of a reversal of the first book.

That is:  “I” is comfortably ensconced in a career and a homelife.  He’s co-owner of a freelance translation business, and he’s doing alright at it;  and at home, he’s living with nubile, nymphomaniac twins.  Twins!  He’s got it made, but feels a tremendous sense of ennui.  He’s emotionally uninvested in the relationship with the twins, who just drifted into his life, and at the end drift out just as mysteriously.  His work, meanwhile – well, twice he protests that he’s never once considered the question of whether or not he enjoys it.  That’s how uninvested he is in it.

It’s the anomie of modern life that’s getting him down.  But I think it’s more than just that, but to get at that you kind of have to read it against the first book.  Early in this one he includes a few flashbacks/ruminations (in what is otherwise a book that moves mostly straight ahead in time) about a girlfriend he’d had in 1969 or 1970 named Naoko who died.  We get almost no details of that relationship or its end;  instead we move on to an account of how, at the end of that year, he’d gotten hooked on pinball.  In the present, of course, this leads to the famous Pinball Quest, where he tracks down the actual machine he’d played back in 1970, and communes with it in a deep dark deathly cold warehouse.

I've always thought that this encounter with the Spaceship is partly an encounter with an image of a dream of life that American culture had offered him in his youth, and I still think that.  But I think there’s also some submerged grief-therapy here, left unenunciated in this book.  In Hear the Wind Sing we know, by the end, that the narrator is coming off a relationship with a girl who killed herself without warning the spring before.  That’s the summer of 1970, and a lot of the narrator’s ennui that summer had to be due to her death.  The pinball addiction comes at the end of 1970, and that’s the period that the narrator flashes back to in 1973:  I think we can surmise that the pinball addiction was a way of dealing with, or escaping, his grief (when he got back to Tokyo, scene of his affair with the now-named Naoko).  But when the game center closed down his coping mechanism abruptly disappeared.  It was like a junkie going cold turkey.  And now, three years later, he’s realizing that, in spite of having moved on in his life, he needs that fix again, needs to commune with whatever it was that he was in touch with then.  His climactic encounter with the machine is narrated almost as if it’s an encounter with the ghost of Naoko, isn’t it?  The very last scene of the book, where he’s sitting in the clear autumn light, suggests that maybe, just maybe, by burrowing down into his old grief, he’s found some peace.  Tentatively. 

So “I”’s story here is about coping with grief, recovering lost dreams, staying in touch with joys that are joyful precisely because they’re pointless.  It’s about the value of escapism, the emotional truth of anything that will help you become mindless.

But it’s all told in the same hardboiled, humorous manner as Hear the Wind Sing.  The twins are, among other things, a really funny plot device.  Like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum in drag.  But they also underscore the narrator’s lost state.  Like, they’re any man’s wet dream, and this guy’s barely moved.

The Rat’s story, meanwhile, is where Murakami gets, as they say in Japanese, wet.  All the melancholy that “I” suppresses comes out here.  The Rat is left all alone in the Town with J, and spends a lot of time drinking in J’s Bar.  He has a desultory affair with a woman who lives by the harbor.  And in the end he decides to blow town.  That’s pretty much all that happens in this half of the story, but it’s immensely affecting.  Like a deeply sad jazz tune.  It’s like Sonny Rollins’s “Body and Soul,” a totally unaccompanied tour through intense emotion, letting it all hang out.  A meditation on melancholy – on a melancholy that, in the Rat’s case, is entirely caused by an indecision in the face of an inescapable sense of the meaninglessness of life.  He’s wallowing in it, while “I” is dealing with it, in his own special way.

That’s the tension that drives this book.

Murakami Haruki: Hear the Wind Sing (1979)

His first book, and still unavailable in English outside of Japan.  Although you can find it if you look.

I’ve always liked this and the sequel a whole lot;  I’ve always ranked them up near the best of his work.  It didn’t let me down this time.  It’s about as accomplished and moving a debut work as I’ve ever encountered.

Now that I’ve read a lot more J-lit, the games he plays with the time structure in this book don’t strike me as out of line with the mainstream, although they’re still fresh from a Western perspective.  He jumps back and forth from a present where the narrator’s about 30 to a past where the narrator is 21, to various points before that ranging from childhood to months before the 21-year-old present.  Most of the scenes take place in August of 1970, though:  the narrator hangs around with his drinking buddy the Rat, meets a girl, almost has a romance with her, visits J’s Bar a lot, and thinks back on past girlfriends and/or traumas.  In the 1979 present he ruminates on the meaning of writing, the meaninglessness of existence and the poignancy of that, and adds childhood anecdotes about taciturnity and loquacity.  All of this is fractured and confused, and interspersed with other passages that take a while to figure out (a DJ’s patter is introduced without explanation, for example).  Again, it’s not so unusual in J-lit – but it’s tremendously effective, all the same. 

