Walter Mosley: Cinnamon Kiss (2005)

It's 1966.  Easy's a licensed PI now.  He's got uneasy but real relationships with members of the LAPD, and with a white PI.  California's got hippies now.  Easy goes to San Francisco, to Berkeley, and meets some. 

Easy Rawlins is getting old now.  We're getting into times that his creator (b. 1952) would remember for himself, and meeting characters - including the book's eponymous femme fatale - who are almost young enough to have been people Mosley knew.  But Mosley stays true to his protagonist's perspective.

Take this encounter (p. 86 of my copy).  Easy's in a Haight legal-aid center, and in the waiting room with him is a woman who speaks "in a white Texan drawl I knew and feared."  But he helps her with her unruly child.

"Thank you, mister.  Thank you," the mother was saying.  She had lifted her bulk from the lawyer's folding chair and was now taking the grinning boy from my arms.  I could see in his face that he wasn't what other Texans would call a white child.

The woman smiled at me and patted my forearm.

"Thank you, she said again.

Her looking into my eyes with such deep gratitude was to be the defining moment in my hippie experience.  Her gaze held no fear or condescension, even though her accent meant that she had to have been raised among a people who held themselves apart from mine.  She didn't want to give me a tip but only to touch me.

I knew that if I had been twenty years younger, I would have been a hippie too.

Easy never lets us forget that prior to being an Angeleno he was and is a Texan, and his understanding of the world and his place in it is conditioned by his Houston experiences as much as his Californian.  So there's a special familiarity whenever he encounters a fellow transplanted black Texan, and a heightened tension whenever he encounters a transplanted white Texan.  It's happened before in the series.  Texans, Louisianans - Easy's LA is full of them.

That's what lends this encounter with a nonprejudiced white Texan woman such power - he's steeled himself for hostility, but encounters only acceptance.  These later books are full of encounters with white people that don't go as Easy had expected - some go worse, but some go better, like this one. 

But here's what I mean by Mosley being true to Easy's perspective.  The book's eponymous femme fatale is young, black, and well educated, and seems to have more confidence in the white world's acceptance of her than Easy does.  And so, perhaps, she appreciates it less - and I don't mean "appreciate" in the sense of feeling gratitude, but in the sense of understanding its significance.  Easy fully appreciates how revolutionary it is that this young white Texan mother - of a mixed-race child (like, we know, Easy's own daughter) - greets him with simple human warmth.  And it's that, rather than the romance of rebellion or spiritual abstractions or the pleasures of turning on, that he sees as the hippie movement's main promise. 

And notice the reticence that comes with age.  He would have been a hippie if he was younger.  Meaning, because he's older, he won't be.  Partly because, obviously, he's got a family and responsibilities he can't just drop out on (everything in this book, in fact, is driven by his urgent family responsibilities - he's got a sick daughter and has to raise money for her treatment). 

But also, one suspects, because he's wary enough not to jump into anything.  A young man might take this one encounter as indicative of a whole scene, but he can't.  And, indeed, in the following book Easy encounters a guy who to all outward appearances is a hippie but who treats him with all the surliness and violence of any redneck ever.  People change, but not all of them, and not all at once, in these books.

Walter Mosley: Little Scarlet (2004)

This one takes place as the 1965 Watts riots are winding down, and of course Easy's in the thick of them. His office - which he'd just obtained at the end of the last book - is nearly burned out from under him, and everywhere he goes he sees the traces of the violence, or feels them.

And it's how he feels about this, how he experiences it, that's so interesting about this book.  The case itself is suspenseful enough...and now I realize how little I've said about the actual cases Easy Rawlins solves.  Which is not because they're not enjoyable.  They are.  There's suspense, there's atmosphere, there's action, there's memorable character after memorable character - a panoply of black Los Angeleno life that never ceases to amaze in its variety and specificity.  But it's true that the real joy of the series for me isn't in the mysteries but in the worldview that those mysteries are there to help develop.  At their best, the Easy Rawlins books display a careful synergy between story and theme, where the details of the cases serve to advance or embody the larger ideas at work.

This is one of the best, and this case does that.  Easy is enlisted by the (white) LA police force to catch the white man who they think killed a black woman in Watts during the riots.  They put Easy on the case rather than sending in police detectives because they want to keep the whole crime covered up for fear that it might reignite the riots.  So Easy's investigative work brings him face to face with the causes and effects of the riots, and the fact that the white cops are asking him to track down a white killer of a black woman puts him at the heart of the race relations that the riots were all about.  And if you suspect, even from this meager description, that there's a cruel irony waiting at the end of this investigation, you'd be right.

Because for Easy, the central truth of the riots is that they turn the normal order upside down.  They contained violence, and Easy already suspects that materially they're not going to make things any better for the black citizens of Watts, but they represent for him, in the moment, the forceful claiming of a space for black self-expression.  Easy didn't riot - he says he sat at home "holding myself in check."  But now that he has to go out and function in the world created by the riots he finds that he's able to - he has to - go places he's never been able to go before, say things he's never said before to people he's never said them to before.  It's a brave new world, full of new perils but also promise.  And that's not something you'd get from most noirs.

