“The number of people who could deliver a kick to the balls with Aomame’s mastery must have been few indeed. “

1Q84
Chapters 11-16
By Dennis Abrams

How’s everybody enjoying it so far?

Let’s start with the basic plotline concerning Aomame:

We learn that she went to college to study physical education and worked for a sports drink and health company, later becoming a sports club instructor where she taught women how to defend themselves again men – primarily by instructing them to kick them in the balls, hard. It is there that she met the dowager who she tutored privately and became friends with.

At a bar on the prowl for men, Aomame met Ayumi, who she was surprised (and somewhat alarmed) to learn was a policewoman. They spot two men in their forties, and Ayumi went to talk with them.

But the next day, Aomame wakes up in bed naked, with a hangover (which she never gets) and no idea of how she ended up where she was. Ayumi calls and recounts the details of the evening. Aomame worries how much longer she can keep up her sexual exploits.

She goes to Willow House to give the dowager a massage: she tells Aomame to enjoy her youth while she can, but cautions her not to cheat herself of happiness and marriage – going wild won’t solve all her problems. Aomame reflects back on her first real friend – Tamaki Otsuka who married a wealthy but abusive man, driving her to suicide at the age of just twenty-six.

It is this that inspired Aomame to murder: she decided to punish the husband and kills him with a sharp needle she develops on her own. But, after she kills him, she discovers that she has intense (if only occasional) desires for the bodies of men.

We then saw how Aomame lives –eating a healthy diet, preferring vegetarian dishes, along with fish and a little chicken. She has few possessions, keeps few books, and when she has finished reading one, she usually sells it to a used book store. She doesn’t even like accepting money for her…work.

She has dinner with her new friend Ayumi at a French restaurant, and reflects on the fact that she hasn’t had dinner with a friend like this since Tamaki dies. She tells Ayumi about a boy she was in love with when she was ten, who held her hand. (Who could it be I wonder?) They talk about their sex lives, and free will, which Aomame things might be an illusion. They go to a bar after dinner, get drunk, and return to Aomame’s apartment where Ayumi spend the night, and Aomame once again considers the possibility that there is something wrong with the world.

The next morning – Aomame sees two moons in the sky. She remembers one moon, but now there are two. She wonders (naturally) why, and asks herself what else in the world has been altered.

And…Tengo:

The Professor reveals to Tengo that it has been impossible to communicate with Fuka-Eri’s parents since she came to live with him when she was eleven. The girl, who had once been lively and talkative was quiet and withdrawn when she left the commune. We learn that the farm, which has shut itself off from the outside world, supports itself by selling vegetables, but the Professor believes that something else must be going on: the farm seems to have evolved from a farming experiment into as vastly-wealthy neoreligious cult.

Alone on the train ride back home, Tengo sees a little girl and her mother, and remembers a girl from his own childhood, who belonged to a very traditional Christian sect called the Witnesses, which forbade surgery and other medical practices. He would see the girl and her mother around town trying to convert people (while at the same time he was with his father bill-collecting). The girl was made fun of in fourth grade and one day when it was particularly bad, Tengo came to her defense. The girl (I wonder who it could be?) takes his hand and looks at him and he sees a profound depth in her eyes – the same depth he saw in the eyes of the little girl sitting on the train.

Komatsu meets with Tengo at a café – Tengo wants to stop the story from being published because he is worried that it will reveal Fuka-Eri’s “scandalous” past – Komatsu promises he can and will protect her, and refuses to cancel the printing of the story. Thrilled with Tengo’s work, he asks that once the prize is won, that he fills out a section describing two moons (!) in greater detail. Tengo agrees.

And Tengo thinks more about his mother and his father’s role as a fee collection agent. He also thinks back on his love as mathematics as a child – to him, math was freeing and consistent and infinite. But over time, that love of numbers evolved into a love of words and novels. Tengo also reflects on his love of music and his own musical talent.

Tengo revises “Air Chrysalis” and submits it to Komatsu – having finished the assignment, he feels both excited and at ease. He realizes, though, that he put more passion into rewriting the novella than he’s ever put into his own work. He doesn’t understand why, but he begins to write.

In early May, “Air Chrysalis” wins the prize (was there ever any doubt?). Komatsu tells Tengo it is now his mob to prepare Fuka-Eri for the press conference, after which her public appearances will be few and far between. Tengo agrees, but doesn’t want to participate in the sham company Komatsu wants to set up in order to maximize the financial awards from the press coverage and winning the award.

Tengo and Fuka-Eri meet at the Shinjuku Café. And, not surprisingly, she is neither happy nor unhappy about the prize. He gives her some sample press questions, and she answers them instantly and deliberately. He emphasizes to her that she needs to be clear that she wrote the story without any help. She agrees.

And some of my favorite things etc.:

The whole passage regarding Aomame and kicking guys in the balls was rather extraordinary – more on this further down.

It strikes me that Aomame is all physical – her body, her muscles, sex for her body, etc. Tengo is all mental and emotional.

Tengo: “As she was standing, though, the girl took one last look at Tengo. In her eyes, he saw a strange light, a kind of appeal or plea directed at him. It was only a faint, momentary gleam, but Tengo was able to catch it.”

And now we know how Tengo and Aomame met.

“May Thy kingdom come to us.” It must be important.

“She stood next to him, and without the slightest hesitation, grabbed his hand and looked up at him. (He was ten centimeters taller, so she had to look up.) Taken by surprise, Tengo looked back at her. Their eyes met. In hers, he could see a transparent depth that he had never seen before…”

Aomame’s methodical self-examination/reassessment after her night out with Ayumi and the guys. She’s so…matter-of-fact.

“All of that sex did seem to have done her body a lot of good, though. Having a man hold her and gaze at her naked body and caress her and lick her and bite her and penetrate and her and give her orgasms had helped release the tension of the spring wound up inside her. True, the hangover felt terrible, but that feeling of release more than made up for it.”

The Dowager telling Aomame to enjoy having sex “Now and then may not be enough…You have to enjoy it while you’re still young. enjoy it to the fullest. You can use the memories of what you did to warm your body after you get old and can’t do it anymore.”

Aomame confessing to the Dowager that she is in love with someone. “Unfortunately, though, he’s not in love with me…He doesn’t even know I exist.”

Aomame’s long-lasting virginity.

Tamaki’s suicide, Aomame’s vengeance. Her prayer after killing him, then, “It was after this that Aomame came to feel an intense periodic craving for men’s bodies.” Thoughts?

Fuka-Eri as Pandora’s Box.

Making the two moons in the story more real: “Think of it this way, Tengo. Your readers have seen the sky with one moon in it any number of time, right? But I doubt they’ve ever seen a sky with two moons in it side by side. When you introduce things that most readers have never seen before into a piece of fiction, you have to describe them with as much precision and in as much detail as possible. What you can eliminate from fiction is the description of things that most readers have seen.” Again – Murakami?

Tengo and his girlfriend and the white slip and his mind misting over.

“Everybody needs some kind of fantasy to go on living, don’t you think?”

Tengo and math and “As a little boy, he noticed that he could easily move into a mathematical world with the flick of a switch in his head. He remained free as long as he actively explored that realm of infinite consistency. He walked down the gigantic building’s twisted corridor, opening one numbered door after another, Each time a new spectacle opened up before him…the world governed by numerical expression was, for him, a legitimate and always safe hiding place…where mathematics was a magnificent imaginary building, the world of story as represented by Dickens was like a deep, magical forest for Tengo. When mathematics stretched infinitely toward the heavens, the forest spread out beneath his gaze in silence, its dark sturdy roots stretching deep into the earth. In the forest, there were no maps, no numbered doorways.” Marvelous.

The magic of no clear-cut solution – “The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form.”

Tengo runs away from home, the older teacher, her return at the judo meet. Why?

Loved this description of Aomame’s life:

“She lived frugally, but her meals were the only things on which she deliberately spent her money. She never compromised on the quality of her groceries, and drank only good-quality wines. On those rare occasions when she ate out, she would choose restaurants that prepared their food with the greatest care. Almost nothing else mattered to her – not clothing, not cosmetics, not accessories. Jeans and a sweater were all she needed for commuting to the sports club, and once she was there she would spend the day in a jersey top and bottom – without accessories. She rarely had occasion to go out in fancy clothing…”

Her childhood. “What she longed for was an ordinary life like everybody else’s.” Of course, what she got…

The Dowager insisting that Aomame get paid for her “work.” “Because you are neither an angel nor a god. I am quite aware that your actions have been prompted by your pure feelings, and I understand perfectly well that, for that very reason, you do not wish to receive money for what you have done. But pure, unadulterated feelings are dangerous in their own way. It is no easy feat for a flesh-and-blood human being to go on living with such feelings. That is why it is necessary for you to fasten your feelings to the earth – firmly, like attaching an anchor to a balloon. The money is for that. To prevent you from feeling that you can do anything you want as long as it’s the right thing and your feelings are pure.”

The Dowager is Aomame’s guide; Fuka-Eri is Tengo’s.

And her French dinner with Ayumi: “I did have one person I fell in love with…It happened when I held his hand…We were in the same third- and fourth-grade classes in Ichikawa in Chiba, but I moved to a school in Tokyo in the fifth grade, and I never saw him again, never heard anything about him. All I know is that, if he’s still alive, he should be twenty-nine years old now. He’ll probably turn thirty this fall…What I want is for the two of us to meet somewhere by chance one day, like, passing on the street, or getting on the same bus…that’s when I’ll open up to him, ‘The only one I’ve ever loved in this life is you.’”

And when Ayumi tells her that she may never meet him again, or that he might be married, etc, “But at least I have someone I love…If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, there’s salvation in life. Even if you can’t get together with that person.”

How beautiful is that?

And then, leaving Ayumi asleep in her bed (non-lesbian style): “There were two moons in the sky – a small moon and a large one. They were floating there side by side. The large one was the usual moon that she had always seen. It was nearly full, and yellow. But there was another moon right next to it. It had an unfamiliar shape. It was somewhat lopsided, and greenish, as though thinly covered with moss. That was what her vision had seized upon.”

“Maybe the word really is ending, she thought.
“And the kingdom is coming,” Aomame muttered to herself.
“I can hardly wait,” somebody said somewhere.”

Tengo writes about the two moons; Aomame sees them.

I’d like to finish there, but…Fuka-Eri’s taste in classic Japanese literature…and Bach. So mathematical. And if you’d like to listen to her favorite BWV 244, click here.

Question: Do you think Tengo and Aomame are even living in the same “year?”

From Jay Rubin:

“From the moment we meet him, Tengo is identified as a man with a problem:

‘Tengo’s first memory dated from the time he was one and a half. His mother had taken off her blouse and dropped the shoulder straps of her white slip to let a man who was not his father suck on her breasts. The infant in the crib nearby was probably Tengo himself. He was observing the scene as a third person…The infant was asleep, its eyes closed, its little breaths deep and regular…This vivid ten-second image would…envelop him like a soundless tsunami. By the time he noticed, it would be directly in front of him, and his arms and legs would be paralyzed. The flow of time stopped. The air grew thin, and he had trouble breathing. He lost all connection with the people and things around him. The tsunami’s liquid wall swallowed him whole. And though it felt to him as if the world were being closed off in darkness, he experienced no loss of awareness. It was just a sense of having been switched to a new track. Parts of his mind were, if anything, sharpened by the change. He felt no terror, but he could not keep his eyes open. His eyelids were clamped shut. Sounds grew distant, and the familiar image was projected onto the screen of his consciousness again and again. Sweat gushed from every part of his body and the armpits of his undershirt grew damp. He trembled all over, and his heartbeat grew faster and louder.’

These brief ‘attacks’ incapacitate Tengo at several points in the book, though they case after he comes to terms with his origins and begins writing his own fiction. While he recognizes the possibility that this ‘memory’ from an impossibly early age may be a convenient fiction to explain his hatred for his father, Tengo does have an extreme breast fixation; perhaps from never having been suckled by his mother (or merely from his having been created by Haruki Murakami, who rarely misses a chance to comment on the mammary endowments of his female characters).

The scene in which Aomame first punishes an abusive male is among the most startling and Murakamiesque in the entire novel, and as with all of Murakami’s best writing, it is firmly anchored in mundane (and even historical) detail piled on just past the point of literal believability. It occurs in Chapter 13 of Book One, during Aomame’s first year of college, when her best friend, Tamaki, has become a victim of date rape.

‘Aomame decided to take it upon herself to punish the man. She got his address from Tamaki and went to his apartment carrying a softball bat in a plastic blueprint tube. Tamaki was away for the day in Kanazawa, attending a relative’s memorial service or some such thing, which was a perfect alibi. Aomame checked to be sure the man was not at home. She used a screwdriver and hammer to break the lock on his door. Then she wrapped a towel around the bat several times to dampen the noise and proceeded to smash everything in the apartment that was smashable – the television, the lamps, the clocks, the records, the toaster, the vases: she left nothing whole. She cut the telephone cord with a scissors, cracked the spines of all the books and scattered their pages, spread the entire contents of a toothpaste tube and shaving cream canister on the rug, poured Worcestershire sauce on the bed, took notebooks from a drawer and ripped them to pieces, broke every pen and pencil in two, shattered every lightbulb, slashed all the curtains and cushions with a kitchen knife, took scissors to every shirt in the dresser, poured a bottle of ketchup into the underwear and sock drawers, pulled out the refrigerator fuse and threw it out a window, ripped the flapper out of the toilet tank and tore it apart, and crushed the bathtub’s shower head. The destruction was utterly deliberate and complete. The room looked very much like the recent news photos she had seen of the streets of Beirut after the shelling.’

Who but Murakami could even think of such a thing? And who but Murakami could manipulate realistic detail [MY NOTE: the specificity of the Worcestershire sauce, the ketchup] to the point of leaving the reader simultaneously shocked and amused? Another passage that only Murakami could have written involves the self-defense training that Aomame gives to women at the health club.

‘The number of people who could deliver a kick to the balls with Aomame’s mastery must have been few indeed. She had studied kick patterns with great diligence and never missed her daily practice. In kicking the balls, the most important thing was never to hesitate. One had to deliver a lightning attack to the adversary’s weakest point and do so mercilessly and with the utmost ferocity – just as when Hitler easily brought down France by striking at the weak point of the Maginot Line. One most not hesitate. A moment of indecision could be fatal…

As a woman, Aomame had no concrete idea how much it hurt to suffer a hard kick in the balls, though judging from the reactions and facial expressions of men she had kicked, she could at least imagine it. Not even the strongest or toughest man, it seemed, could bear the pain and the major loss of self-respect that accompanied it.
“It hurts so much you think the end of the world is coming right now. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s different from ordinary pain,” said a man, after careful consideration, when Aomame asked him to explain it to her…

Some time after that, Aomame happened to see the movie On the Beach on late-night television. It was an American movie made around 1960. Total war broke out between the US and the USSR and a huge number of missiles were launched between the continents like schools of flying fish. The earth was annihilated, and humanity was wiped out in almost every part of the world. Thanks to the prevailing winds or something, however, the ashes of death still hadn’t reached Australia in the Southern Hemisphere, though it was just a matter of time…

Aomame was primarily in charge of classes in muscle training and martial arts. It was a well-known, exclusive club with high membership fees and dues, and many of its members were celebrities.

Aomame established several classes in her best area, women’s self-defense techniques. She made a large canvas dummy in the shape of a man, sewed a black work glove in the groin area to serve as testicles, and gave female club members thorough training in how to kick in that spot. In the interest of realism, she stuffed two squash balls into the glove. The women were to kick this target swiftly, mercilessly, and repeatedly. Many of them took special pleasure in this training, and their skill improved markedly, but other members (mostly men, of course) viewed the spectacle with a frown and complained to the club’s management that she was going overboard.

As a result, Aomame was called in and instructed to rein in the ball-kicking practice…

In any case, Aomame had mastered at least ten separate techniques for kicking men in the balls…If the need arose, she knew, she would never hesitate to apply her sophisticated techniques in actual combat. If there’s any guy crazy enough to attack me, I’m going to show him the end of the world – close up. I’m going to let him see the kingdom come with his own eyes. I’m going to send him straight to the Southern Hemisphere and let the ashes of death rain all over him and the kangaroos and the wallabies.’

Here, Murakami has managed to weave in both historical and cinematic references to outrageous effect. That quirky brilliance of his is still there, and though the book is full of familiar Murakami tropes (a strangely philosophical cab driver like the one in A Wild Sheep Chase, a beautiful teenage girl with telepathic powers, a cartoonishly grotesque messenger/detective named Ushikawa like the one of the same name in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, passages between worlds, the preparing and consuming of healthy ‘simple meals,’ detailed appreciations of both jazz and classical compositions, parallel narrative tracks that seem destined to intersect, and, yes, cats), it contains more surprises than a reader perhaps has the right to expect from a novelist headed into his middle sixties. Indeed, more so than the attention paid to religious cults, which Murakami examined at length in the non-fiction Underground, the focus on the abuse of women can be counted as one of those surprises. Aomame combines the two – and the insistence on healthy eating – in one startling observation: ‘It was a simple meal, but ideal for preventing constipation. Constipation was one of the things she hated most in the world, on part with despicable men who commit domestic violence and narrow-minded religious fundamentalists.’”

There’s really not much I can say after that.

My next post: Tuesday, September 23rd, Chapters 17-24 (through the end of Book One)

Enjoy

“Don’t let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality.”

1Q84
Chapters 1-10
By Dennis Abrams

OK – let’s start with Aomame’s part of the story:

It’s 1984, an Aomame is in a taxi on a way to meet a client, listening to Janacek’s “Sinfonietta” playing on the cab driver’s excellent sound system. She’s surprised that the music affects her; we learn her name means “green peas,’ and that she loves sports, history and dates. She and the driver are stuck in traffic which could take hours to clear up; and since Aomame has to meet her client at a specific time, the driver suggests that she use an emergency stairway off the elevated highway to get to the subway to get to her meeting. He cautions her to be careful because of the early April wind, and warns that while things are not always as they seem, “there is only one reality.” With all the other drivers watching her, she gets out of the cab, she gets out of the cab and makes her escape; as she descends the stairs, the wind blows her hair and reveals – a misshapen left ear.

As she continues going down the stairway, her mind wanders, and she thinks about a sexual experience she had with another girl at summer camp some years before. THIS causes her to think about the future – dates, times and places. When she gets to the bottom of the stairs, she finds a locked gate, but slips through a hole in the metal fence, gets on the subway and heads off to a hotel for her meeting.