It’s a novella (A-Prize-bait length, truth be told), but it’s amazingly packed.  The 1970 scenes function as a seishun novel, sure enough – the fleetingness of summer, sunsets and torrid love affairs, beer and Beach Boys records.  But the love affair is unconsummated (this is about the most delicate evocation of blue balls you’ll ever read), and so’s the Beach Boys record for that matter.  It’s about missed connections, as well as broken ones;  unfulfilled desire, rather than fulfilled.  “You can’t miss what you never had,” Muddy Waters sang;  but Murakami knows otherwise.

The 1979 frame only deepens the story.  Poetry is, Wordsworth sang, emotion recollected in tranquility, and the 1979 frame is all about finding, at long last, the voice to recollect 1970’s emotion in public.  It’s a lot of navel-gazing, frankly, talking about the narrator’s childhood inability to speak, then his rush of speech;  and then of course there’s the Derek Heartfield bit.  This is of course an homage to Kurt Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout:  a hack sci-fi writer, forgotten by everybody, but known by the narrator, in a sort of gnostic transmission, to have possessed the keys to knowledge and to communication of it.  Murakami is modestly shrugging off literary ambition here, while at the same time setting himself very high aims indeed:  to speak truth, in a new way.  (And a measure of his art is how he carefully and subtly ties this ambition, this theme of learning how to write, to the 1970 story as well, by having the Rat undergo a literary awakening and decide to try to write a novel.  We think the “I” of 1979 is the “I” of 1970, but what if it’s actually the Rat?)

What is that truth?  It’s pretty simple:  life is meaningless.  All you can do is do what you must do, and you do it well, as Bob Dylan sang;  Voltaire sang it, too.  It’s not an earthshaking truth (although it is, really), certainly not a new one;  and as such it’s not really the most remarkable thing about the book.  Although, if you’re still into such things as thinking about truth, as most of us tend to be at age 21, it can make a big impact on you anyway.  As well it should.

What’s more remarkable about the book is that, even though he comes right out and states this meaning, or something like it, several times, he also effectively demonstrates it, through the narrator.  It’s the voice of the narrator, of course – the narrative persona – that’s so alluring about this book.  His famous “cool,” which involves dismissing its very coolness as a debility, starts here.  Is it a disaffection?  Ennui?  Only to the unperceptive.  There are plenty of hints that the controlled exterior hides an interior full of grief – the narrator is still getting over the unexpected suicide of his girlfriend the spring before – he’s wallowing, but it takes us most of the book to realize it, because he’s so mild-mannered about it.  So matter-of-fact about it.  So determined to know that this kind of bewilderness of pain is the way of the world, not something he can blame on anybody. 

It’s also a very funny book – Murakami has great comic timing, a fantastic ear for dialogue and a classic Hollywood eye for mise-en-scene.  (And Alfred Birnbaum is a great translator.)  It’s just satisfying in so many ways…

It’s good to be back.

Introduction to a series of posts on Murakami Haruki

I've spent the last month rereading all of Murakami Haruki in English in preparation for a course I'll be teaching in the fall.  Now, Murakami Haruki is one of my top two or three favorite writers, and somebody I've been reading loyally for exactly twenty years now, both in Japanese and in translation.  But it just so happens that I haven't been reading him during the last few years since I started this here blog.  Frankly, after Kafka on the Shore I needed a little time apart from Mr. Murakami;  I read his next two (After Dark and Strange Tales from Tokyo), but never got around to 1Q84 until this summer.  And this is why I haven't blogged about him before.  But this time through his (English) oeuvre, I've been making fairly extensive notes, and now I'm going to post them.

Caveat:  As I say, I've been reading Murakami in both Japanese and English for a long time now, but since the class I'm teaching will be relying on translations I wanted to give the translated corpus a concentrated read-through.  That's the basis for the posts that follow.  Accordingly, I won't, with a very few exceptions, be commenting on how the translations differ from the originals.  There's a lot to say on this subject, both on micro level (the stylistic choices of his three English-language translators) and the macro level (the way some of his translated work is also, and without any indication, significantly abridged).  But I won't be saying it here, for the most part.  I will say, with reference to the micro level, that Murakami's writing is of a nature that works better in translation than that of some other writers - i.e., it depends more on plot and imagery than on rhetoric, and what rhetoric it does employ tends to lend itself well to an English rendering - and that on balance Murakami has been exceedingly well served by his three English translators (Alfred Birnbaum, Jay Rubin, and Philip Gabriel).  That's my honest opinion.