Walter Mosley: Six Easy Pieces (2003)

This actually contains seven stories, not six, so the title is a misnomer...or is it?  Actually, I'm going to say it is, and I don't understand quite why it's there.  Yeah, I know that six is the next number after five, and the title is a reference to the film Five Easy Pieces (with Easy taking on a double meaning here, of course).  And the first six stories in the volume were excerpted in simultaneous reprints of the first six Easy Rawlins books.  So was Mosley actually only planning to write six, but then added a seventh for the book, but it was too late to change the title?  I dunno.

So these middle books - A Little Yellow Dog through Six Easy Pieces - in the Easy Rawlins series form an interesting cluster.  In Dog, Easy has settled into a job as a junior high custodian.  That it's beneath a man of his talents and accomplishments goes without saying, but he turns out to be good at it - this is his Candide period, when doing what he can to protect and cultivate young minds is its own reward.  And it provides good stable cover for his unofficial private eyeing, not to mention his under-the-table landlording.  He's got two adopted kids now, and by the end of the book he's in a committed relationship, a common-law marriage, with a sexy Caribbean stewardess named Bonnie.

Domestic bliss is what Easy has now.  Security.  Even a certain measure of prosperity.  But is it a false sense of security?  After all, Easy's still black in a racist city, and he's still an unlicensed p.i., constantly in danger of being sucked into the criminal shadows.  Plus, he's been here before.  Earlier in the series we saw him married, we saw him owning a house, we saw him playing stand-up citizen, and it didn't last.  We can't help but wonder, all through these middle books, if this is a false sense of security, if problems universal or particular are going to take it all away.  It's bliss, but it's precarious.  That's in the background of these middle books.

In the foreground is Easy's relationship to Mouse.  As we've realized by now, Mouse is Mosley's take on the Staggerlee archetype:  he's a badass motherfucker who'll shoot a man over a Stetson hat easy.  In the early books of the series, Mouse isn't much more than Easy's ace in the hole, or his chickens come home to roost.  But in these middle books Mosley explores Mouse's more mythical dimensions, and more importantly what he means to Easy.  What it means for Easy to have a man like Mouse on his side, and then not to have him on his side.

Mouse is, of course, a great destabilizing factor in Easy's life.  "Just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in" - and here, as often as not, they's Mouse.  And so as we see Easy blissing out with Bonnie and the kids, puttering around Sojourner Truth Junior High, we like he come to dread Mouse showing up.  So it's kind of a relief when Mouse dies. 

But in his absence, as we discover in Bad Boy Brawly Brown, Easy is forced to confront the fact that it's only been Mouse's shadow over his shoulder that has kept him alive all these years.  That continues in the first stories in Six Easy Pieces.  The idea is that a man like Easy - a black Everyman - couldn't possibly have survived the Jim Crow years without someone like Mouse.  Staggerlee was necessary.  And so in Brawly, Easy finds himself hearing Mouse's voice - he finds that he's internalized Staggerlee.  And that of course forces him to realize that he's conscioned Mouse's violence far more than he'd ever intended.  It's a powerful idea.

Six Easy Pieces was mostly, I think, written concurrently with Brawly - it had to have been, judging by the publication dates.  That might explain why, although it mostly seems to take place after that book, Easy's relationship with the Mouse in his head doesn't have quite the intensity it does in that book.  Gone are the internal debates.  Mouse is no longer the devil sitting on Easy's shoulder.  Instead he's the ghost that haunts black LA - rumors are spreading that Mouse is still alive, and Easy finds he can use those rumors almost as effectively as he could use the real live Mouse. 

All of this plus the serious, non-mystery mythmaking of Gone Fishin', contributes mightily to investing Mouse with some serious subtextual mojo.  And so when he reappears late in this volume, it's almost inevitable that it's going to be anticlimactic.  In fact, his reintroduction is so low-key that you half suspect it's an extended dream of Easy's.  But it's not:  Mouse is back.  And the very anticlimax of his reappearance becomes eery by the time you finish the book.  He's like a bomb that lands but doesn't explode.  You know he's got it in him to wreck Easy's life like never before.  But when?

Daniel Mendelsohn on criticism

I don't have much to say about this article, except that you should read it:  Daniel Mendelsohn's spirited defense of the professional critic.  He has some nice thumbnail ideas on what makes a good critic, and what critics should do, and the place of critics in the current media environment.

For example.  Writing about the critics he read as a boy, he says:

I thought of these writers above all as teachers, and like all good teachers they taught by example; the example that they set, week after week, was to recreate on the page the drama of how they had arrived at their judgments.