There she goes to room 426, where she meets Mr. Miyama, a callous businessman who had beaten his wife. Pretending to be a hotel employee, she informs him he has a spot of paint on his neck, and while examining it, pushes a thin needle (which she had encased in a specially made soft cork covering) into his neck, puncturing a part of his brain, instantly and painlessly killing him. After cleaning up any evidence of her presence in the room, she leaves.

She then heads to the Akasaka District to s hotel bar for a drink to calm her nerves. Sitting at the bar, hoping nobody takes her for a prostitute, she reads a book about the history of the South Manchurian Railway, and spies an older man whose thinning hairline reveals the kind of shaped head that she’s attracted to. After striking up a conversation about Cutty Sark, and asking him when the Japanese police started using more high powered weapons (she noticed this after she climbed down from the highway), she seduces him, asking if the size of his “cock” is large enough to make her happy. They go to his room, have sex, after which she watches the TV news.

The next day she visits an old, Western-style home called Willow House, where she is greeted by Tamaru, a muscular, gay, professional bodyguard. He takes her to see the Dowager, who wants to meet Aomame in her hothouse – filled with ordinary plants and extraordinary butterflies. The dowager takes about butterflies as her “nameless friends” who live and die as if they had never existed. The dowager shows Aomame photographs of the murder victim’s badly beaten wife. We learn that Willow House is a home for beaten women.

Aomame, still concerned about her lack of memory about the Japanese police, asks Tamaura about when they started using more modern weapons – he confirms that the change happened two years earlier.

Aomame goes to the library to research the past few years – some of the stories she remembers vaguely, others not all – and she finds this disturbing due her need for control – and if she’s lost control and memory her job could be at stake. She does find the story she’s looking for: a gunfight at Lake Motosu in Yamanashi, which led to the deaths of three police offers and the change in weaponry from revolvers to automatics. She wonders whether or not her mind has willing blacked out certain events, or, more likely she thinks, that the world has begun to change around her, like “switching tracks” – a parallel world. She decides to call the “new” present year 1Q84, the “Q” standing for “question” – 1984 no longer exists for her.

She realizes that she is going to turn thirty in a week.

On to Tengo:

If Aomame is being defined by what she doesn’t remember, we open Tengo’s sections with his first memory from infancy – watching his mother have her breasts sucked on by a man who isn’t his father. He wonders whether this is a real or “created” memory, but decides it has to be real, since recalling the memory also brings about a kind of paralysis that causes Tengo to tremble and sweat. In public, he tells others that it was simply dizziness.

Tengo, an aspiring novelist, has dinner with a “friend” and editor named Komatsu at a café near Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station, where they discuss the novella “Air Chrysalis” by a seventeen year-old girl named Fuka-Eri. Though the writing leaves much to be desired, the plot and mood of the piece are extraordinary. Komatsu, although he believes the girl has only one story in her, wants Tengo to edit/rewrite “Air Chrysalis” and submit it to the Akutagawa Prize competition under the girl’s name. Tengo isn’t entirely convinced of the ethics of the idea, but when Komatsu tells Tengo that he knows that he wishes he had written the story, he agrees to think it over.

Komatsu calls Tengo in the middle of the night (Tengo recognizes his ring) and reveals that Fuka-Eri wants to meet Tengo before she commits to the rewrite. Tengo goes to meet Kamatsu (reading a book on Japanese occultism and curses while he waits) – she’s late, and when she arrives Tengo is struck by her beauty. It turns out that she had sat in on two of his lectures on mathematics – Tengo explains that he likes math because everything fits together in its proper place. Fuka-Eri, who is very direct (speaks in one sentence answers) doesn’t seem to care about the form of her story and agrees to Komatsu’s plan.

When discussing the story, Fuka-Eri reveals that the Little People do exist, and tells Tengo that she has someone she wants him to meet on the following Sunday morning. Tengo tells Komatsu that there is something special about Fuka-Eri – that she sees things that others don’t.

Komatsu calls Tengo and tells him to buy a word processor at Komatasu’s expense; Tengo agrees to start on the rewrite. We learn that Tengo also has a married girlfriend (quick easy sex) who cancels on him for the day (she’s having her period) which allows him to get to work on “Air Chrysalis.” He compares his work to that of a carpenter – leaving the basic structure and framing in place, while reworking the trim, the walls, the floors, and so on.

It seems that “Air Chrysalis” is the story of a ten year old girl who lives in an ancient village and has the responsibility of tending a blind goat that is somehow important to the community. When the goat dies, the girl is punished by being locked up with the goat’s dead body – the “Little People” use the corpse to come into the little girl’s world, and taught her how to make an air chrysalis.

Fuka-Eri refuses to tell Tengo whether the experiences in the story were real.

Tengo dresses in his “best clothes” for his meeting. As he and Fuka-Eri travel by train to a destination unknown to Tengo, he asks her if she reads a lot – when she says that she doesn’t because it takes her a long time, he suspect that she is dyslexic.

On their way to meet the man she calls the “Professor,” Tengo learns that Fuka-Eri had dictated the story to another girl named Azami, who wrote it all down and then submitted it. Fuka-Eri lowers her voice while talking to Tengo so that the Little People will not overhear that she has included them in the story.

We also learn that Tengo hates Sundays based on childhood memories of spending them going door to door with his father, a television fee collector for the NHK. Noticing that Tengo is stressing out, Fuka-Eri gives him her hand and reassures him that it is “not just another Sunday.”

The hand-holding continues as they ride and transfer trains, though there is nothing romantic about it – Tengo thinks that she is trying to communicate or discover something about him without using words.

Finally after arriving at Futamatao Station, they take a taxi to a large old home, where he is introduced to the Professor, a short, elderly, physically unimpressive man. His name is Ebisuno which means “field of savages.” After questioning Tengo about Komatasu’s scheme, the Professor, believing that Tengo is honest approves of the rewriting.

We also learn t hat the Professor is Fuka-Eri’s caregiver: Her father, Tamotsu Fukada, was a fellow professor at the university, although both left the academic world after violent left-right clashes at the end of the 1960s. Fukada though was a Communist, and he and some of his students wanted to learn to farm and become self sufficient.

They built up a nearly abandoned village in Yamanashi called Sakigake which became a communal farm with private ownership and regulated compensatory pay. The population soon split though: a group of militant communists wanted to use farming as a cover for violent revolution and left the commune to form their own village nearby, which is when Fuka-Eri came to live with the Professor. The radicals ended up in a firefight with police at Lake Motosu – obviously the same fight that Aomame read about and that led to the introduction of new uniforms and weaponry for the Japanese police.

————

That’s the basic plot as we know it so far. Some favorite things and quotes:

Janacek’s Sinfonietta: I wonder what it’s going to end up meaning. Listen to it here.

The specificity during Aomame’s cab drive – the brand names, the cars. The grounding in reality.

The cabdriver’s “warning”: “And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. I’ve had that experience myself. But don’t let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality.”

And then again, “There is always, as I said, only one reality.”

The spare leanness of Aomame. In every aspect of her life.

What’s up with her frown?

“Don’t let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality.”

Tengo and his mother. But even more importantly, the idea, that during one of his “spells” of the tsunami, but then, even more importantly: “…he experience no loss of awareness. It was just a sense of having been switched to a new track.”

Tengo, another in a long line of Murakami’s heroes “satisfied” with not a whole lot. Or seemingly so.

Tengo’s initial description of “Air Chrysalis” “…the best thing about this…is that it’s not an imitation of anyone…The style, for sure, is rough, and the writing is clumsy…You could pick it apart completely if you wanted to. But the story itself has real power: it draws you in. The overall plot is a fantasy, but the descriptive detail is incredibly real. the balance between the two is excellent…after you read your way through the thing, with all its faults, it leaves a real impression – it gets to you in some strange, inexplicable way that may be a little disturbing” – Couldn’t that apply as a description of Murakami’s own works?

Aomame’s climb down from the highway. The rubber plant (why other than to ground the description?). The flowing of her memories as she…switched tracks?

The cool methodical way she killed the businessman. Brutal description. But then, after, during the five minutes she waited to stop any drop of blood from the wound, “And in her head, in time with the beat, resounded the opening fanfare of Janacek’s Sinfonietta. Soft, silent breezes played across the green meadows of Bohemia. She was aware that she had been split in two…I’m here, but I’m not here. I’m in two places at once…”

The beauty of Fuka-Eri, another of Murakami’s odd but wise teenage girls who help guide the passive hero towards…something.

“But this seventeen-year-old girl, Fuka-Eri, was different. The mere sight of her sent a violent shudder through him. It was the same feeling her photograph had given him when he first saw it, but in the living girl’s presence it was far stronger. This was not the pangs of love or sexual desire. A certain something, he felt, had managed to work its way in through a tiny opening (Compare to Aomame’s escape from the fenced in after climbing down from the freeway, “If you changed the angle a little and pulled it inward, a space opened up that was just big enough for a person to squeeze through.”) and was trying to fill a blank space inside him. The void was not one that Fuka-Eri had made. It had always been there inside Tengo. She had merely managed to shine a special light on it.”

Aomame in the bar – as cool and detached in picking up the balding businessman and having sex with as him as she was murdering the other businessman in his hotel room.

WHY a history of the South Manchurian Railway Company?

Why did she have the urge after having sex with the businessman to kill him as she did the other guy? “There was no reason to expunge this man from society, aside from the fact that he4 no longer served any purpose for Aomame…’This man is not an especially bad person,’ she told herself…The shape of his head and the degree of his baldness were just the way she liked them.”

The observation post on the moon.

“All she had done was record a story – or as she had put it, things she had actually witnesses – that she possessed inside her, and it just so happened that she had used words to do it.”

Obviously, we’re going to learn more about the story.

The oddness of Fuka-Eri. The phone call. “Fuki-Eri fell silent again, but this time it did not seem deliberate. She simply could not fathom the purpose of his question or what prompted him to ask it. His question hadn’t landed in any region of her consciousness. It seemed to have gone beyond the bounds of meaning, sucked into permanent nothingness like a lone planetary exploration rocket that has sailed beyond Pluto.”

Aomame and the Dowager. The butterflies. “There is no one in this world who can’t be replaced. A person might have enormous knowledge or ability, but a successor can almost always be found. It would be terrible for us if the world were full of people who couldn’t be replaced.”

The Dowager and her butterflies. Not giving them names “These people are your nameless friends for must a little while. I come here every day, say hello to the butterflies, and talk about things with them. When the time comes, though, they disappear. I’m sure it means they’ve died, but I can never find their bodies. They don’t leave any trace behind. It’s as if they’ve been absorbed by the air. They’re dainty little creatures that hardly exist at all: they come out of nowhere, search quietly for a few, limited things, and disappear into nothingness again, perhaps to some other world.” Like us?

Loving Tamaru: “’As luck would have it’ is a bit too direct for me…I prefer ‘Due to heavenly dispensation.’”

Tengo’s father – again, Manchuria and the war.

Tengo’s lack of focus on the train. “An ominous sandstorm was developing somewhere on the plane of his emotions.”… “Don’t be afraid. It’s not just another Sunday.”

Aomame’s quick review of recent history. The gunfight with the radicals.

What do the things forgotten have in common?

“It’s not me but the world that’s deranged…At some point in time, the world I knew either vanished or withdrew, and another world came to take its place. Like the switching of a track [like Tengo]. In other words, my mind, here and now, belongs to the world that was, but the world itself has already changed into something else…”

She remembers the cabdriver’s words

It wasn’t her that changed: “Of course, it’s all just a hypothesis…But it’s the most compelling hypothesis I can produce at the moment. I’ll have to act according to this one, until a more compelling hypothesis comes along. Otherwise, I could end up being thrown to the ground somewhere. If only for that reason, I’d better give an appropriate name to this new situation in which I find myself. There’s a need, too, for a special name in order to distinguish between this present world and the former world in which the police carried old-fashioned revolvers. Even cats and dogs need names. A newly changed world must need one too. 1Q84 – that’s what I’ll call this new world…Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.”

“To think I’m going to have my thirtieth birthday in this incomprehensible world, of all places!”

Tengo’s carefully prepared meal, grilled dried mackerel with grated daikon, miso with littlenecks and green onions to eat with tofu, cucumber slices and wakame seaweed dressed with vinegar, rice and nappa pickles, vs. Aomame’s papaya, three cucumbers with mayonnaise and soy milk (to avoid constipation) “Constipation was one of the things she hated most in the world, on part with despicable men who commit domestic violence and narrow-minded religious fundamentalists.”

The first linking of Aomame and Tengo’s world – the commune and shootout. Tengo: “Gun battle,’ Tengo thought, ‘I remember hearing about that. It was big news. I can’t remember the details, though, for some reason, and I’m confused about the sequence of events.”

I’m going to end it here. As a special bonus discussion of Murakami is pretty cool

Thoughts so far? Thoughts on Murakami in general? Share with the group!

My next post: Tuesday, September 16th; Chapters 11-16
Enjoy!

“The whole of 1Q84 is closer to comedy than to tragedy, but it is a deeply obsessive book…”

1Q84
An Introduction

So…it’s on to the “big” one – 1Q84. I don’t want to give away a lot about the book in the introduction, so just a few brief introductory pieces:

First, from Jay Rubin:

“The controversy surrounding Murakami’s decision to accept the Jerusalem Prize and the spectacle of his delivering a daring critique of the Israeli government on Israeli soil reawakened interest in the novelist beyond the bounds of his usual readership to a degree not seen since the fervor surrounding Norwegian Wood. This, combined with the Shinchosha publisher’s decision to keep details about Murakami’s first long novel in seven years strictly under wraps (partly in response to criticisms that it had revealed all too much about Kafka on the Shore before it reached the bookstores), served to ramp up the level of expectation for the oddly – but intriguingly – titles 1Q84 before its first two volumes were released on 30 May 2009. Pre-publication sales were explosive, prompting Shinchosha to increase its first print run from 380,000 to 480,000, and readers who finally got their hands on the book were so eager to learn the fate of the heroine, left tantalizingly vague at the end of Book Two, that lines formed for midnight sales when Book Three was finally released on 16 April 2010. By the end of April 2012, Shinchosha had printed well over a million sets of the three-volume novel in hardcover (3,865,000 volumes total) and had already printed 800,000 copies of the first paperback volume (the first half of Book One) as the more affordable edition began to appear. The New Yorker printed an excerpt of the English translation, ‘Town of Cats,’ in its 5 September 2011 issue, but readers had to wait until 25 October for Knopf to bring out all three books at once (Harvill Secker released Books One and Two of the UK editions a week earlier; Book Three on 25 October), and midnight sales and giddy celebrations were not uncommon in this case either.

There cannot have been many novels as widely read as the English translation of 1Q84 with so much uncertainty regarding the pronunciation of its title. Some people, misreading the 1, call it IQ84 (pronounced ‘Eye-Q-eighty-four’), as though it were about a protagonist such as Forrest Gump with a low intelligence quotient. Investors might think it means ‘first quarter of 1984.’ Others, having learned of the book’s references to Orwell, and possibly aware of the identical pronunciation of the Japanese number 9 and the English letter Q, pronounce it ‘One-Q-Eighty-Four’ or “Nineteen Eighty-Four’ just like Orwell’s book. I have even heard ‘Q-Teen-Eighty-Four.’

The author himself, however, supplied a Romanized gloss for the Japanese title, ‘ichi-kew-hachi-yon’ (one-Q-eight-four), which is both reminiscent of Orwell and determinedly different. [Confession time: I’d been pronouncing it ‘One-Q-Eighty-Four.’] The Japanese reader instantly gets the meaning of ‘9’ from the ‘Q’ but is more intrigued than enlightened by it because there is no indication that this is a reference to a year on the calendar. The Japanese title of Orwell’s book is pronounced: ‘Sen-kyu-hyaku-hachi-ju-yo-nen,’ which is the standard way to write the year 1984, meaning exactly that: ‘The year one-thousand-nine-hundred-eighty-four.’ Murakami’s title does not include the suffix for ‘year’ (-nen), leaving the Japanese reader to question what relationship there could be between this odd group of four characters and the year 1984. As an English title, then, encountered before the reader has had a chance to read the novel, 1Q84 should be somewhat puzzling, as the original ‘ichi-kew-hachi-yon’ is, and out to be pronounced, ‘One-Q-Eight-Four’

True, without access to the Q/9 pun, the reader in English will be slightly more puzzled than the Japanese reader, but that lasts only a little more than a hundred pages. At that point, the female protagonist, Aomame, convinces herself that she is no longer living in the normal world of 1984, that the world around her has changed or is on some kind of track parallel to 1984, and that she needs a name to distinguish this new mode of existence: ‘1Q84 – that’s what I’ll call this new world,’ Aomame decided…Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question…Like it or not, I’m here now, in the year 1Q84. The 1984 that I knew no longer exists.’ From this point on in the Japanese text, Murakami consistently adds the –nen suffix to his intriguing four-character title, writing it ‘1Q84-nen,’ for which the Japanese pronunciation would most likely be ‘ichi-kew-hachi-yo-nen.’ Once this context of discussing year names is established, the pronunciation in English ‘One-Q-Eighty-Four’ is all but inescapable. Many readers are likely to pronounce the title this way, though, strictly as a title, ‘One-Q-Eight-Four’ is marginally more correct.

The unavailability of the Q/9 pun to readers in English raises the question of how best to translate the title. The ‘Q is for ‘question mark’ might have been brought out by using an actual question mark: 1?84, but that would have made the title even more unpronounceable, and it might have incorrectly suggested that the author was hinting at other centuries (1884, 1784, etc.) Finally the look of ‘1Q84’ with the capital Q boldly plunked among the numerals, is at least as important as the sound and is certainly more important than the Q/9 pun itself, which does not have a deep meaning. The pun simply makes Aomame’s choice of the letter Q seem less arbitrary in Japanese than it does in English, but in a book with a million arbitrary-seeming decisions and story twists, Aomame’s Q does not stand out.