Caveat, pt. 2:  Okay, I lied.  There's one point about Murakami's presentation in English that I'm going to be a little particular about, and that's the order and context in which his short stories have been presented.  In Japan, Murakami's short stories appear in a number of smaller collections (usually 6-12 stories);  if you read these in order in Japanese you're more or less getting his short stories in chronological order.  You'd still have to pay attention to the dates in which they were published in magazines, because with a couple of the collections there's some chronological overlap, but by and large, since these things are still in print, they make it easy to track his development in the short story form, and to see where his stories fit into his full-length novel chronology.  In English the best (arguably) of his short stories have been presented in two big anthologies, The Elephant Vanishes (hereinafter EV) and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (hereinafter BW), where they're presented with no indication as to the order in which the stories were written or published, or even what Japanese collection they're taken from.  I can understand why they were presented in big anthologies in English (although I don't understand why the publisher doesn't include the original dates), and EV and BW each has a certain internal consistency that makes them appealing.  But for this project I wanted to read the short stories in order, too, and so that's what I did.  I note after each one the month and year of original (magazine) publication, as well as the English and original Japanese collections it's found in.

Thus, if you read these posts in order, starting with this one, you'll get my humble-yet-arrogant take on Murakami's (almost) Complete Works in English in Chronological Order.

Yoshimoto Banana: Kanashii yokan (1988)

Kanashii yokan 哀しい予感:  A full-length novel written expressly for book publication, her first.  And the last of her five Banana-boom volumes of fiction that I’ve read.  It was published in book form in December, 1988.  I read the Kadokawa paperback, published in 1991;  it says it contains revisions to the original hardback text of an unspecified nature and extent.  Supposedly they’re pretty extensive.

It starts out sort of gothic, describing a dilapidated, overgrown, big old house and the strange spinster aunt who lives there.  The narrator is Yayoi, a college aged girl, and the aunt is Yukino, about ten or so years older than Yayoi.  The aunt is a school music teacher, outwardly prim but a real slob when she gets home;  nobody in the family really seems to get her but Yayoi, who has a habit of running away from home every now and then to stay with Yukino, which is what she’s done as the story begins.

Oh, yeah, and Yayoi has no memories of her childhood, but she had a ghostly encounter a few months before the story starts that triggered the beginning of the return of her memories, and among them is the realization that as a child she used to have some kind of clairvoyance.

All the makings of a good horror story, in fact, and there’s some creepiness crawling over the first few pages.  But soon enough the story takes a turn for the romantic, and the rest of the book is what readers by now would have begun to recognize as Standard Issue Banana. 

The aunt disappears, and Yayoi chases her first to Karuizawa and then to Aomori.  In the process she makes a lot of discoveries about her life and her family, chief among which is that Yukino’s not her aunt, but her sister.  Yukino and Yayoi were orphaned when Yayoi was a small girl, in a car crash from which the girls barely escaped, and they were taken in by friends of the family, the people who Yayoi now calls Mother and Father.  Yukino was old enough to insist on living alone in a house the new family’s grandfather gave her (no money problems in this world), and so they called her an aunt.  Now Yayoi discovers the truth, which explains why she’s always felt so close to Yukino.

She discovers the truth just in time, too, because she’s realizing she has a crush on her “brother,” Tetsuo, who’s a couple of years younger than her.  Turns out he’s known for a while that they’re not related, and by the end of the book he’s reciprocating Yayoi’s feelings, although they decide to keep it cool for a while so as not to freak out their parents.

Like I say, the gothic atmosphere pretty much disappears by about a quarter of the way into the book.  For example, there’s no resentment between Yayoi and her adoptive parents as one might expect in a darker version of this scenario;  instead, they’re all happy, like a family in a Spielberg movie, she says.  In fact, there’s really not much conflict at all in the story;  instead there’s just a gentle and safe period in which the narrator learns about her traumatized background in a non-traumatic way, and falls in love into the bargain.  Even the aunt’s disappearance turns out merely to be the result of a need for a little time alone to confront her own memories – no foul play, no monsters under the bed.

Standard Issue Banana.  Reasonably well done, though.  Certainly lays out some themes that the author would explore more purposefully in future books – memory loss, near-miss-incest, the subversion of horror-story motifs.