Yeah.  That's it.  I felt that too, as a young reader.  And that's what I aim for now, as a blogger.  (Don't bother telling me that I seldom achieve it!)  Later he says:

What I was really learning from those critics each week was how to think. How to think (we use the term so often that we barely realize what we’re saying) critically—which is to say, how to think like a critic, how to judge things for myself. To think is to make judgments based on knowledge: period. 

Yeah.  That's it.  The best criticism is an exercise in thinking, and therefore a lesson in thinking.

Unfortunately he ends his meditations with a couple of overly-facile statements.  Like so many people writing for pay, he Mendelsohn seems to harbor disdain for those who haven't Made It like him.  Apropos of some current contretemps about criticism, he concludes that

...I wonder whether the recent storm of discussion about criticism, the flurry of anxiety and debate about the proper place of positive and negative reviewing in the literary world, isn’t a by-product of the fact that criticism, in a way unimaginable even twenty years ago, has been taken out of the hands of the people who should be practicing it: true critics, people who, on the whole, know precisely how to wield a deadly zinger, and to what uses it is properly put...  Yes, we’re all a bit sensitive to negative reviewing these days; but if you’re going to sit in judgment on anyone, it shouldn’t be the critics.

Yeah, but.  First of all there's a "no true Scotsman" kind of thing going on here.  Even before the advent of the Internet, a lot of the people practicing criticism would have failed to live up to his "true critic" standards, right?  Obviously it's not amateur vs. professional (i.e., do you get paid to do it) that determines the "true critic."  It's all the things he's detailed over the course of his article (passion, knowledge, taste, etc.).  Print-based professional journalistic critics have no monopoly on those things.  Certainly the internet has loosed a lot of idiots to drool on the keys, but it has also given voice to a lot of people who have passions, knowledge, tastes that could never have qualified for mainstream media patronage.  If criticism is a thing worth doing (as he's convinced us it is), then surely it's worth doing well - it's possible to do it well, and therefore it's possible to do it badly.  And when it's done badly, why shouldn't we sit in judgment?  Why should critics be immune to criticism?  And yet he says they should be.  Hmm.

Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

I haven't read many reviews of Wes Anderson's latest, Moonrise Kingdom (which just made it to us here in our own little moonrise kingdom).  But I can well imagine that this might prove to be a divisive film.  Those who like Wes Anderson but think he goes a little heavy on the quirkiness - those who like him in spite of his style, in other words - might find this one a bridge too far, while those who like him because of his style might decide this is his best film yet.  I'm in the latter jamboree.

For a description of that style and how it's manifest in this film I'd commend you to Jim Emerson's description.  I agree with every word except two.  He writes:

How many more distancing devices can we get?

Now, I think I know why he's calling Anderson's obsessions "distancing devices."  That is, they are such from the point of view of traditional Hollywood filmmaking, which developed a film language of shot designs, acting styles, editing techniques, etc. that we have all become so thoroughly accustomed to through repetition that their use allows us to, or seduces us to, forget that we're watching a film, an artificial creation, and believe that we're watching real life unfold before our eyes.  This point of view privileges realism, and therefore artifices that produce an illusion of realism.  Artifices that are thought to destroy an illusion of realism, that take us out of the suspension of disbelief, are thought to do so by distancing us from what should (from the p.o.v. of realism) be an intimate immersion in story.  That is, if we're thinking about shot composition or set design rather than story, it's because shot composition or set design have alienated us from what should be the natural experience of watching a film.  Turned what should be an emotional catharsis into a coldly intellectual exercise.

This privileging of realism, of immersion in the illusion of reality, is the film-world equivalent, I think, of the mid-20th-century literary fetish for clear, direct prose in fiction - the Hemingway-inspired worship of journalistic writing as the most effective and truest because it rejects all the Victorian ornamention of rhetoric.  Style, in this view, is essentially a distraction from what should be the business of fiction:  telling stories.  Communicating.

As a lover of popular fiction and popular film I can see the utility of such prose, or such filmmaking - as I wrote about Walter Mosley, I love to be immersed in a good story almost more than anything else.  But I no longer, and I'm pretty sure Jim Emerson no longer does either, believe that this point of view is right or true in any absolute way.  In other words, we're long past the point where many of us would seriously argue that the realist point of view should be privileged, should be the norm. 

So the term "distancing device" doesn't work for me when describing Wes Anderson.  Partly because he takes these devices so far, particularly in this film, that immersion in style becomes immersion in story.  This is another way of saying that here, to a degree not quite true of his previous live-action films, story and style are utterly fused.  You can't separate the story being told from the way that story is told.  Well, you never can - the invisibility of the Hollywood realistic style is a kind of deception, as we all know - but in any case I don't find "distancing" as a concept to be informative when talking about Anderson's style in this film.  I want another concept.

I found this film as fascinating as his others for its art direction, its scene construction, its camerawork and editing.  But I also found it utterly entrancing and even moving on an emotional level.  The term "distancing device" seems to say that this shouldn't be possible.  But it is.

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?