Clearly, what Murakami was aiming for in his title was that it should be enigmatic, that it should be visually striking, and that it should have an Orwellian echo.. Although the title evokes Orwell’s 1984, and both books begin on a chilly day in early April 1984, the novel 1Q84 cannot be called an homage to or a variation or commentary on Orwell. As a critique of the Soviet Union and totalitarianism in general, 1984 imagines one possible future. 1Q84 instead ‘looks back and imagines the past as it might have been,’ says Murakami, who points out that he is interested in examining the mentality of the era he lived through from a different perspective…”

And a bit from Matthew Carl Strecher’s The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami:

“…1Q84 is a relatively simple narrative, particularly when compared to Kafka on the Shore. Its plot is relatively explicit, though like most Murakami works, it contains certain puzzles that remain unsolved to the end (the ‘Little People,’ to name one), intentionally left for readers to decipher on their own. 1Q84 also contains a quasi-sacred subnarrative, which will be explored…that deals with mythological aspects of the ‘other world,’ so here will confine ourselves to the metaphysical qualities of this novel as a prelude to that discussion…”

“…1Q84 is centered on the gradual convergence of its two lead characters, Tengo and Aomame. The work’s title is derived from the name Aomame assigns to the ‘other world,’ the Q standing for ‘question mark.’ However, use of the expression ‘other world’ in this particular world is somewhat unsatisfying; in fact, it is more like a time slip or, as the Leader describes it to Aomame…like a train switching tracks. ‘This is not a parallel world…Here the problem is one of time…the point where the track switched, and the world became 1Q84.’ It would be most accurate, then, to envision ‘1Q84’ as a side step for time, not unlike opening one new circuit while closing off another. Murakami himself may have been concerned that his readers would misunderstand this point, for more than one character remarks that there can only be one reality at any given time.

Structurally, too, the world of 1Q84 represents a significant departure in how Murakami handles the idea of other worlds. Aside from certain bizarre details – the existence of the Little People, a second moon hanging in the sky, police who carry automatic weapons rather than revolvers – this new dimension is virtually indistinguishable from the old, and while Aomame unmistakably enters ‘1Q84’ in the characteristic way, that is, via an escape ladder form an elevated highway, even she does not initially notice anything different. The eerie, gloomy, atmosphere that normally marks the metaphysical realm is nowhere to be found.”

And finally, as Charles Baxter wrote in his review in The New York Review of Books:

“The whole of 1Q84 is closer to comedy than to tragedy, but it is a deeply obsessive book, and one of its obsessions is Macbeth and the problem of undoings. After saying that Banquo is dead and cannot come out of his grave, Lady Macbeth in Act Five observes that “what’s done cannot be undone.” Then she leaves the stage for the last time. What the two major characters in 1Q84 desire above all else is to undo Wonderland and to get out of it and back to each other, but “gears that have turned forward never turn back,” a phrase that is repeated with variations three times in the novel, as if the problem of a snowball narrative had to do with how to melt the snowball and escape the glittering and thrilling world that Unrealism has created. 1Q84 seems to be about the undoing of a curse, so that the characters who believe that “the original world no longer exists” can somehow get back to that original world they no longer believe in. In a somewhat startling form of humanism and faith, Tengo and Aomame come to believe that what has been done can be undone.

That they do so by means of loyalty, prayers, and love is the most touching element of this book, and for some readers it will be the most questionable. Aomame, the novel’s assassin, repeats to herself a prayer that Murakami quotes several times. This prayer is the novel’s purest article of faith:

‘O Lord in Heaven, may Thy name be praised in utmost purity for ever and ever, and may Thy kingdom come to us. Please forgive our many sins, and bestow Thy blessings upon our humble pathways. Amen.’

I finished 1Q84 feeling that its spiritual project was heroic and beautiful, that its central conflict involved a pitched battle between realism and unrealism (while being scrupulously fair to both sides), and that, in our own somewhat unreal times, younger readers, unlike me, would have no trouble at all believing in the existence of Little People and replicants. What they may have trouble with is the novel’s absolute faith in the transformative power of love.”

Let’s have fun with this one. And please…share with the group your comments and questions!

My next post: Tuesday, September 9.
Our reading: 1Q84, Chapters 1-10
Enjoy!

“If you remember me, I don’t care if everyone else forgets.”

Kafka on the Shore
Conclusion
By Dennis Abrams

I so love this book. And after this reading, even more so.

OK…Kafka.

Kafka, asleep in bed gets a call from Oshima who tells him to get dressed and packed and ready to go. He drives Kafka to the cabin in Kochi, telling him that the police are searching the city every since word broke of Nakata’s confession to the stabbing – police suspect that Kafka may have hired him to commit the crime. AS they drive, Oshima asks Kafka to stop seeing Ms. Saeki, at least for the time being, fearing that her deluded sense that Kafka is the reincarnation of her husband is dangerous.

When they arrive at the cabin, Oshima lays down for a nap while Kafka puts away the groceries and reads for awhile. When Oshima wakes up, he once again warns Kafka about the dangers of wandering too far into the woods – it seems that during the War, a regiment of soldiers trained in these woods, and two disappeared, never to be found.

But despite Oshima’s warning, Kafka wanders into the forest, carrying survival supplies and going deeper into the woods than ever before. That night, he dreams about raping Sakura despite her pleas not to, telling him that although it is a dream, she is his sister. He orgasms and wakes up.

Kafka once again goes into the woods, forging a trail with an axe, all the while arguing with Crow. He has been fighting against his father’s curse all his life, culminating in the previous night’s metaphysical rape of his “sister” Sakura. Believing the war within him is destroying him, he throws away his survival supplies (except his father’s hunting knife) and goes farther into the forest. He is, in effect, committing suicide.

Wandering through the woods, Kafka feels so connected to the rhythms of nature that he is not afraid of being lost, but still feels despair that his mother hated him so much that she abandoned him and confusion about his feelings for Ms. Saeki. Indeed, he seems to doubt the possibility of actually feeling love for anyone. And then…the two Japanese Imperial soldiers who disappeared in the woods during the War approach him, telling him that they have been waiting for him for a long time, and inviting him to come with them through the “entrance.” He agrees to do so.

But as the soldiers lead Kafka through an increasingly treacherous woods, he tires and is starting to fall behind when they reach a ridge overlooking what looks like a deserted village. They descend, and take him to a hut that in the inside looks like Oshima’s cabin. There, he is told to adjust to his surroundings (much as Oshima told him to do) and is left alone. He turns on the TV and watches part of The Sound of Music before falling asleep. When he wakes up, the spirit of the teenage Ms. Saeki is cooking him dinner. They sit and talk; she tells him she has no name and will appear whenever he needs to see her. Kafka tells her that he feels he has come to this place to see her and one other person.

And then…we see The Boy Named Crow, who comes upon Johnnie Walker in the woods??? He shows Crow the flutes made from cat’s souls, and complains that since dying he’s been stuck in limbo and is struggling to find a way out. Walker invites Crow to try and kill him; Crow leaps on him, gashing his skin and cutting out his eyes and tongue, but Johnnie just laughs. (What was that all about???)
Kafka wakes up in the lonely village, wanting to read a book, but there are none there. The spirit of the young Ms. Saeki returns to sit with him, telling him that she feels completely one with him. She also says that this village, a place where time is meaningless, is also a place where memory ceases to exist, along with hunger. (Not unlike the End of the World?) After the 15 year old spirit disappears, the real Ms. Saeki enters the hut. Kafka prepares her tea and they talk her about their relationship. Ms. Saeki explains to him how much she lost trying to ‘freeze time’ when she feared she would lose her husband, and begs him to return to the real world immediately, telling him to take the picture of the boy on the beach and to always remember her. Kafka forgives her for leaving him as a child. The two soldiers lead Kafka out of the village, warning him, a la Lot’s wife (or Orpheus?) not to look back. He does once, at the top of the ridge, and comes close to not leaving. Finally, though, he makes his way back to Oshima’s cabin.
(My take on this extraordinary section? The village is the place that each of the book’s main characters – Nakata, Ms. Saeki, the evil spirit – has been trying to reach – a place free from time and desire – limbo.

And this it seems is what Kafka has desired as well. He has experienced pain and love and hope and loss almost comparable to Ms. Saeki’s, and now he is the place where she has actually lived since she was twenty. And the two Imperial soldiers? They serve the role of Chiron on the River Styx, leading Kafka from one life to the next. And they also serve another role as well – as an image of two men who have avoided a life of pain and torment while giving up a life of happiness as well.)

Oshima’s brother Sada comes to the cabin to retrieve Kafka. As they drive back to Takamatsu, Sada says that the cabin is the one thing that unites him and Oshima. After discussing surfing, Kafka tells Sada that he went into the woods – Sada asks if he met the soldiers, although neither one will acknowledge what the soldiers told them. At the library, Oshima tells Kafka that Ms. Saeki has died, and gives him the picture of the boy on the beach along with a copy of “Kafka on the Shore.” Kafka says that it’s time to return to Tokyo to finish school and to talk to the police, Later, he might come back to work with Oshima at the library.

At the bus station, Kafka calls Sakura to tell her he is leaving Takamatsu. She tells him that she had dreamed of him a couple of nights earlier, but it was not the same rape dream he had – she dreamed that she was protecting him. On the bus back to Tokyo, Crow tells Kafka that he did well on his journey, but Kafka is worried that he learned nothing about himself. Crow tells him to sleep and when he wakes, he will be in a whole new life.

And…Nakata’s story:

Hoshino rents a car that won’t stand out and brings it back to the apartment. There, Nakata talks to him about the stone, which he says is telling him that someplace nearby has what they need. The next day, the pair begin driving around Takamatsu, looking for the mysterious location, but after a full day of looking, Nakata doesn’t find it, and the normally patient Hoshino is getting pissed. The same thing happens the next day, but on their way home, they got lost in the neighborhood surrounding their apartment and come across the Komura Library, which Nakata is sure is his destination. But since it’s Monday the library is closed and the play to return the next day.
The intrepid duo return to the library where they are greeted by Oshima. Hoshino reads a book about Beethoven and at lunch, he talks with Oshima. In the afternoon, Nakata and Hoshino take Ms. Saeki’s tour of the library; Nakata mentions that he is from the area where Kafka’s father was murdered, which makes Hoshino nervous, but Ms. Saeki continues with the tour. Afterward, the pair go back to the reading room, but suddenly, Nakata runs out and into Ms. Saeki’s study, where he tells her he wants to talk to her about the entrance stone. She agrees and closes the door so that they can speak in private.

And here’s where it gets interesting: they realize they are companions with incomplete shadows: he can’t live anywhere except in the present; and she can’t live anywhere except in the past. We learn that she opened the entrance stone when she was twenty to try to save her husband but was punished for doing so: first with his death, and then with her inability to forget their love. Now, she understands why Nakata is doing the same. She points out to him that HE Is the boy looking out at the water in the painting, and when they touch hands his mind suddenly floods with memories. Ms. Saeki gives Nakata a pile of papers that she says tells the story of her life and asks him to burn them. (She restores his memories, he destroys hers.) Nakata and Hoshino leave to find a place to burn them; Oshima is so busy manning the front desk that is not until late afternoon that he realizes that Ms. Saeki has died. While he waits for the ambulance, Oshima makes note of the time to tell Kafka.

After Nakata and Hoshino burn Ms. Saeki’s memoir, Nakata once again is very tired, so Hoshino calls a cab to take them home. In the cab, he tells Nakata how much the ten days he has spent with him have meant, and how Nakata has made him a better person. Nakata falls asleep in the cab, Hoshino carries him to bed, where Nakata dies peacefully in his sleep. Hoshino, afraid of complicity in the Tokyo murder, thinks about calling the examiner and leaving, but stops short, when he realizes that the entrance stone has not been closed. He wants to do that for Nakata but doesn’t know how, so he waits for word from Colonel Sanders.

While waiting to figure out what to do with the stone, he turns the AC up to keep Nakata from smelling. The weather slowly gets better; the opposite of the storm when Hoshino flipped the stone for the first time. He can’t sleep, and the next morning he sits with the stone (a la Nakata) and tells it his failings, feeling that his life has largely been a waste. A cat goes by the window and tells him “hello.”
Hoshino is now able to speak with cats, and the cat warns him that a being of pure evil will try to sleep through the entrance before it closes – this is the time when Hoshino must flip the stone and kill the being once and for all. Hoshino is worried, though, that he doesn’t know what this being even looks like: the cats gives him the clue that it only moves by night. So, that night, Hoshino waits by the stone with an arsenal of kitchen knives and mallets. At midnight, he sees a creature that looks like a slimy white salamander crawl out of Nakata’s mouth and head straight for the stone. His knives and mallets have no effect on it, so Hoshino concentrates all his energy on flipping the stone: after he does so, he easily kills the creature with a knife. The next morning, Hoshino says farewell to Nakata and takes the creature’s body away to be burned.

And Kafka has learned the lesson that he ran away from home to discover. Ms. Saeki, who squandered her life after twenty, had begged him that he had to accept the pain of his own early live and keep on living. Oshima seconded that in Chapter 49, telling Kafka that we store memories inside of us like books in a library, and only every now and they do we need to dust them off.

The novel, then, ends like it began, with Kafka and Crow talking. At the beginning, Crow had cautioned Kafka that the only way he could survive was by becoming the toughest fifteen-year old in the world. And as the story ends on the bus back to Tokyo, Crow assures Kafka that he is a survivor.

From Matthew Carl Strecher’s extraordinary new book, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami:

“…Saeki and Nakata actually share the same crippling debilitation: like the protagonist who is trapped in ‘the Town’ in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, both have lost their shadows and must now live in the conscious world – on this side – while their other halves go on existing ‘over there.’ Nakata’s story begins in the closing days of World II. For reasons that are never made clear – perhaps it was to escape the rampant violence that surrounded him in his own world – Nakata entered the ‘other world’ as a child, emerging some weeks later without his ‘shadow.’ Along with his shadow, he has lost the ability to remember anything from his past or to form new memories. Put in a slightly different way, he is no longer a being in ‘time,’ divided into past, present, and future, but of Time, that unified eternity in which past and future are bound up in an endless present. Saeki, on the other hand, having once entered the ‘other world’ as a teenager in the mid-1960s, appears to have returned without her complete physical self. Today she has the appearance of a woman in her midforties, but she is, almost literally, a mere shadow of herself with nothing but memories to sustain her. Much like Cinnamon, she spends her time writing memories in a notebook.

Owing in part to his liberation from the snares of the human construct of time, like Yuki in Dance Dance Dance, Nakata is able to sense when certain things are going to happen. And yet, again like Yuki, he cannot be certain whether he is merely seeing what will happen or is actually making it happen. Following his murder of the spirit known as ‘Johnny Walker,’ Nakata visits the nearest police box and confesses what he has done, but he is taken for a senile old man and told to go home. As he prepares to leave, Nakata helpfully suggests to the officer that he bring along an umbrella should he be on duty the next evening, even if the sky is clear, because ‘fish will fall from the sky like rain. A lot of fish. Probably sardines, though there may be a few mackerel mixed in among them.’ The following day, as he predicted, a great plague of fish rains down upon that section of Tokyo. Somewhat later, at a rest area on the way to Shikoku, Nakata observes a man being beaten to death by a biker gang in a parking lot. As when he witnessed Johnny Walker’s cruelty toward the neighborhood cats, Nakata’s inner self reacts to this brazen violence and rises to the surface of his consciousness, incensed:

‘Nakata closed his eyes. Something in his body was quietly boiling over, and he was powerless to hold it back. He felt faintly nauseated…Nakata looked up at the sky, then slowly opened his umbrella above his head. Then, carefully, he took several steps backward…At first it was just a few spatters, but soon the numbers swelled and it became a downpour. They were pitch-black and about an inch long. Beneath the lights of the parking lot it looked fascinating, like black snow. This unlucky snow struck where it landed on the men’s shoulders, arms, and necks. They tried to pull them off, but this was not easily done.’
“Leeches,’ someone said.’

Does Nakata open his umbrella because it is about to rain leeches, or does it rain leeches because Nakata opens his umbrella? Even Nakata appears uncertain. Later in the novel he confides to Hoshino that he is afraid of being used for some terrible evil. ‘Suppose, for instance, that what falls from the sky next time is ten thousand knives, or a huge bomb, or poison gas/ What would Nakata do then?’ The truth is that Nakata, by his own admission, is an ‘empty shell’; we might say he is a mere vessel through which ideas – words – pass at the whim of others, and it is this, rather than any willpower of his own, that brings these new realities into being. He has never truly been in control of his life or of the things that happen in this world through him.

It is, instead, Saeki who represents the more active aspect of the two characters, for in contrast to Nakata’s ‘pure flesh’ existence, Saeki is something closer to ‘pure thought,’ or ‘pure spirit.’ Like all Murakami’s characters – like the ‘poor aunt’ – she has a corporeal form but one that can change; her true existence is bound up in the pages of manuscript paper on which she scribbles, virtually non-stop, with her fountain pen. In response to Nakata’s admission, late in the book, that he understands nothing but the present, Saeki declares to him that she is the opposite, that ‘I haven’t had anyone I could call a friend for a long time…except for my memories.’

But what exactly has Saeki been writing on her manuscript paper, so much that it fills many large file folders? ‘Since returning to live in this town, I have been sitting at this desk, writing this manuscript,’ she explains to Nakata. ‘It is a record of the life I have followed.’ Her final request to Nakata, before he touches her hand and sends her ‘over there’ for good, is that he burn the entire manuscript, so that not a single fragment remains. This collection of manuscript pages thus stands in for the physical remains of Saeki; its burning will be her cremation.

Though he is unable to read or write himself, Nakata intuitively grasps the importance of both, for as Saeki tries to explain to him, the process of writing is synonymous with the act of living, of existing meaningfully, something about which Nakata has no firsthand knowledge since his childhood:

‘It’s a very important thing, the act of writing, isn’t it’? Nakata asked her.
‘Yes. That’s right. It is the act of writing that is so very important. There is nothing meaningful in what has been written, in the result itself.’
‘Nakata cannot read or write, so I cannot leave any records behind,’ said Mr. Nakata. ‘Nakata is just like a cat.’

Stated another way, words – spoken or written – create a new reality for themselves. The act of writing, rather than what is written, is important because through this means we create a new, often tangible, reality. And Saeki is correct is stating that what is written is meaningless, but fails to add, ‘until it is read by another.’ It is the acknowledgment of another that brings the reality of all words to fruition. For Saeki, however, the only person she might wish to read her words is long gone from this world, so she directs Nakata to destroy them.

The most important reality generated through words in this novel, of course, occurs for the title character, Tamura Kafka himself, whose solution to the Oedipal prophecy/curse that governs his life is to create the reality he desire by fulfilling every last detail of that prophecy as it was spoken by his father. In so doing, as we will see [below], Kafka uses his oracle to construct a world in which he regains not only his mother and sister but a renewed (and for him, more acceptable) sense of identity.”
….
“In Kafka on the Shore, the forest plays an even more central role as a narrative setting, not only in terms of the detailed description it receives but also for its function as a repository of the collective memories of humanity and a meeting place for those memories. In its role as the ‘other world,’ reprising the metaphysical hotel in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, the forest also serves as a conduit between worlds and as a sort of ‘changing room’ wherein the inner self may leap from one physical vessel to another Access to this forest, as always, requires a journey, yet the ‘other world’ of the forest also seems to lurk always just beside us, waiting for us to take that one step farther across the boundary into oblivion.

This journey, in the case of Kafka on the Shore, is made by the title character, Kafka himself. As will be recalled…Kafka having fled from his father’s prophecy to Takamatsu City in Shikoku, Kafka lays low at the Komori Memorial Library, where the cross-dressing Oshima provides him company, counsel, and, when necessary, an escape route. As detectives hunt for Kafka as a ‘person of interest’ following the murder of his father, however, they track him to Takamatsu, eventually coming across the library, and Oshima, fearing that Kafka may be implicated, takes him deep into the forested mountains of Shikoku outside of Takamatsu City. There, at a tiny, secluded cabin owned by Oshima’s easygoing surfer brother, Kafka spends a few days in seclusion, warned by Oshima not to wander too far into the forest, as he might never find his way back. As a cautionary tale, Oshima tells him about two deserters from the Imperial Army during World War II who escaped into the forest, never to be seen again.

In time, of course, Kafka does enter the forest, marking trees with spray paint as he goes, like Hansel and Gretel dropping bits of bread. During his initial stay at the cabin he explores slowly and methodically, venturing slightly farther each day into its murky depths. Even here, at the edge of the metaphysical world, he senses something powerful and mysterious. The description is remarkably like that of the protagonist in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World:

‘Like yesterday, the forest is dark and deep. The towering trees surround me like a wall. In the gloomy hues, something hidden among the trees, like in an optical illusion picture, is observing my movements.’

Not until the end of the novel, however, does Kafka finally penetrate deeply enough to discover those who actually reside in the metaphysical realm of the forest. Initially, he meets up with two soldiers – the same two who disappeared during World War II, and although the war has been over for decades, both appear exactly as they were the day they deserted from the Imperial Army. They lead Kafka into a dense part of the forest, eventually coming upon a small cluster of cabins deep in the woods. One clever narratological detail worth noting here is that although the soldiers speak to Kafka and he asks them questions, Kafka’s utterances are not set off by quotation marks; we may conclude from this that Kafka’s utterances are really thoughts, for his mind is directly hardwired into the collective unconscious represented by this forest. Much as we see in the latter pages of Hear the Wind Sing, as Kafka converses with others, he is also conversing always with himself.

When Kafka finally does reach the village, he is mildly surprised to find that it has electricity supplied by wind power, and even electrical appliances, though they are uniformly fifteen to twenty years out of date and look as though they have been taken out of trash dumps. This suggests that the metaphysical world – or at least this little part of it – has been closed off since the 1960s, presumably when Saeki and her boyfriend opened and closed the ‘Gateway Stone.’ Since that time, the village has remained isolated, blocked from receiving fresh input (The repetitive showing of The Sound of Music on the television Kafka discovers would seem to suggest the year 1965.) That fresh, current input (memories) from the physical world is supplied by Kafka himself, and thus the ‘Saeki’ whom Kafka meets there is, simultaneously, the middle-aged woman he fantasizes to be his mother (and with whom he has by now had sexual intercourse) and also the fifteen-year-old girl who first entered that world more than twenty years earlier. The forest will preserve both versions of Saeki forever.

EXPLOITING THE MIND-BODY SPLIT

In addition to its function as a repository for memory, the ‘other world’ in Kafka on the Shore serves as a conduit by which characters may cross vast distances in this world without ever leaving. This is accomplished through the mind-body separation we have already seen in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. In this later work, however, the phenomenon is used to open up the narrative structure to virtually endless possibilities as each character’s true identity grows less and less clear. This is, on the one hand, liberating, as our potential readings of the text increase exponentially depending on how we choose to confront each character; at the same time, much of the complexity – and confusion – in this novel arises from its use of a kind of latticed structure, in which characters with intact inner selves are juxtaposed with those who have no inner self, as well as some who appear to have multiple inner selves. When this inherent confusion of character identity is combined with the overlay – like transparency films placed atop one another – of multiple historical eras in physical time, the tangle grows even worse.

Among the trickier characters in this text is Tamura Kafka’s father, Tamura Koji, a sculptor who is, for at least part of the narrative, possessed by the spirit taking the form of ‘Johnny Walker.’ But is Johnny Walker actually Kafka’s father, or has he joined the party, so to speak, at some later point? Kafka’s loathing of his father brings this dilemma into sharper relief; is the man Kafka detests Tamura Koji himself, or is the spirit we know as Johnny Walker? Kawai Hayao is also drawn into this slippage between identities within these father figures:

‘Kafka’s real father, Johnny Walker, Colonel Sanders, Hakata – they are all father figures. This novel is full of fathers. So it is not so simple as just killing the father and having done with it; no matter how many times the father is killed, he just keeps reemerging in different guises.’

Further, Kafka’s father is not the only tricky issue in this story. Whether Kawai means to argue for shirting core identities, this is precisely what leaves us in so much doubt about who is really who.

One approach to this dilemma is to explore the historical layering of the novel. Each of the three principled characters we meet – Nakata, Saeki, and Tamura Kafka – represents a distinct generation, a discreet historical era, and each at some point in his or her youth, for various reasons, enters the metaphysical world. Beginning chronologically, Nakata first enters this world as a child in 1944, the closing days of World War II, whereupon he loses his ‘shadow,’ in effect, his mind. Saeki, a musician who shared a relationship with a young man…entered the ‘other world’ during the turbulent 1960s, seeking a place where the chaos of the outer, physical world could not threaten the perfect enclosure in which she and her boyfriend lived; she, too, emerged from this world without her other half – her boyfriend. Kafka, finally, goes ‘over there’ near the end of the novel’s present (concurrent with the novel’s writing), but, unlike the others, escapes with more than he possessed when he entered. The one thing each character’s foray into the ‘other world’ has in common with the others is that it occurs at a moment of chaos and fear: Nakata’s during the conclusion of a disastrous war, Saeki’s during the rising tide of violence attending the antigovernment student movements in the 1960s, and Kafka’s in the face of a more personal crisis, namely, his association by blood with a man he considers to be evil.

Despite their distinct historical epochs, however, these three cases are also linked obliquely by a voice in Kafka’s head, whom he knows as ‘the Boy Called Crow’ (karasu to yohareru shonen) who guides Kafka in nearly all of his movements away from his father and the prophecy he has received from him. For purposes of this discussion, it is useful to state at the outset that this ‘voice’ very likely represents the shadow lost by Nakata as a child. [MY NOTE: Really? Interesting…] As such, we will focus our attention chiefly on what actually happened to Nakata on that day in 1944.

Nakata’s entry into the ‘other world’ takes place during something that comes to be known as the ‘rice bowl hill’ incident. Although this incident is narrated through chapters that occur far apart from one another in the text, the narrative may be reconstructed as follows: Nakata’s teacher, a woman whose husband has been killed fighting in the Pacific theater, has a vividly erotic dream about her husband one night. The following day, as she leads her class – Nakata’s class – into the mountains to hunt for wild mushrooms, her menstruation suddenly begins, her blood flow unusually heavy. After cleaning herself as best she can, she buries the bloody towel far from the group, yet not long thereafter finds Nakata standing before her, presenting her bloody towel to her in silence. Possessed by a sudden, uncontrollable rage, she beats him savagely about the face. Shortly after this, a silvery glint is seen in the sky – the teacher assumes it is a lone B-29 bomber, perhaps on reconnaissance. Suddenly all the children collapse in a collective faint. All awaken some hours later, with no apparent ill effects, save Nakata, who remains in his coma for several weeks. When at last he awakens, he has not only lost his memory but the ability to construct new memories as well. He has, however, acquired the ability to speak the language of cats. He spends the rest of his days a ward of his family, and later the state, unable to read or write but useful to the families in his neighborhood in locating lost pets.

If previous Murakami fiction is any guide, we may conclude that like the protagonist of Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and Kumiko in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, he simply remained for too long in the ‘other world,’ to the point that he could no longer maintain connections with his shadow. In fact, more than once Nakata explains to other characters that he is without a shadow, and so we may view in him an idea of what might have happened to the protagonist of that earlier work if, rather than remaining in the forest that stands between the physical and metaphysical worlds, he had instead managed to escape the Town and return to the physical world without his shadow – one of four possible scenarios Murakami identifies for the earlier novel.

But what actually happened to Nakata’s shadow after its separation from him in 1944? Did it die? Did it remain in the ‘other world?’ Or did it perhaps find other hosts – other physical beings – with which to join when they happened to wander too far into the forbidden forest and found themselves in the metaphysical world? This appears to be what has happened with Nakata’s shadow, not just once but several times.

If the inner mid or spirit is indeed capable of moving from one body to another, as previous Murakami texts have clearly suggested to be the case, it is not implausible to suppose that Nakata’s shadow originated with the husband of his childhood teacher (which is why he so unerringly located her menses, a silent communication to her from the dead), and later inhabited not only Saeki’s boyfriend at one time (which would go far in explaining the question of why Saeki tells Nakata that ‘I have known you from a long time past’ but also Kafka himself in the form of ‘the Boy Called Crow’? Having taken our (admittedly speculative) reading this far, why not supposed that Nakata’s shadow at one time inhabited Kafka’s real father, Tamura Koji, as well? If Saeki actually were Kafka’s mother, this would help us to understand why she was drawn to him in the first place.

The final piece of the puzzle is, of course, the trickster spirit now calling himself Johnny Walker, for if Nakata’s shadow can move from body to body, so too can Johnny Walker. If we imagine in this work a sort of pursuit, in which the Johnny Walker spirit and Nakata’s shadow chase one another through time, across generations, driving each other from one body to another, we might gain insights into several of the riddles Murakami sets up in this story, among them (a) why Saeki’s boyfriend was killed in Tokyo, and (b) why Saeki left Kafka and his father behind, if indeed she is his real mother.

It may also mean, of course, that Kafka is his own father.

This reading is but one of many, intended not to offer a definitive explication of Kafka on the Shore but rather to highlight the extraordinarily open-ended text that results when the fixed nature of the ‘self’ – combining flesh and spirit – is disrupted and the two become separable. But what is the role of the ‘other world’ in this instance? To answer this, we need to look at the moments at which flesh and spirit break apart. This occurs most notably in the chapters in which Nakata, led to the home of Tamura Koji and Kafka in Tokyo by a large black dog, is confronted with the horror of Johnny Walker’s harvest of cat’s souls.

The sequence, which stretches across three chapters, begins in a vacant lot where Nakata has been waiting patiently, seeking information about a missing cat named ‘Goma.’ While he waits, an enormous black dog approaches him and, without actually speaking, communicates to him that he must follow it. This he does and soon arrives at the home recently abandoned by Kafka. The house itself is protected by an ‘old fashioned gate,’ and upon being led into what appears to be the study, Nakata find it quite dark. In the dim light admitted through the closed curtains, he can see only that there is a desk in the room and the silhouette of someone seated beside it. The atmosphere of the room, reminiscent once again of Room 208 in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and the living room of Rat’s villa in A Wild Sheep Chase, marks it as a part of the ‘other world.’

There he meets Johnny Walker (but not being a drinker, does not recognize his iconic costume), whose description is equally otherworldly, a mass of negatives: ‘His face had no distinguishing characteristics. He was neither young nor old. He was neither handsome nor ugly’ He is, rather, just ‘in-between’ all descriptors, marking his place as something belong neither to ‘this side’ nor to ‘over there’ but to both. He is, however, at present located in the ‘other world,’ and it would seem that the only way he can break free of the metaphysical realm and emerge into the physical is through his own death. This is why he has summoned Nakata.

His choice is an apt one, for mild-manner though Nakata appears, his self-description as a ‘man without a shadow,’ an ‘empty shell,’ makes him the ideal tool for the job. Nakata’s physical self is, finally, a mere portal, a conduit between the physical and metaphysical worlds, and into his body virtually any force of Will may lodge. However, he must be brought to the proper ‘temperature’ before this may occur. Johnny Walker brings Nakata to his boiling point by committing acts of brutality – of war, as he himself terms it – against the very cats who form Nakata’s circle of attachment. He urges Nakata, likewise, to do his duty as a soldier:

‘You have never killed anyone, nor have you ever wished to kill anyone. You don’t have that tendency. But listen here, Mr. Nakata, there are places in our world where that kind of logic doesn’t work. There are times when no one cares much about your tendencies. You need to understand that. Like in war…When war starts, you get taken to be a soldier. When you’re taken as a soldier, you sling your rifle and head off to the battlefield, and you have to kill enemy soldiers. You have to kill a lot of them. No one cares whether you like it or not. It’s what you have to do, and if you don’t, you get killed instead.’

In this statement, Johnny Walker reveals his true character as a spirit: he is a force of chaos, of bloodlust, the madness that possesses ordinary people in times of war. If we consider his function in terms of history, we recognize that the moments of chaos and struggle in our world are precisely those in which he has been released from the ‘other world’ to play his role on ‘this side.’ Within this context we may understand better why Nakata’s shadow chose to remain in the ‘other world’ in 1944; like Kizuki and Naoko in Norwegian Wood, and indeed like Saeki and her lover (who, I maintain, actually was Nakata’s shadow) in this novel, he sought to escape the ravages of violence that had gripped the physical world, to find a place of perfect, utopian peace. Herein we discover the cause of the inherent, incessant conflict that exists and always will exist between this spirit and Nakata’s shadow, the former seeking to foment chaos and destruction, the latter to stamp it out. This is why, in the face of Johnny Walker’s acts of brutality – indeed, witnessing any acts of brutality – Nakata’s ‘empty vessel’ connects with its inner core and is overcome by the urge to return violence for violence. ‘Something was definitely beginning to happen inside him. A violent confusion was attempting to change the constitution of his flesh.’ And at last, unable to bear any more, ‘Nakata stood up from his seat without a word. No one – not even Nakata himself – could have stopped him. He advanced with great strides, and without hesitation snatched up one of the knives on the desk.’ He then plunges the knife into the breast of Johnny Walker, right up to the handle. Johnny Walker laughs hysterically throughout his own murder, for he knows that this killing is the key to his release into the physical world.

This explication of the role of the spirit taking the form of Johnny Walker gives us insight into the nature and role of the other important spirit in this novel, that taking the form of Colonel Sanders. Moving beyond the obvious dichotomy their forms represent as “spirit’ and ‘flesh’ (whiskey and meat), we note that Colonel Sanders’s character is, on the whole, marked by the pleasures of the flesh, not only of eating but of sex. When Nakata and his young sidekick Hoshino reach Takamatsu, the latter takes a stroll around town and meets up with Colonel Sanders, who, in addition to promising to help him locate the Gateway Stone that blocks the portal between the physical and metaphysical worlds, procures for him a stunning prostitute – significantly, a university student majoring in philosophy, thus representing the rational, ordered nature of the universe. From this we conclude that where Johnny Walker is a force of destruction and death, Colonel Sanders is a force of life, plenty, fertility, and pleasure.

It would, however, be a mistake to assign value judgments to these two sides of the dichotomy, for the two spirits transcend such human considerations. Rather, both are necessary, both forces of nature, each defining the other. Johnny Walker’s behavior is undoubtedly disturbing, disruptive, but he is not evil; rather, he serves to awaken a destructive impulse that lurks beneath the surface, both for Nakata and for Kafka. Jung’s model would suggest that both Johnny Walker and Colonel Sanders represent ‘archetypes’ of the inner mind, each with an equal capacity to guide or to deceive. Both transcend human emotions, and this is why neither of the two spirits betrays what Colonel Sanders (somewhat disdainfully) terms ‘feelings,’ and yet each is indelibly linked to our human minds as well. When Colonel Sanders dominates, we behave in a manner that leads to order and tranquility; when Johnny Walker takes over, we lose our cool and act as beasts. For Jung, the latter would be considered the darker, more primitive side of the inner shadow, emotional and predictable. ‘Closer examination of the dark characteristics – that is, the inferiorities constituting the shadow – reveals that they have an emotional nature, a kind of autonomy, and accordingly an obsessive or, better, possessive quality,’ writes Jung. ‘On this lower level with its uncontrolled or scarcely controlled emotions one behaves more or less like a primitive, who is not only the passive victim of his affects but also singularly incapable of moral judgment.’ This is essentially the transformation that overcomes Nakata when he witnesses brutal acts: his dark inner self rises to the surface, forcing his surface persona into a subordinate position, and lets loose its destructive urges. The question, as always, is one of balance between our own inner forces of nature, between the inner and outer minds, the flesh and the spirit, the physical and the metaphysical aspects of our selves. The balance is achieved through control (or, at times, the lack of control) over the flow of psychic energy between the two realms. Nakata’s role, as Iwamiya also notes, is to facilitate the flow these elemental forces from one realm to the other, keeping them balanced in their respective realms. ‘When overwhelmed by the power of the other side, life in this world loses its weight and becomes distorted. When the distortions of the world are corrected, these distortions are also corrected. The burden of correcting these distortions falls to Nakata.’ He does this, as we have seen, through the violence that is released when his own psychic energy is ‘brought to a boil,’ so to speak, but also by opening the Gateway Stone, permitting the necessary flow and equalization of energy between the physical and metaphysical worlds.”

—————-

So…what did you think of the book? Of Strecher’s reading of it? Share your thoughts and questions with the group!

My next post: Tuesday, September 2, my introduction to our next book, Murakami’s broadest vision to date: 1Q84.

“As long as there’s such a thing as time, everybody’s damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later.”

Kafka on the Shore
Chapters 25-36
By Dennis Abrams

This is so good…

Let’s catch up with Kafka:

Kafka gets another late night visit from the spirit of the teenage Ms. Saeki and realizes in the morning that he is love with the spirit and that the spirit is in love with her long-dead lover. Kafka asks Oshima if he can find the music to “Kafka on the Shore” and wonders aloud if Ms Saeki is his mother. Later that day, Kafka brings her coffee, and she asks why he ran away from home. As they talk, she says that he reminds her of a boy she knew long ago. She also mentions, curiously enough, that she had written a book of interviews with people who had been struck by lightning. That night, Kafka remembers that when he was younger, his father had been struck by lightning on a golf course.

Kafka is visited again by the spirit, and that morning, Oshima is interviewed by the police. They know that Kafka came to the library, but Oshima covers for him, saying he hasn’t seen him in days. When Kafka brings Ms. Saeki her coffee that day, he asks her if she has any children – she doesn’t answer. That night, Kafka wonders if he is in love with the younger or the older Ms. Saeki.

Kafka calls Sakura to warn her that the police know he has called her in the past – that was how they traced him to the library – and to let her know that he is safe. He says that he is in a “surreal” situation. She invites him to come back to her place, but he tells her that he is in love with somebody else. Sakura tells him that if he ever needs to talk, he can call her. That night, Kafka thinks he is seeing the spirit come into his room again, but it is the real Ms. Saeki, sleepwalking. She strips and gets into bed with him, thinking he is her long-dead husband. They have sex, and she immediately leaves.

Ms. Saeki asks Kafka to tell her about his past, and he mentioned that he is from Tokyo and that his father has recently died. He suggests that she may have been his father’s lover at one time, but she rejects the idea. He asks her to go to bed with him, and she does not answer. After work, Oshima and Kafka go out for dinner – Oshima talks about his fantasy of fighting in the Spanish Civil War (!) and mentions that he has a regular boyfriend. Oshima says that love is always accompanied by sadness because our beloved – in the act of completing us – reminds us of what we have lost. That night, Ms. Saeki lets herself into Kafka’s room and looks at the painting. She offers to show him the beach that is shown in the painting. On the beach, Kafka embraces her, encouraged by Crow and maybe even the spirit of her dead lover. They return to the library and make love, and once again, Ms. Saeki leaves afterward.

Kafka sneaks out of the library to go workout at the gym, not knowing what to say to Ms. Saeki. After his workout – and resisting the temptation to immediately hop a bus out of the city – he returns to the library. Oshima talks to him about his search for freedom, questioning if anyone is ever truly free. When he brings Ms. Saeki her coffee, Kafka asks her about her past. She tells him there’s nothing he needs to know and wonders out loud how he has become so wise at so young an age. He tells her that he is taking back his life after the emotional abuse his father had put him through – that is why he took the name Kafka: it means “crow” in Czech, and crows are free and wild. He asks Saeki if she interviewed his father for her lightning book; she says she didn’t, but he doesn’t believe her. She confesses that she is confused by her life, and Kafka responds that she doesn’t have to be confused by him: he is her lover – past and present – and her son. That night they make love again, and for the first time, she stays.

And now to Nakata:

Hoshina and Nakata go toe Takamatsu Public Library (NOT the Komura) to try and find out what the entrance stone is – they spend the day there but no luck. That night, after Nakata goes to sleep, Hoshimo, who can’t fall asleep, goes to get a drink at a bar and on his way back, he runs into Colonel Sanders, who is working as a pimp and offers him a deal on a beautiful girl. Hoshino turns him down, but when Colonel Sanders sweetens the deal by offering to show him where the entrance stone is, Hoshino agrees.

Colonel Sanders takes Hoshino to a religious shrine to meet the prostitute. She’s gorgeous, and after they go to a hotel, she has sex with him for yours while, naturally, reciting Hegel. After they finally finish, Colonel Sanders offers to take him to the entrance stone. At first Hoshino is doubtful, thinking that the offer is too good to be true, but he goes along anyway.

The Colonel explains to Hoshino that his is a spirit – neither god nor Buddha – that chooses his earthly form as he goes along – hence, Colonel Sanders. He needs the help of a mortal with an assignment, and giving him the entrance stone is part of that assignment. They go to a vault at a religious shrine, and the Colonel tells Hoshino that this is where the stone is located. Hoshino is uncomfortable with the idea of robbing a shrine, but Colonel Sanders tells him that it is OK. The stone is very heavy and Hoshino needs a cab to get it back to the hotel, where he laves it on Nakata’s bed and finally falls asleep.

When Nakata wakes up and discovers the stone in his bed he spends a long time just looking at it, wondering what to do next. He talks to Hoshino about how sad he is, but feels that once he opens the entrance stone, something will change (although he can’t do anything until it’s thundering outside). Hoshino agrees to stay with him as long as it takes. Naturally a huge storm begins outside, the entrance stone becomes heavier, and Nakata realizes that flipping it over will open the entrance. Hoshino gathers up all his strength and flips the stone.

But with the storm over and the stone flipped, Hoshino is confused that nothing seems to have changed. Nakata goes to sleep. That night, Hoshino goes to a coffee shop where he meets the elderly owner, a classical music enthusiast, talks to him about Beethoven while he wonders why he’s so drawn to Nakata. The next day, while Nakata is still sleeping, Hoshino goes to a double feature of Truffaut films, thinks about his life and why he should be smarter than he is, and returns to the coffee shop to learn more about Beethoven and classical music.

When Hoshino returns to the hotel, Nakata is STILL asleep, but he gets a phone call from Colonel Sanders, who insists that Hoshino wake up the sleeping man and leave the hotel immediately and go to an apartment he has arranged for them. – police are making a sweep of the hotels of Takamatsu, looking for Nakata. Hoshino wakes Nakata and asks him why the police would be looking for him; Nakata tells him about killing Johnnie Walker. The two men check out quickly taking everything – including the entrance stone and go to their new digs – a stylish new apartment in a residential part of town. Once settled in, they talk about what happened in the hotel – Nakata is certain that the stone opened something somewhere, but isn’t sure what to do next. The two men walk to the beach and Hoshino promises Nakata that they will go to an aquarium after things blow over.

Some of my favorite things:

Oshima on Ms. Saeki’s song: “Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly’s wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose.” “So you’re saying Miss Saeki maybe found those words in some other space – like in dreams?” “Most great poetry is like that. If the words can’t create a prophetic tunnel connecting them to the reader, then the whole thing no longer functions as a poem.”

The lack of a mother’s name in Kafka’s family register.

Miss Saeki: “As long as there’s such a thing as time, everybody’s damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later.”

Miss Saeki on her book on lightning: “The book didn’t come to any conclusion, and nobody wants to read a book that doesn’t have one. For me, though, having no conclusion seemed perfectly fine.” A reference to Murakami’s own lack of endings, perhaps?

All of Chapters 26 and 28, Hoshino’s encounter with Colonel Sanders was pretty brilliant.

Oshima and Kafka’s talk about leaving one’s shell – symbolically or not.

Kafka’s phone call with Sakura: “I don’t know to put it exactly…This might sound strange, but you’re living in the real world, breathing real air, speaking real words. Talking with you makes me feel, for the time being, connected to reality. And that’s really important to me now.”

Sakura telling him that he feels like “a younger brother” to me.

“The axis of time. Somewhere I don’t know about, something weird is happening to time. Reality and dreams are all mixed up, like seawater and river water flowing together.”

I found it interesting that during the love making scenes with Kafka and Ms. Saeki, the voice switches from first to second person. Crow is narrating?

The line from Akinari’s Tales of Moonlight and Rain, “Shape I may take, converse I may, but neither god nor Buddha am I, rather an insensate being whose heart thus differs from that of man.”

“It’s not the sample. We’re not talking about that sort of time here. I know you when you were fifteen. And I’m in love with you at that age. Very much in love. And through her, I’m in love with you. That young girl’s still inside you, asleep inside you. Once you go to sleep, though, she comes to life. I’ve seen it…I’m in love with you, and that’s what’s important.”

The two chords of the song, “I found those chords in an old room, very far away. The door to the room was open them.” The entrance stone?

Oshima’s line: “A hemophiliac of undetermined sex who’s hardly ever set foot outside Shikoku isn’t about to actually go off to fight in Spain, I would think.”

Haydn linking Kafka and Oshima to Hoshino.

Kafka metaphorically fighting in the Spanish Civil War, blowing up bridges.

“We’re all dreaming, aren’t we?” she says. All of us are dreaming. “Why did you have to die?” “I couldn’t help it,” you reply. Crow again?

The emptiness sad emptiness of Nakata – his awareness of it after killing Johnnie Walker.

Hoshino and Beethoven and Truffaut. Wonderful.  And if you’d like to listen to the Archduke Trio (and you should), click here.

And who knew it had been turned into a play?

And to continue with Jay Rubin:

“Johnnie Walker has to be one of Murakami’s boldest challenges to the forces of high seriousness in the evaluation of literary art. Readers will face an equally bold challenge in later chapters with the sudden appearance of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Colonel Sanders as a pimp with supernatural powers. This second strange creature, who appears only to the truck driver Hoshino, looks just like Colonel Sanders, with the white suit and glasses and string tie, but he explains his supernatural powers by pointing out that ‘I’m neither a [Shinto] god nor a Buddha nor a human being. I’m something else again – a concept.’ Murakami has latched on to these familiar – even beloved – symbols of worldwide corporate penetration and imbued them with unimaginable powers of evil, violence, and depravity. Johnnie Walker Black Label has long been a preferred gift in Japan from duty-free shops abroad, and because Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in Japan all have slightly evil-looking plastic models of Colonel Sanders standing out front, the Colonel may be an even more familiar figure there than in his native country. The healthy-eating Murakami is probably conscious, too, that the Colonel’s fried chicken and other fast food, much of it exported to Japan, may be a significant contributor to American – and now Japanese – obesity. Japanese readers were shocked and confused by these enigmatic creations, said an interviewer, but Murakami draws some interesting parallels between them and his earlier writing:

‘The first character to come out of me like that was the Sheep Man in A Wild Sheep Chase. I was not planning to bring such a character onstage: he just popped out while I was writing. This was something from the world of darkness, a being that lives in the other world. Johnnie Walker and Colonel Sanders are the same kind of thing – ‘performers’ who appear from the darkness. There were a few who showed up in The Wind up Bird Chronicle, too: Boris the Manskinner, say, appears to be a realistic character, not something from the other world, but I think he’s probably the same kind of thing. Because he is there, the story is able to move off in a new direction.

While I’m writing, I’m not thinking: I don’t know if they are good or evil. I still don’t know whether the Sheep Man is good or evil, the same with Johnnie Walker. What he does is surely evil, but I don’t know how much of that is true. And Colonel Sanders? I have no idea what he’s all about. Both of them give a kick to the flow of the story, help it to move along. Rather than whether they themselves are good or evil, the really big question for me is, What kind of direction to they give the story as they help it to move along? It may be that, depending on how you look at them, Colonel Sanders and Johnny Walker are the same thing appearing with different faces. This is a very real possibility. I don’t know, though…I think the story would not have proceeded so successfully had those two icons not been present. I think, too, though, that there are a lot of people out there who can’t accept such things.’

Murakami’s interviewer agrees that most of the numerous negative reviews of the book complain that these figures are undecipherable. We need not appeal to Murakami’s critics to fault his use of such devices, however: his own remarks all but confess that he makes them up to solve difficulties with the plot. If your story needs Character A and Character B to meet at some point but you have described them as strangers living in different cities, you can work out some mundane real-world developments that bring them together (work schedules, plane connections, a taxi with a flat tire), or you can have an exotic supernatural being appear in the dream of Character A telling him to dial the phone number of Character B as soon as he wakes up. All too often in this book, it seems as though Murakami has chosen the latter approach. When it becomes important for Colonel Sanders to contact Nakata, for example, he calls him on his friend Hoshino’s switched-off mobile phone, defying the laws of physics. (It is at this point that he calls himself a ‘concept.’)

[MY QUESTION: Does this matter?]

Kafka on the Shore uses such devices in ways that seem quite arbitrary, and its characters often move around more by rules of authorial convenience than by any consistent system of either fantasy or realism. Murakami appears to be making up the rules as he goes along, as if, say, in a vampire novel, we were suddenly to learn in the last chapter that vampires are vulnerable not only to garlic and the sign of the cross, but also to ketchup, which allows the hero to defeat the vampire villain by feeding him a hamburger. Anything goes. More disappointing, however, is the novel’s failure to answer the questions it raises at the end of the brilliant cat-killing scene in Chapter 16. What does it mean for a peaceful human being to kill another person, even if the killing is meant to stop the other person from killing? How do killing and war change people, make them no longer who they once were? Everything in the first 15 chapters of the book leads to that bout of horrific bloodletting, but nothing in the subsequent 33 chapters rises to that level of enquiry; and the meticulously composed chapters concerning the wartime events in Nakata’s childhood never figure in the narrative again.

Instead of changing into a virtually new human being (for which Murakami has given us plenty of precedents: take The Wind-up Bird Chronicle’s Creta Kano, for example), Nakata remains the same mentally weak old sweetheart. He does lose his ability to talk to cats, but now he acquires the ability to talk to rocks (which, thankfully, do not make audible replies), and suddenly, in Chapter 24, he can diagnose and cure back pain. He is possessed by an inexplicable desire to travel westward and cross a bridge, and he can summon such creatures as fish or leeches to rain down from the sky. He has certainly ‘changes,’ but only in diverse ways that make him bizarre without adding up to a critique of violence in society. Murakami, it seems failed to see what a profound document he had produced in the first 16 chapters of the book, and he lost the chance to make his novel a great comment on the human condition. Having emerged as the world’s foremost killer in the name of peace and justice, the United States – the primary source of Murakami’s literary vision – could have benefited from such a lesson most of all. Devoid of imagination, America’s leaders know only the ethic of kill or be killed in a black-and-white world of good and evil.

[MY NOTE: If, as I believe, Murakami’s a more akin to entering into a dream than any solid “reality,” is it fair to criticize him for not playing by the rules of reality? Or that a fictional character named Colonel Sanders isn’t totally realistic? And to continue, is criticizing Murakami for not writing the book Rubin wishes he had written a valid critique?]

Nakata’s need to travel westward propels him through the rest of the novel. He has no idea where he is going, but ‘something’ (never explained) draws him to Takamatsu, the exact same Shikoku city to which the young Kafka has fled, and his instincts bring him and his newly acquired travelling companion, the truck driver Hoshino, to the library where Kafka lives and works. [WARNING – From here through the next four paragraphs contain elements of the plot through the rest of the book.] Though he and Kafka are from the same Tokyo neighborhood, they have never met. When Nakata and Hoshino arrive at the library on 10 June, Kafka is off in the deep woods of Shikoku, preparing to tramp his way into the other world in the company of ghostly Second World War soldiers, so the anticipated encounter between Nakata and Kafka never happens.

At the library, Nakata feels the need to meet Kafka’s middle-aged lover, head of the library and writer of the hit song from 25 years earlier, ‘Kafka on the Shore,’ a dreamy ballad full of enigmatic poetic imagery that just happens to relate to Nakata’s raining fish and to the magical stone that marks his own entryway into the ‘other world.’ (The song also contained two unusual chords that contributed to its wide appeal.) They meet for the first and only time in their lives in the climatic Chapter 42, but Saeki declares that she has been waiting for him, and he apologizes for having taken so long to find her, as if he knew all along that she was his destination. She is a person trapped inside the memories of her past (she spends her time writing her voluminous memoirs with their Mont Blanc pen), while he is all but devoid of memory and lives only in the present.

‘I feel as though I’ve known you for ages,’ she says. ‘Weren’t you in that painting? A figure in the sea in the background?’ This was the picture of ‘Kafka on the Shore’ that featured the one true love of her youth. The two also share knowledge of the ‘entrance stone.’ This was merely an evocative phrase in her song, but it took on great reality for Nakata when his companion Hoshino, guided by Colonel Sanders, found the miraculous stone in the grounds of a Shinto shrine (probably the same shrine in which Kafka had awakened after his four-hour blackout). In a ritual Nakata performed during a dramatic storm, he had ‘opened’ the stone and, presumably, the entrance to the other world. He confesses to her that he killed a man in Tokyo. ‘I didn’t want to kill anybody, but Johnnie Walker was in charge and I took the place of a 15-year old boy who should’ve been there, and I murdered someone. Nakata had to do it.’

Saeki then wonders, ‘Did all that happen because I opened the entrance stone a long time ago?’ Nakata does not know the answer to her question, but he does know that ‘My role is to restore what’s here now to the way it should be.’ It was for this purpose, he says, that he ‘left Nakano, went across a big bridge and came to Shikoku.’

[END OF SPOILERS]

The level of contrivance here is mind-boggling, but Murakami seems comfortable with it:

‘In the context of the story as I conceive it, everything can occur quite naturally. Even something like this long-distance killing of the father is naturalistic realism in the world as I conceive it, so there is nothing at all strange about, say, Nakata’s doing the killing and the blood showing up on Kafka’s hands. I would be hard-pressed to explain why this is so, but it’s something that can happen as a matter of course.

A lot of readers, though, say they don’t get it. Why does Kafka have blood on his hands even though Nakata committed the murder? Because it can happen, that’s why. How can such a thing happen? Because a story can express things at a level that transcends explanation, things that cannot be explained in an ordinary context. Because a story expresses things in a way that is different from other kinds of expression.’

One’s reception of Kafka on the Shore, then, depends heavily on the degree of one’s willingness to ‘go with the flow’ of the story. To a reader less willing, Murakami seems to be relying far too heavily on contrivance and coincidence, and he too easily overlooks inconsistencies on the realistic plane. Take, for example, the amount of publicity concerning the murder of Kafka’s father. It is in all the newspapers and on TV, but for some reason none of Kafka’s Shikoku acquaintances know anything about it with the single exception of the young assistant librarian, Oshima. He has been closely following the reports, many of which mention the desire of the police to question the dead Koichi Tamura’s son, whose name certainly would have mentioned in the media, but still Oshima remarks that he does not know Kafka Tamura’s real name. The degree of Nakata’s memory is also inconsistent. After reading several times that his memory had been wiped out, we find him at points talking about ‘the occupation’ and ‘bombs,’ and he experiences at least one flashback that leads into a detailed narrative of his childhood. Nakata is stupid where the situation calls for him to be stupid, and he is almost eloquent when he needs to be more verbally eloquent.

This is not to say that Murakami completely ignores all matters of realism. The composition of the Allied occupation authorities’ documents on the ‘Rice Bowl Hill Incident’ is accomplished with meticulous attention to verisimilitude, and often the narrative will spell out the minutiae of ordinary life to give rational explanations for how or why characters do what they do – matters such as the Japanese equivalent of birth certificates (koseki) or the downloading of information from the Internet, or getting discounts at a hotel, or lining up room reservations at the YMCA, or the differences in traceability between prepaid and subscribed mobile phones, or weight training at the gym (Kafka works hard to toughen himself physically). We know a good deal more than we need to about Nakata’s finances and also about his bowel movements – sometimes to low comic effect.

For long stretches of the novel, then, Murakami seems to accept the conventions of realistic fiction, but this only makes his departures from the rules of consistency (or physics) all the more disconcerting. And for scenes involving out-and-out encounters with the supernatural, the amount of purple prose thrown at the reader exceeds even the loud music played during Sputnik Sweetheart’s close encounters with the other world. When Nakata invokes the magic powers of his ‘entrance stone’ to the other world, the thunder crashes and the wind blows with all the ferocity of a Bulwer-Lytton ‘dark and stormy night.’

Another feature of the book that has been remarked upon, both approvingly and disapprovingly, is the extremely large number of references to works of literature and music – large even for Murakami, and with a surprisingly high proportion of nods to high culture rather than jazz or pop music (although Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, the Beach Boys, Prince, and Cream are briefly mentioned.) In this, the character Oshima plays a major role. Having taken Kafka under his wing and arranged for him to live in the library, the 21-year-old Oshima never misses an opportunity to wax eloquent on any topic that arises between them, whether it be high culture or the meaning of life. He speaks profoundly on Franz Kafka and “In the Penal Colony” (actually young Kafka himself is the one who comes up with an incredibly sophisticated comment on that story); the Japanese novelist Soseki Natsume; the best colors for automobiles, the relationship of man and nature; Greek tragedy; Plato, issues of gender; sexuality; and love; Franz Schubert; the search for identity; T.S. Eliot; the art of sculpture; the subtleties of metaphor and symbolism; the psychology and ontology of ghosts; The Tale of Genji, it’s depiction of ‘living spirits’ and the question of whether deep resentment can leave the body and inflict injury on the object of hatred (which, we are invited to conclude, is probably how Kafka killed his father); the Edo-period fabulist Akinari Ueda (1734-1809); opera; the Spanish Civil War; Rousseau; Australian Aborigines; the nature of human freedom; Hansel and Gretel; and the guts as the original model for the interior human labyrinth. Some of these topics come in for repeated discussion by Oshima’s ever-open and active mouth. (Yeats, Mozart, novelist Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, Adolph Eichmann, and the Richard Burton translation of The Thousand and One Nights are commented upon elsewhere. Beethoven comes in for extended treatment, too, but that mainly happens in the Nakata narrative, as the truck driver Hoshino opens his soul to this elevating source of spiritual enrichment.)

Earlier, we noted Murakami’s tendency towards an indirect didacticism, but here the didactic element is anything but indirect. Asked if head consciously loaded this novel with so many references, Murakami answered:

‘Of course…Citation and erudition were extremely important for me in this novel. After all, the protagonist is a 15-year old boy, so it’s important for him to pass through a lot of different things. I myself crammed I knowledge from many areas as I grew up; the knowledge really comes pouring in at that time of life, like rain soaking into parched earth…If you do something like this in the story of a mature adult, it can come off as affectation, but for a young person it’s really important…Oshima imparts his erudition regarding Schubert’s piano sonata while he’s driving. Some people might think he’s just showing off his knowledge and be repelled by it, but he’s using this to convey something to the boy Kafka.’

Your thoughts? Are you able to “go with the flow” or do what Rubin sees as the book’s narrative flaws get in the way of your enjoyment? Share with the group!
My next post: Tuesday, August 26, the conclusion of Kafka on the Shore
Enjoy

“Just like an iceberg, what we label the ego or consciousness is, for the most part, sunk in darkness.”

Kafka on the Shore
Chapters 13-24
By Dennis Abrams

Are you all enjoying the book as much as I am?

First things first, let’s catch up with Kafka:

Oshima approached Kafka, offers him lunch, and they discuss the great Japanese writer Matsume Soseki. Kafka asks if Oshima can find him a place to sleep (since he’s checked out of the hotel for fear of discovery; Oshima says he might be able to get him a job at the library where he can sleep at night; in the meantime, Oshima drives Kafka to a bare bones cabin in the woods of Koshi, warning him not to wander too far off into the woods. He leaves him there, promising to return in a couple of days.

Left alone in Oshima’s cabin, on the first night there in his sleeping bag, he is scared by noises and solitude, but Crow appears and reproaches him for his weakness. The next day, Kafka reads part of a book about Adolf Eichmann, to which Oshima has attached a note saying that one must accept responsibility for one’s imagination.

Kafka walks into the woods, stopping short of losing his way, and is jarred by how easy it is to lose oneself. After dinner he writes down everything he has done since running away and the next day, goes further out into the forest.

After three days in the cabin alone, Kafka feels he is growing connected with nature. On the afternoon of the fourth day, he is outside sunbathing in the nude when Oshima arrives to pick him up. They clean up and head back to Takamatsu, where Oshima says that Kafka now has a job as a library assistant and an empty room to use as a bedroom. Oshima tells Kafka Ms. Sakei’s story: How she fell in love as a teenager with the son of one of the wealthy sake distributors that own the library While engaged, the man went to Tokyo for school. Ms Sakei went to visit him and wrote a song for him called…”Kafka on the Shore.” She played it for friends, was asked to record it, and became a huge pop hit. The husband was killed during a student protest, and she disappeared for a long time. One day, shortly after her mother’s death, she suddenly returned to Takamatsu and took over the running of the library.

Kafka moves into the library, and the next day, while running the front desk with Oshima two “serious” women enter. After examining carefully scrutinizing the entire library, they complain to Oshima that the building is in violation of gender equality standards: there are no separate bathrooms, and the books are separated by gender with women shelved below men. Oshima tries to explain that the library has no room for another restroom and is understaffed, but the women accuse him of misogyny. Oshima fires back, telling that he is in fact a woman, born with female genitals (although his breasts never developed) and he lives life as a gay man with a male identity. The women leave. Oshima and Kafka sit together, Oshima telling him that he is sickened by people who act out of dogmatic certainty and who lack imagination; Kafka assures him that his opinion of Oshima hasn’t changed now that he knows he is transsexual.

Kafka reads about a murdered artist in Tokyo: the artist is his father, Koichi Tamura, and Kafka is terrified because the night his father was killed was the same night he blacked out and woke up covered in blood. Although he knows he could not have gone to Tokyo in that time, he wonder is if he is still somehow responsible. He reveals to Oshima his big secret: when he was young, his abusive father told him that one day Kafka would murder his father and sleep with both his mother and his sister.

But that night, Kafka is jolted awake in his room in the library and sees the spirit of a beautiful teenage girl. She looks at a painting in the room of a boy looking at the water from a beach, and suddenly vanishes. Kafka is in love but doesn’t know what to do. The next day, he asks Oshima to get him a copy of Ms. Saeki’s song on vinyl – Oshima gets a copy from his mother, and Kafka sees that the picture of Ms. Saeki on the record sleeve is a slightly older of the spirit he saw in his room. Kafka asks Oshima if a ghost can exist even if the person is still alive; falling back on Japanese folklore, Oshima says that it can exist if the intentions of the living person are evil. After listening to the song, Kafka determines that it has been written about the painting on his wall. The song also mentions knives, a rain of fish, the “entrance” stone” and the Sphinx (Oedipus’s nemesis, reflecting Kafka’s father’s Oedipal prophecy). He goes to sleep, hoping to see the spirit again.

And now Nakata:

Nakata updates and collects his daily fee from Goma’s family, not mentioning that the information he obtains comes from cats rather than humans. Going back to the empty lot, he is approached by Kawamura, once again babbling nonsensically, and a tough cat he names Okawa. Okawa says he has seen Goma, but is unwilling to talk about him. A large black dog approaches Nakata and demands that he follow him, and then takes him to another part of town, to the house of a strange yet elegant man who calls himself Johnnie Walker. Mr. Walker offers to give Goma to Nakata in exchange for his cooperation in a “game” – it turns out that Johnnie Walker has been looking for Nakata for quite some time.

Returning to the residence of Johnnie Walker, a dog leads Nakata to a large freezer, where he finds the severed heads of many cats – but not Goma’s. Johnnie Walker explains that he is taking the souls of cats to create a “mystic flute” to steal even larger souls. But, he says, he has grown tired of life and asks Nakata to kill him, agreeing to return Goma to Nakata, but Nakata “feels” that he cannot kill a man. Johnnie Walker responds by telling him that this is a war and Nakata will learn to kill. Walker then proceeds to murder two paralyzed cats in front of him, cutting out their still-beating hearts and eating them before beheading the animals. He then tells Nakata that there are two more cats to kill before he gets to Goma – Kawamura and Mimi. Walker kills Kawamura, but before he can cut Mimi open, Nakata attacks him and kills him with his own butcher knife. Nakata takes Goma and Mimi with him as he leaves Johnnie Walker’s house.

Nakata wakes up (not unlike Kafka) in the vacant lot with Mimi and Goma. He has no blood on him (unlike Kafka) but he does remember killing Johnnie Walker. And now he is unable to understand the cats. Nakata returns Goma to her family and goes to the local police station, where he confesses to the duty officer that he has committed a murder. The officer (not surprisingly) thinks that Nakata is mad, but he humors him. Nakata politely thanks him, and on the way out the door, tells the officer that he should bring an umbrella the next day because it will rain fish. The next day, 2,000 sardines and mackerels (love the specificity) fall from the sky. The officer is, naturally, shocked, and is even more shocked later in the day when a famous artist is discovered stabbed to death.

Nakata want to escape Tokyo by traveling west on the Tomei Highway, but doesn’t know how to use the train system. Although embarrassed that he can’t read, he stops two businesswomen on the street to ask them how to get a ticket. They get a friend of theirs, Togeguchi, who happens to be heading west, to take Nakata with him and then Nakata can hitchhike from there. On the road, Togeguchi confides all his secrets to Nakata who listens quietly. At a rest stop, Nakata hitches a ride with an older trucker who talks politics, and tells Nakata that he himself is a communist. At the next rest stop, Nakata has a harder time finding a ride, and after seeing some bikers beating a man, he feels the same rage building that he felt with Johnnie Walker. And then…suddenly…leeches???…fall from the sky. After the leech rain, Nakata gets a ride with a slightly vulgar young driver called Hoshino, who says that Nakata reminds him of his own senile grandfather.

Hoshino buys Nakata dinner at a rest stop – Nakata says he need to go over the bridge to Shikoku and figure out his next step from there. The next day, Hoshino arrives at his destination and tells Nakata to wait for him in a nearby park while he unloads his freight. We learn that when Nakata finished primary school, he learned a trade: traditional woodworking. He assisted a carpenter into his middle age, until the mentor died and the shop closed. Afterward, he invested the money he’s saved for his retirement in a condo project sponsored by his cousin, but the cousin lost all the money to loan sharks and disappeared. Since then, Nakata has lived in a flat arranged by one of his brothers, the company of cats being his only joy until now. Hoshino returns and, intrigued by Nakata, asks if he can join him in his travels for a few days. Nakata agreed.

The two travel by bus to Shikoku, and when they arrive Nakata is extremely tired. Hoshino finds a cheap hotel; Nakata warns him that he will sleep for a long time and, indeed, he does not wake up for more than 24 hours. In the meantime, Hoshino (a most likeable character I think) spends his time playing pachinko, drinking, and wondering why he finds Nakata so interesting. We learn that Hoshino was often in trouble when he was younger, often picked up by the police and always bailed out by his grandfather. When Nakata finally wakes up, he eats two days worth of food before declaring that they should go to Takamatsu next. But before they check out Nakata performs an extremely painful adjustment on Hoshino’s back, curing his chronic stiffness – a truck driver’s curse. When they arrive in Takamatsu, Nakata announces that they need to find the “entrance stone,” although he does not know what it is.

And now we see the two narratives beginning to come together: and not only geographically. The periods of unconsciousness. Rage. The rain of fishes and the “entrance stone” from the song “Kafka on the Shore” actually taking place in Nakata’s narrative. And…is “Johnnie Walker” Kafka’s father?

——————————

Some favorite things:

“But people need to cling to something,” Oshima says. “They have to. You’re doing the same, even though you don’t realize it. It’s like Goethe said: Everything’s a metaphor.”

And if you’d like to hear Brendel playing Schubert’s Piano Sonata in D (one of my favorite pieces) click here.

“That’s why I like to listen to Schubert while I’m driving. Like I said, it’s because all the performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I’m driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what a human is capable of – that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally, I find that encouraging. Do you know what I’m getting at?”

Oshima’s note on Eichmann: “Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It’s just like Yeats said: ‘In dreams begin responsibilities.’ Flip this around and you could say that where there’s no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise. Just like we see with Eichmann.” (Of course, as Proust said: “If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.”

Kafka’s sudden fear when he’s briefly “lost” outside the cabin. “Just like Crow said, the world’s filled with things I don’t know about.”

Chapter 16 is brilliant but too painful to excerpt from. But the parallels between Johnnie Walker and Eichmann are all too clear: the rules must be followed.

Oshima will be a part of the library. What does that mean?

On turning-points in stories: “That’s how stories happen – with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”

Oshima again: “Kafka, in everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.”

Nakata is so amenable – he has so many “favorites.”

The comedy of the rain of mackerels and sardines.

Oshima’s revelation; Kafka’s acceptance. “But there’s one thing I want you to remember, Kafka. These are exactly the kind of people who murdered Miss Saeki’s childhood sweetheart. Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe. Of course it’s important to know what’s right and what’s wrong. Individual errors in judgment can usually be corrected. As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around. But intolerant, narrow minds with no imaginations are like parasites that transform the host, change form, and continue to thrive. They’re a lost cause, and I don’t want anyone like that coming in here.”

Nakata’s journey, the people he meets, Mr. Hagita buys him eel. FINALLY!

Leeches??? Why leeches?

Could Kafka have killed, directly or…indirectly his father?

“And the sense of tragedy – according to Aristotle – comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist’s weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I’m getting at? People are driven into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex being a great example. Oedipus is drawn into tragedy not because of laziness or stupidity, but because of his courage and honesty. So an inevitable irony results.”

Kafka reveals his father’s prophecy. His sense of being polluted.

Kafka’s father: “A theory is a battlefield in your head.”

Nakata’s truck driver Hoshino. His lack of awareness of World War II: “A long time ago I lived in Yamanashi. During the war.’ “No kidding,” the driver said. “Which war was that?” And…”Japan was occupied by the Americans back then. The seashore at Enoshima was filed with American soldiers.” “You’ve gotta be kidding.” “No, I’m not kidding.” “”Come on,” Hoshino said, “Japan was never occupied by America.” And when Nakata tried to explain what he knows, “Yeah? Whatever…I told you I don’t like long stories.”

The Tale of Genji and living spirits. Oshima again: “In Murasaki Shhikibu’s time living spirits were both a grotesque phenomenon and a natural condition of the human heart that was right there with them. People of that period probably couldn’t conceive of these two types of darkness as separate from each other. But today things are different. The darkness in the outside world has vanished, but the darkness in our hearts remain, virtually unchanged. Just like an iceberg, what we label the ego or consciousness is, for the most part, sunk in darkness. And that estrangement sometimes creates a deep contradiction or confusion within us.”

Nakata’s “memories” of the sea.

The lyrics of Kafka on the Shore:

You sit at the edge of the world,
I am in a crater that’s no more (when Kafka saw the spirit, he felt like they’d sunk into a crater lake.)
Words without letters.
Standing in the shadow of the door.
The moon shines down on a sleeping lizard,
Little fish rain down from the sky,
Outside the window there are soldiers,
steeling themselves to die.
(Refrain)
Kafka sits in a chair by the shore,
Thinking of the pendulum that moves the world, it seems.
When your heart is closed,
The shadow of the unmoving Sphinx,
Becomes a knife that pierces your dreams.
The drowning girl’s fingers
Search for the entrance stone, and more.
Lifting the hem of her azure dress.
She gazes – at Kafka on the shore.
Is the entire book in that song?

And from Jay Rubin:
“This old man, Nakata, is the main protagonist of the story in the even-numbered chapters (which are narrated in the third person and the past tense). He does not enter the action at his present age, however, until Chapter 6, when we find him in a Tokyo neighborhood talking to the local cats. He is a gentle old fellow beloved by the residents of the district for his uncanny ability to find missing cats, though no one realizes he can actually understand their speech. Chapters, 2, 4, 8, and 12 provide background material suggesting (but never really explaining) how he got that way in his childhood.

Those chapters drop back to 1946 and 1972 to provide written testimony concerning mysterious events that occurred in rural Yamanashi Province in 1944, the penultimate year of the Second World War. A 26-year-old woman named Setsuko Okamochi testifies to Allied occupation authorities that she was guiding a group of schoolchildren on a hike in the hills when something (possibly involving an American warplane) caused all the children to pass out. All but one of them, a nine-year-old boy named Nakata, came out of their swoon unscathed, but Nakata spent three weeks in a coma and was so severely affected that he lost the ability to read and write, and his memory and capacity for learning were nearly nonexistent thereafter. The teacher’s follow-up letter of 1972, addressed to a Tokyo psychologist who had been an expert witness in the case, reveals that the carefully compiled documents those comprise those earlier chapters had been based on her false testimony. In fact, she had had a wildly erotic dream the night before that brought on a premature menstrual flow during her outing with the children, and she used a towel to stanch the unusually heavy rush of blood. When the children went into the woods to hunt for mushrooms, the Nakata boy came out holding the bloody towel, and she was so mortified and filled with sexual guilt that she beat him into unconsciousness. The other children were so shocked by the spectacle that they went into a group swoon and conveniently forgot everything that had happened.

Nakata’s mental strangeness, then, began with blood and erotically tinged violence. And although he is a sweet, simple soul, his killing of Kafka’s father (if that is what it is) is a horrendously violent and bloody scene. In fact, coming as it does after several chapters looking back to the Second World War and after Kafka’s reading (in the other extermination of course) of a book about Adolph Eichmann’s bureaucratically brilliant extermination of the Jews, this chapter (16) is a searingly visceral demonstration of the impossibility of ending violence with violence. In a move that perhaps only Murakami could have pulled off, it raises the intensity of hits unspoken – but intensely felt – message by introducing the reader to talking cats.

This business about the talking cats, plus the note of doubt in the previous paragraph, questioning whether what we take to be Nakata’s killing of Kafka’s father really is that, need some explaining. When he first enters the action at his present age of 60 plus, Nakata is really just talking to a cat, the first of several with which he communes, speaking in his special stilted style. Chapter 6 begins:

“Hello there,” the old man called out.
The large, elderly black tomcat raised its head a fraction and wearily returned the greeting in a low voice.
“A very nice spell of weather we’re having.”
“Um,” the cat said.
“Not a cloud in the sky.”
“…for the time being.”
“Is the weather going to take a turn for the worse, then?”

If anything, the cat speaks more naturally than Nakata, whose idiosyncratic speaking style is one of the most widely admired features of the novel. He rarely uses personal pronouns to refer to himself, for example: he calls himself ‘Nakata.’ He is a gently comical character (in contrast to the deadly serious Kafka, who rarely smiles in the book), and the many scenes involving cat talk are sweet and amusing. Given the third-person narrative and the lack of intrusive commentary by the narrator, however, there is nothing to call into question the reality of the cat’s talk. We are not seeing the world through Nakata’s eyes, and the seeming objectivity forces us either to accept the reality of what is presented or to throw up our hands in exasperation. Murakami never flinches as he brings on a cast of highly individualized cats, including the lovely Siamese Mimi (names for La Boheme’s heroine, she lives in a house with a cream-colored BMW 530 parked out front) and the well-meaning Kawamura-san, whose ineptness with language produces hilarious nonsense (‘I don’t mind at all, the tallest of heads.’)

Nakata has been commissioned by a neighborhood lady to find a missing cat called ‘Goma,’ but Mimi tells him the other cats think a local cat-catcher has got her. Several more cats have been captured recently by this “bad person.” When the naïve Nakata can’t imagine what such a person would do with snatched cats, Mimi enlightens him regarding the various scientific, musical instrument and gourmet possibilities, plus torture for its own sake, because “there are twisted people like that in this world.” She describes the cat-catcher as being very tall, wearing a strange tall hat and long leather boots. She also warns Nakata that he is an extremely dangerous man, adding, “This world is a terribly violent place. And nobody can escape the violence. Please keep that in mind.”

Nakata, however, cannot fully grasp what she means, though he is soon to find out. His fuddled, innocent mind is not much different from those of the placid souls living in peaceful democratic societies unaware that violence can attack them at any moment – in the form of Aum-style terrorism or the forces of nature or the intrusions of a self-righteous right-wing government. Nakata feels he has nothing to fear from the cat-catcher because he himself ‘was a person, not a cat.’ In retrospect, however, this recalls the famous words attributed to German pastor Martin Niemoller (1892-1984): ‘In Germany they first came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.’

The one who ‘comes for’ Nakata is a big, black dog with bloodstains and chunks of flesh on his fangs. He guides Nakata to an old-fashioned house in an unfamiliar house in an unfamiliar neighborhood, and Nakata begins to feel uneasy. The dog shows him into a dark reception room or study, which could be the same room where Kafka took 400,000 yen of his father’s money from a drawer. The tall man sitting in the shadows of this room, however, cannot possibly be Kafka’s father, the famous sculptor Koichi Tamura. His clothing comes straight out of nineteenth-century Europe. He wears a black silk top hat, a long-skirted, tight-fitting red jacket over a black waistcoat, flesh-tight white trousers and long black boots. His left hand grips a black walking stick with decorative gold knob.

‘You know who I am,’ I assume?,’ he says to Nakata and is disappointed with Nakata’s negative reply. He then strikes the pose of a man jauntily striding down the street, but still Nakata has no idea who he is. “Perhaps you’re not a whiskey drinker, then,’ he says, and Nakata affirms the accuracy of this observation.

The man gives up and reveals his identity to Nakata: he is Johnnie Walker, the whisky icon. This still means nothing to the illiterate, non-drinking Nakata, but by this time, most readers are probably open-mouthed in amazement. Johnnie Walker?! What is he doing in this book? As if this itself were not shocking enough, Johnnie Walker has the dog guide Nakata to the kitchen, where he finds a freezer full of decapitated cats’ heads. Back in the study Johnnie Walker congratulates Nakata on the good timing of his arrival: Johnnie Walker says he is about to harvest a new crop of cats’ heads, and among them will be Goma, the young female cat Nakata has been hired to find. If, however, Nakata will do Johnnie Walker the favor of killing him, Goma will be allowed to escape unharmed. ‘First you fear me. Then you hate me. And finally you kill me,” he says.
‘But why – why ask me?’ Nakata asks. ‘Nakata’s never ever killed anyone before. It’s not the kind of thing I’m any good at,’ Johnnie Walker replies:

‘I know. You’ve never killed anyone, and don’t want to. But listen to me – there are times in life when those kinds of excuses don’t cut it any more. Situations when nobody cares whether you’re suited for the task at hand or not. I need you to understand that. For instance, it happens in war. Do you know what war is?’

‘Yes, I do. There was a big war going on when Nakata was born, I heard about it.’

‘When a war starts people are forced to become soldiers. They carry guns and go to the front lines and have to kill soldiers on the other side. As many as they possibly can. Nobody cares whether you like killing other people or not. It’s just something you have to do. Otherwise you’re the one who gets killed.’ Johnnie Walker pointed his index finger at Nakata’s chest. ‘Bang!’ he said. ‘Human history in a nutshell.’

Johnnie Walker demands that Nakata make up his mind to kill him immediately. ‘The knack to killing someone, Mr. Nakata is not to hesitate. Focus your prejudice and execute it swiftly.’ He then begins pulling cats out of a leather case one at a time, eviscerating them, and yanking out and eating their still-beating hearts. Goma will be the last one, he says. Like Adolph Eichmann, Johnnie Walker works methodically, but with an added touch: he whistles ‘Heigh-Ho!’ like Disney’s Seven Dwarfs. Nakata does not know the first cat, but the horror rises as his friends begin to emerge from the case. Suddenly the killing takes on a highly personalized aspect. This is no longer the disposal of faceless victims by an anonymous Kafkaesque machine but the slaughter of recognizable individuals. Now we know why Murakami let us become so intimately acquainted with his varied cast of cat characters. Those sweet, silly chapters prepared us to share Nakata’s horror. First comes Kawamura, the cutely mixed-up speaker. Nakata has been feeling something inside him changing, but still he cannot bring himself to kill Johnnie Walker before he kills Kawamura and savors his heart. Will Nakata kill to stop the killing? And if so, what will he gain? ‘This is war,’ Johnnie Walker reminds him. Then he pulls Mimi out of the bag.

‘Johnnie Walker,’ Nakata groans. ‘Please, stop it. If you don’t Nakata’s going to go crazy. I don’t feel myself any more.’

Johnnie Walker answers calmly. ‘So, you’re no longer yourself…That’s very important, Mr. Nakata. A person not being himself any more.’
Now it is time for even the gentle Nakata to act. He snatches up a large knife and plunges it into Johnnie Walker’s stomach and then his heart. Johnnie Walker laughs aloud, coughs up the cats’ hearts he has just eaten, and collapses at Nakata’s feet. Everything and everyone are smeared with blood. Gathering up Mimi and Goma, Nakata sits on a sofa and sinks into darkness. He has killed to stop the killing, he has saved his friends from death, but in doing so he may have cased to be the sweet old man we knew as Nakata and instead joined with ‘human history in a nutshell,’ perpetuating the endless cycle of murder. What will he be like when next we meet him? Will he have regained his memory, killed so as to become a ‘normal’ human being? Will he still be able to talk to cats? Murakami could have lectured his readers on the subject of war, but instead he has created this spellbinding surreal drama –using cats and a whiskey logo! – to make us feel the dilemma faced by those who want peace but also human justice.

The bloody Chapter 16, then, is one of the most intense and profound pieces of writing that Murakami has ever produced, raising questions that haunt the memory of the blood-soaked twentieth century and continue to plague mankind in the twenty-first, which has got off to such a heartbreakingly violent start. The value – or success – of the novel must hinge on what Murakami does with the universal issues to which he has given such urgent expression.

Nakata’s killing of Johnnie Walker has occurred at the exact time (and perhaps in the same house) as the killing of Kafka’s father on 28 May – the time when Kafka, hundreds of miles away in Shikoku, loses consciousness for four hours and wakes in a shrine compound with blood on his hands and clothing. Although we will read ‘real’ newspaper reports of the death of the sculptor Koichi Tamura, this phantasmagorical narrative is all we will ever see of Nakata’s or Kafka’s involvement in the murder.

Johnnie Walker has to be one of Murakami’s boldest challenges to the forces of high seriousness in the evaluation of literary art…”

————–

Thoughts? Questions? Anything?

And a question for me for the group.  My plan was that we’d read 1Q84 next, then follow up with Murakami’s newest book, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. But since that’s coming out this week, would you rather read it first while it’s “hot” and then go back to 1Q84? Let me know what you think in the comments section below.

My next post: Tuesday, August 19; Chapters 24-36, Kafka on the Shore.

Enjoy

“But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s about.”

Kafka on the Shore
Chapters 1-12
By Dennis Abrams

And so we begin.

Let me begin with a summary of what we’ve all (hopefully) read. Since the two plotlines are, at least for the moment, so divergent, I’ll start with Kafka’s story through Chapter 12, then Nakata’s:

Kafka: In “The Boy Named Crow,” which seems to work as a prologue, “Kafka” Tamura is getting ready to run away from home, and talks about his plans with his imaginary (or is he?) friend/companion Crow. Kafka’s got money stolen from his father, as well as his cell phone and hunting knife. Crow warns Kafka that there will be many trials along the way, and that to survive, he will have to be the toughest teenager ever.

While we don’t know yet why he’s planning to run away, Kafka has been preparing for this for years, cutting himself off from people at school and working out in a regular and methodical manner. Along with the money etc., Kafka takes with him a picture of his sister, who he hasn’t seen or heard from in many years – since his mother abandoned him, taking his sister with him. Kafka takes the bus to Takamatsu (thinking no one will think to look for him there.) and wakes up on his 15th birthday.

At a bus stop en route to Takamatsu, he meets Sakura, another in Murakami’s line of seemingly “knowing” young women. She says she’s on her way to visit relatives in Takamatsu; Kafka lies and says he’s doing the same. On the bus she mentions that she has a younger brother she hasn’t seen for awhile, and Kafka wonders if she is his sister.

When the bus arrives at Takamatsu, Sakura gives him her phone number and tells him to call her sometime. He goes to the Komura library (who’s going to look for him there?) where he meets the assistant Oshima, who tells him about that the library is a historical building (it sounds just like the kind I’d like to read in) and houses mostly Japanese poetry – haiku and tanka. (Oshima also seems interested in Kafka.) Kafka explores the library, settles in with a copy of Burton’s unexpurgated translation of The Arabian Nights, and takes the tour of the library, given by the head librarian Ms. Saeki. Kafka finds a discounted hotel room (courtesy of the YMCA) and wonders if his father has noticed he’s left.

Later, claiming to be a student doing research at the library, Kafka asks the girl at the hotel’s front desk if his discount could be extended – after calling the library to confirm he was actually there, his request is granted. (Although it seems that Oshima was inclined to ask him to stay with him as well.) Kafka and Oshima discuss the real Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony,” while he continued reading The Arabian Nights. He falls into a routine: breakfast, gym, library, noodles for dinner, back to the hotel.

But then something weird happens. In Chapter 9, Kafka wakes up in the middle of the night, on the ground at an unknown shrine outside of town – he has passed out, is filthy and covered with blood that’s not his own – and he doesn’t remember a thing (link to Nakata?) Crow tells him to calm down, Kafka calls Sakura, who, while annoyed at being woken up, agrees to meet him. He takes a cab to Sakura’s sister’s apartment, tells her that he is only 15 and a runaway. Sakura, a fellow runaway, agrees to let him spend the night.

Kafka admits to her that he has violent episodes in the past, but none involving the amount of blood in this one. We learned that his older sister was adopted – why then did Kafka’s mother leave with the adopted child and not her biological one? Although they started off sleeping separately (bed/sleeping bag), Sakura, despite having a boyfriend in Tokyo invited Kafka to share her bed. When he gets an erection, she strokes him off to climax. After she leaves to go to work, Kafka thoroughly cleans the apartment.

And then…there’s Nakata’s story:

His story begins with a procedural investigation by U.S. military intelligence with a rural countryside Japanese school teacher regarding an incident that occurred in November 1944. The teacher had taken a group of children to the hills outside of town to pick mushrooms (food was becoming scarce). While there, she (and some of the students) thoughts they saw a B-29 fly overhead, even though records show that there were no American planes in the area at that time. The teacher discovers the children in a strange clearing in the forest, all passed out on the ground and seeming as if they were in a trance.

Next is an interview with Dr. Nakazawa, the town doctor who went to help the teacher with the catatonic children. Although he originally thought they must have eaten poisoned mushrooms, but when he sees the strangeness of the clearing and the trance like state of the children, he knows something else is going on. The children regain consciousness with no memory of passing out. All except for Nakata who doesn’t wake up and is taken away for evaluation.

We next see Nakata as a grown up, looking for a lost cat named Goma. Since the incident, Nakata has no memory and cannot read, but strangely enough, can talk with cats. Because of this skill, he has been able to supplement the subsidy he receives from the government which considers him mentally deficient. Nakata talks to a nameless cat who he names Otsuka. Otsuka has not seen Goma, but is more interested in Nakata because he senses that he has lot half his spirit “Your problem is that your shadow is a bit – how should I put it? Faint. I thought this the first time I laid eyes on you, that the shadow you cast on the ground is only half as dark as that of ordinary people…What I think is this: You should give up looking for lost cats and start searching for the other half of your shadow.” Nakata agrees to consider Otsuka’s suggestion that he go search for the other half of his shadow.

In a military interview with Dr. Shigneori Tsukayama, he disagrees that the incident with the children could be traced to poison gas of food poisoning, finally settling on mass-hypnosis of some sort, likening the incident to the idea of “spirit projection.”

Back in the “present,” Nakata talks to a particularly stupid cat that he names Kawamura, who seems to know where Goma is, but is unintelligible. A clever Siamese cat (is there any other kind) named Mimi helps Nakata out, serving as translator. It seems that Goma has been hanging around an empty lot, but was recently caught by a strange man who took him away. Mimi fears that the man (very tall, wearing a strange tall hat and long leather boots) might be some sort of pervert who tortures cats. The innocent Nakata is shocked to hear that such people exist: he goes to the lot and sits eating his usual lunch. When he’s done, he falls into a hibernating state, something he has been able to do since the incident.

And finally, there’s a letter – written in 1972 – from the rural school teacher to Dr. Tsukayama. In it, she admits that she’d lied to both Japanese and American officials about what had actually happened that day. It seems that at the time of the incident, her husband had been drafted and the night before the incident, the normally tight-laced teacher had an intense sex dream that left her in a highly euphoric state the next day. But while on the hill with her students, she discovers that, for mysterious reasons, her period had abruptly begun. She goes off into the woods with some towel to wipe away the blood and hides the towels, but Nakata finds them and returns to her. Angered and panicked and…she begins to beat him while the other students watch. But after they collapse and reawaken, they have no memory of the towels or the beating.

A few observations/favorite things:
It took until page 30 for the first reference to a woman’s ears…

I’m going to have to assume that there’s significance in Kafka’s reading choices: The Arabian Nights, In the Penal Colony…any guesses as to what it is?

Oshima’s story from Plato:
“In ancient times people weren’t just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everybody in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half.” And in the next chapter, Nakata’s, Otsuka tells him that he needs to look for his missing other half.

Kafka: Every woman, every younger woman, is a possible missing mother/sister. Again, the search for what’s missing.

Kafka on Kafka’s execution device in In the Penal Colony: “I think what Kafka does is give a purely mechanical explanation of that complex machine in the story, as sort of a substitute for explaining the situation is…What I mean is…What I mean is, that’s his own device for explaining the kinds of lives we lead. Not by talking about our situation, but by talking about the details of the machine.” But then…”What I really wanted to say didn’t get across. I wasn’t just giving some general theory of Kafka’s fiction, I was talking about something very real. Kafka’s complex, mysterious execution device wasn’t some metaphor or allegory, it’s here, all around me. But I didn’t think anybody would get that. Not Oshima. Not anybody.”

On old books: “When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages – a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers.”

Kafka’s narrative is 1st person. Nakata 3rd. Why?

From Jay Rubin:

“In an interview, Murakami voiced his great admiration for Franz Kafka, who is only one of many writers, musicians, and artists cited in the novel. Echoing remarks in Kafka on the Shore, Murakami’s interviewer mentions ‘In the Penal Colony,’ which accomplishes its eerie effect through a seemingly objective description of a grotesque apparatus used for executions. Murakami responds: ‘What Kafka gives us in his writing, I think, is the narrative of a nightmare. In the world in which he lived, real life and nightmare were, in a sense, closely bound together.’ Kafka conveys the true terror of a nightmare, he says, not by concentrating on the reactions of the protagonist but on the fine details of the nightmare itself. What Murakami says he most likes about Kafka is ‘his abnormal fixation on the details of the world of dream or imagination.’ This is a quality that Murakami perhaps shares with Kafka [MY NOTE: Perhaps?] suggests the interviewer. Indeed, the remark is reminiscent of Murakami’s own earlier quoted comment regarding Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World that there is nothing he enjoys so much as the process of describing in ever finer precision the details of a thing that does not exist.

Young Kafka has a kind of alter ego, ‘the boy named Crow,’ (Karasu to yobareru shonen), who speaks to him at certain critical moments in the story, calling him ‘you.’ We learn at one point that ‘Kafka’ means ‘crow’ in Czech, and a crow motif derived from the letterhead of Franz Kafka’s father is used to decorate both the title page of Volume 1 and certain unnumbered sections where the ‘boy named Crow’ speaks to the protagonist. In fact, the novel opens with such a speech:

“‘So you’re all set for money, then?’ the boy named Crow asks in his characteristic sluggish voice. The kind of voice you have when you’ve just woken up and your mouth still feels heavy and dull. But he’s just pretending. He’s totally awake. As always.
I nod.
‘How much?’
I review the numbers in my head. ‘Close to 400,000 (yen) in cash, plus some money I can get from an ATM. I know it’s not a lot, but it should be enough. For the time being.
‘Not bad,’ the boy named Crow says, ‘For the time being.’
I give him another nod.
‘I’m guessing this isn’t Christmas money from Santa Claus.’
‘Yeah, you’re right,’ I reply.
Crow smirks and looks around. ‘I imagine you’ve started out by rifling drawers, am I right?’”

Kafka is preparing to leave home, and he has helped himself to some of his father’s money from a drawer in the study. He is another ‘Boku’ narrator, and he tells his story largely in the present tense, rather like the ‘Boku’ in the dreamier chapters of Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. One wonder if Birnbaum’s device, which worked so well in the translation of that novel, was Murakami’s inspiration here…”

And of course, there’s the quote everybody knows and loves from Crow in the Prologue:

“Sometimes fate it like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine…
And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic I might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood, You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.
And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s about.”

Thoughts on this?

And questions? We know that somehow the stories of Kafka and Nakata are going to merge – but how? So far, the only connections I can see is that an appearance of a cat in both, and of course, periods of unconsciousness. And violence vs. pacifism.

Share with the group!

My next post: Tuesday, August 12 – Kafka on the Shore, Chapters 13-24. (And as an aside…what does everyone thing of the pace of reading – too fast? too slow?)

Enjoy

“Murakami is like a magician who explains what he’s doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers.”

Introduction to Kafka on the Shore

by Dennis Abrams

If Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was an odd (albeit wonderful) introduction to Murakami, and if The Wind-up Bird Chronicle was too long and unwieldy, then you’re in luck, for in my opinion, Kafka on the Shore is Murakami’s most “perfect” and (at least to date) best novel.

I mean, who wouldn’t enjoy a book that along with Murakami’s usual assortment of extraordinary characters and happenings and philosophical musings also offers up such delights as fish falling from the sky, conversations between man and cat, a truly supernatural Colonal Sanders, ghostly lovers, a deep-thinking prostitute, World War II soldiers untouched by time, and much more.

————————————–

To give you a little taste of what you’ve got in store for you — from Jay Rubin:

“Murakami had long been wanting to write a sequel to Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Kafka on the Shore was as close as he felt he could come. Too much time had gone by, he said, for it to be an immediate sequel, and so it followed the earlier work more ‘in spirit’ than as a continuation of the story, but the echoes are unmistakable. As in Hard-boiled Wonderland, there are two parallel narratives from beginning to end, and the reader is held in suspense as the developments seem to draw the separate groups of characters in each narrative closer together in time and space towards an anticipated climactic intersection. Unlike Hard-boiled Wonderland, however, the separate narratives do not occur on different levels of reality. Indeed, in both stories a more or less ‘real’ world and a distinctly metaphysical or metaphorical ‘other world’ intersect so that, in effect, the reader is drawn into four separate levels of existence.

The central character in odd-numbered chapters is a trouble boy who runs away from his Tokyo home on Monday, 19 May 1997 (or 2003), the eve of his fifteenth birthday. We never learn his real given name but he tells people that it is Kafka, his family name in Tamura…”

—————————–

And from Laura Miller’s review in The New York Times on February 6, 2005:

“It is easier to be bewitched by Haruki Murakami’s fiction than to figure out how he accomplishes the bewitchment. His novels — in America, the best known is probably “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” — lack the usual devices of suspense. His narrators tend to be a bit passive, and the stakes in many of his shaggy-dog plots remain obscure. Yet the undercurrent is nearly irresistible, and readers emerge several hundred pages later as if from a trance, convinced they’ve made contact with something significant, if not entirely sure what that something is.

Murakami’s latest, “Kafka on the Shore,’ is no exception, although it is a departure for this Japanese novelist in other ways. Most of his protagonists have been men in their 30’s, easygoing military types with spotty romantic histories and a taste for jazz, whiskey, and American films. This time, Murakami’s hero, a runaway boy calling himself Kafka Tamura, is only 15. Kafka is fleeing from his father, a man whose shadowy malevolence takes the form of an Oedipal prophecy: Kafka, he insists, will kill his father and sleep with his mother and older sister, both of whom vanished when the boy was 4.

Kafka relates his adventures in chapters that alternate with another story, that of Satoru Nakata, an elderly man. When he was 9, near the end of World War II, Nakata was part of a group of school children who, while on a school trip in the local woods, inexplicably lost consciousness. When he came to, weeks later, Nakata had lost all of his memories, his ability to read and write, and most of his intelligence. On the upside, he acquired the ability to talk to cats, and so he supplements the small subsidy he gets from the government with fees his neighbors pay him to find their lost pets.

‘The best way to think about reality,’ the narrator of ‘The Wind-up Bird Chronicle’ declares, is ‘to get as far away from it as possible.’ (This is just before he decides to cope with the disappearance of his wife by sitting at the bottom of a dry well for hours at a time.) You could call this Murakami’s own method, except that in his fiction, the unreal elements are handled so matter-of-factly that they could hardly be called ‘far away’ from the realistic ones; the two coexist seamlessly. Nakata may talk to cats, yes, but their conversations always begin with polite chitchat about the weather.

Murakami is an aficionado of the drowsy interstices of everyday life, reality’s cul-de-sacs, places so filled with the nothing that happens in them that they become uncanny: hallways, highway rest stops, vacant lots. Although the dreamlike quality of his work makes the film director David Lynch his nearest American counterpart, Lynch’s palette is primarily nocturnal while Murakami’s welcomes the noontime sun. No one is better at evoking the spookiness of midday in a quiet neighborhood when everyone is at work.

A lot of things happen in Murakami’s work, but what linkers longest in the memory is this distinctive mood, a stillness pregnant with…what? Some meaning that’s forever slipping away. The author achieves this effect by doing everything wrong, at least by Western literary standards. Although Murakami is both an admirer and a translator of Raymond Carver, this simplicity isn’t the semaphoric purity of American minimalism. Partisans of the beautiful sentence will find little sustenance here.

Murakami can turn a pretty metaphor when he chooses — headlights that ‘lick’ the tree trunks lining a dark road, the ‘whooshing moan of air’ from a passing truck ‘like somebody’s soul is being yanked out’ — but he’s just as likely to opt deliberately for a cliche: ‘Sometimes the wall I’ve erected around me comes crumbling down.’ He also makes free use of brand names. In American fiction, the sanctum of the literary must not be polluted by the trash of commercial culture — not, that is, unless it’s coated in a protective layer of satire. But when Murakami tells us that a character drinks Diet Pepsi or wears a New Balance cap it’s not to sketch a withering little portrait of this person’s social class and taste, but to describe exactly what he or she drinks and wears, creating a small tether to a shared reality.

Later in the novel, Kafka finds refuge in a job at a small, private library in a seaside town, while Nakata attracts the attention of a sinister cat catcher who wears leather boots, a red tailcoat and a tall hat. The cat catcher introduces himself as Johnnie Walker, but any inclination to see this is a bit of whacky humor is promptly squashed by the sadistic violence that follows. Colonel Sanders, who appears farther on in the novel in a more helpful capacity, professes to be taking on the appearance of ‘a famous capitalist icon’ as a convenience, when really, he says, ‘I’m an abstract concept.’

Cliches, the ephemera of pop culture, characters who proclaim their thematic function — these sound like the gambits of postmodernism, tricks meant to distance the reader from the narrative and the sort of tactic that gets a novel labeled ‘cerebral.’ But ‘Kafka on the Shore,’ like all of Murakami’s fiction, doesn’t feel distant or artificial. Murakami is like a magician who explains what he’s doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers. So great is the force of the author’s imagination, and of his conviction in the archaic power of the story he is telling, that all this junk is made genuine. Johnnie Walker becomes frightening, and Colonel Sanders a lovable if irascible incarnation of, say, the god Hermes.

The story, of course, is a very old tale in contemporary trappings. Can Kafka escape the legacy of violence he has inherited from his father, the DNA he equates with fate? The question has resonance for Murakami, who is keenly interested in his country’s role in World War II and who has described himself as profoundly transformed by a nonfiction book he wrote about survivors of the Aum Shinrikyo cult’s poison gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995. Toward the end, deep in a forest, Kafka will encounter two imperial soldiers who stepped out of time during the war because they couldn’t stomach the kill-or-be-killed nature of their lot. They haven’t aged, but they also haven’t lived.

The soldiers aren’t the only characters in “Kafka on the Shore” who have chosen suspended animation over suffering the depredations of time and loss. This links ‘Kafka’ to an earlier keystone novel of Murakami’s, ‘hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World,’ which uses the same two-story format. In that book, a noirish science fiction yarn alternates with eerie dispatches from a walled fairy-tale village where nothing ever changes. The village is eventually revealed to be a cordoned-off section of the narrator’s own unconscious mind. Because of some botched neurosurgery, he’ll soon be confined there — a kind of death, but also a kind of immortality, since in the unconscious there is no time.

The weird, stately urgency of Murakami’s novels comes from their preoccupation with such internal problems; you can imagine each as a drama acted out within a single psyche. In each, a self lies in pieces and must be put back together; a life that is stalled must be kick-started and relaunched into the bruising but necessary process of change. Reconciling us to that necessity is something stories have done for humanity since time immemorial. Dreams do it, too. But while anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream, it’s the rare artist, like this one, who can make us feel that we are dreaming it ourselves.”

This is going to be good.

My next post: Tuesday August 5, Kafka on the Shore, Chapters 1-12

Enjoy

 

 

“By this time it must be reasonably clear that what really connects the three disparate narratives that make up The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is a crisis of identity that is both physical and metaphysical, real and magical.”

 The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

Conclusion

by Dennis Abrams

——————-

 

To continue with Strecher:

“[Mamiya’s] ordeal, however, is not over. In a much later narrative, passed on to Toru in a long letter, Mamiya relates how he managed to survive the massed attack of a Soviet armored division in the final days of the war, and found himself, minus one hand, alive in a Soviet labor camp after the war. There, again, he meets Boris the Manskinner, who starts out as a fellow inmate but will shortly take over control of the camp. In time Mamiya gains Boris’ confidence, hoping for a chance to take revenge on him. Unfortunately for Mamiya, however, he cannot kill Boris. Even given two easy opportunities to blow his enemy’s head off at pointblank range, he is unable to do so. Eventually he returns to Japan, bearing Boris’ final curse on him: ‘Wherever you may be, you can never be happy. You will never love anyone or be loved by anyone. That is my curse. I will not kill you. But I do not spare you out of goodwill. I have killed many people over the years, and I will go on to kill many more. But I never kill anyone whom there is no need to kill.’ And true to this prophesy, Mamiya lives out the rest of his days in quiet misery, an ‘empty shell’ of a man.

The purpose of Mamiya’s narrative, I think, is to provide a historical pattern, a narrative ancestor, to the situation in which Toru finds himself in the present. The relationships established here are of critical importance: Mamiya, a force of good, opposes Boris, the embodiment of evil. Two worlds collide, one of controlled gentility and forbearance – something also displayed by Toru…the other of pure malevolence and ambition. In that struggle between elementary forces, Mamiya loses everything; his failure to destroy this evil presence costs him his soul. Cast into archetypal terms, as I believe we must with the whole of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Mamiya fails to restore life to the wasteland of death (seen both in the wilds of the Mongolian desert and the labor camp in barren Siberia) that remained following World War II.

But there is another, equally important, subnarrative to the saga of Mamiya in the war, and this is the tension that is established between the will of the individual and the power of the State. Murakami himself is primarily interested in this aspect of the war as part of his project of recovering the individual voices of those who were involved. Indeed, the same impulse that led the author to seek the fuller story of the sarin gas incident, including the first-hand views of the cult members themselves, leads him to wonder what role government plays – especially a strict, militaristic one such as ruled Japan at that time – in the atrocities committed during war. ‘It is the same with the Rape of Nanking,’ Murakami commented in 1997. ‘Who did it? The military or the individual soldiers? Just how responsible are individuals to a society where they relinquish their free will to the system?’

Murakami does not absolve those who commit atrocities, but he does suggest the possibility of mitigating circumstances, particularly the lack of individual freedom at times of international tension. Sometimes individual evil and ambition cause suffering, as we see in the case of Boris the Manskinner, but even Boris represents not so much an individual but a system, of which he is a part. Without the Soviet system, there might be no Boris. Similarly, were there no Japanese State, there might be no war, and thus no need to carry out stupid orders that waste human life.

We see signs of dissent and hostility toward the Japanese State, whose leaders’ arrogance and ambition led to disaster, in the comments of many of those involved. Hamano expresses it to Mamiya – an act in itself that could have been regarded as treason – as they sit on the wrong side of the Khalkha River in Soviet-held territory: ‘I’m telling you, Lieutenant, this is one war that doesn’t have any Righteous Cause. It’s just two sides killing each other. And the ones who get stepped on are the poor farmers, the ones without politics or ideology…I can’t believe that killing these people for no reason at all is going to do Japan one bit of good.’

This is the common soldier’s perspective, one echoed later by the lieutenant put in charge of executing Chinese prisoners. But the overview, the hostility toward the politics of the war, is best and most succinctly expressed by Honda as he shows his bitterness of the aftermath of the Nomonhan disaster of 1939.

‘Nomonhan was a great embarrassment for the Imperial Army, so they sent the survivors where they were most likely to be killed. The commanding officers who made such a mess of Nomonhan went on to have distinguished careers in central command. Some of the bastards even became politicians after the war. But the guys who fought their hearts out for them were almost all snuffed out.’

Although we are unaware of it so early in the novel, this is the first step toward establishing a link between the events of 1939-1945 (Nomonhan through the end of the war) and the events surrounding Toru and Kumiko now, for the springboard used by Noboru Wataya to enter politics is his uncle, Yoshitaka Wataya, a member of the Diet who was at one time connected with the very members of central command who had begun the disastrous war against China. Noboru, following in these footsteps, demonstrates that the dark side of the State persists, exerting its ugly influence over the ordinary people.

Murakami’s fiction has, of course, posed this sinister aspect of the Japanese State for many years – indeed, it is a central element in A Wild Sheep Chase, and becomes even more pronounced in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. World War II, however, is the ideal vehicle for the pursuit of this theme, for it is war, as he put it to interviewer Ian Burama in 1996, that ‘stretches the tension between individuals and the state to the very limit.’

The third major narrative of this novel emerges entirely in Book Three (‘The Birdcatcher’), and concerns the enigmatic characters Nutmeg Akasaka and her son, Cinnamon. More closely tied to the original narrative of Toru and his quest for Kumiko, this final story provides the necessary path by which the mystery of Kumiko’s disappearance, the real nature of Noboru’s plot, may be approached. It also offers a plausible, if puzzling, explanation of what the ‘wind-up bird’ of the title is really supposed to be. Indeed, we might look upon Book Three as Murakami’s attempt to reconnect the disparate events in Books One and Two.

Nutmeg Akasaka makes her first appearance in Book Two, but we have no more idea than Toru about who she is, or how much she will figure into the story later. Toru sits outside Shinjuku Station, watching the people go by, following his uncle’s advice to sit and clear his head for awhile, when a woman, well dressed and attractive, approaches him and stares at the mark on his face. She asks him if he needs anything, but when he replies in the negative, she leaves.

The woman returns in Book Three, and this time there is something Toru needs from her: he needs money, for he has decided to purchase the land on which the well he needs so much is located. The sum required, eighty-million yen (more than half a million U.S. Dollars), is a considerable one, and it is to the evidently wealthy Nutmeg that he turns for help.

In response, she employs him in a most peculiar position for which he is uniquely qualified: Toru becomes a ‘healer’ of sorts, a medium by which women who suffer from a mysterious unconscious imbalance restore their internal equilibrium. The process by which they are healed is, for Toru, both passive and sexual; as he sits blindfolded in a darkened room, his mind blank, the women kiss, fondle, and caress the mark on his cheek.

But the structure of the third narrative is more complex than this, for it encompasses both the physical and metaphysical aspects of the central narrative (Toru and Kumiko) in its focus on sexuality and the unconscious, and at the same time brings to bear the historical significance of the World War II, the power of the State, and the risks of playing with the inner consciousness.

Most of this third narrative is revealed to us through Nutmeg’s mute son, Cinnamon, a refined youth of about twenty. Through certain asides, unattributed, we learn that Cinnamon lost his ability to speak through a strange incident that occurred when he was very young. Waking one night to investigate the cry of a bird he has never heard before, he spots two men, one of whom looks like his father, burying a small bag under a tree in the family’s garden. The man who looks like his father climbs the tree, never to return. After watching for a while he goes back to bed, but later dreams that he has gone out to the garden to dig up the bag, which turns out to contain a human heart, still beating.

When he returns to bed, he finds another ‘him’ sleeping in his bed. He panics, fearing that if there is another ‘him,’ then he himself will no longer have a place in the world. IN order to preserve his existence, he forces his way into the bed with the other ‘him’ and goes to sleep. When he wakes the next morning, he discovers that he no longer possesses a voice.

From this time on the boy – later known to us as Cinnamon – seems to live in two worlds; one that is shared by his mother and other family members; and another, inner world of his own. Later we come to suspect that that this ‘inner world’ is the same as the unconscious hotel in which Toru seeks Kumiko. For Cinnamon, this takes the form of cyberspace, the mysterious interior of his computer network, to which he gradually allows Toru (limited) access.

There is no question of what that inner space means to Cinnamon: it is the key, if he can only unlock it, to the meaning of his life, and the answer to why his voice was taken from him. To do this, Cinnamon creates stories (again, the power of the story is revealed!). This is a practice first begun with his mother, who used to play a game with him of making up stories about her own father, a veterinarian with the Imperial Army in Manchuria who bore a mark on his right cheek virtually identical to Toru’s. How much truth there is in the stories it is impossible to say, for Nutmeg’s father disappeared after the Soviet invasion in the last days of the war. But this is not the point; these stories, which are connected with those of Mamiya and Honda in their expression of tension between individual Japanese soldiers and the Japanese central command, are designed not to reinvent the life of the actual man who was Cinnamon’s grandfather, but to help Cinnamon to understand (and create) himself. Toru recognizes this after having been permitted a brief glimpse of one of the stories in Cinnamon’s computer:

‘I had no way of telling how much of the story was true. Was every bit of it Cinnamon’s creation, or were parts of it based on actual events?

I would probably have to read all sixteen stories to find the answers to my questions, but even after a single reading of #8, I had some idea, however vague, of what Cinnamon was looking for in his writing. He was engaged in a serious search for the meaning of his own existence. And he was hoping to find it by looking into the events that had preceded his own birth.’

The stories, no doubt at least nominally grounded in those his mother had told him about his grandfather, are filled with the violence and misery of the final weeks in Manchuria, during which the Imperial Army, hopelessly outnumbered, prepared to make its last stand against the Soviet armored units assembling for their final assault on them. The first story concerns the killing of animals at the Hsin-Ching zoo in order to prevent them from being accidentally released once the Soviets have invaded. This task is assigned to an intelligent young lieutenant who has no stomach for the job, and in the end leaves it only partially completed.

We gain a better sense of the lieutenant’s attitude toward the war and his role in it in a later story in which he is given the job of executing eight Chinese prisoners, members of the local military academy’s baseball team who have attempted to flee the city in its final days. The lieutenant’s impressions, conveyed to the veterinarian (Nutmeg’s father) are similar to those of ‘Hamano’ in Mamiya’s earlier narrative.

‘Just between you and me, I think the order stinks. What the hell good is it going to do to kill these guys? We don’t have any planes left, we don’t have any warships, our best troops are dead. Some kind of special new bomb wiped out the whole city of Hiroshima in a split second…We’ve already killed a lot of Chinese, and adding a few bodies to the count isn’t going to make any difference. But orders are orders.’

In this brief statement, the lieutenant expresses the ‘tension between individuals and the state’ that interests Murakami so much. What is one to go when given orders that make no sense, that merely reassert the stupid brutality of those in charge? Much of the brutality of the war, he suggests, is attributable not to individuals but to the State that commands them.

Another important aspect of Cinnamon’s subnarrative on the computer is its recreation of the ‘wind-up bird’ itself, linking the narrative to earlier phases of the novel. The wind-up bird in Cinnamon’s narrative world is a spectral creature, audible only to certain gifted (or cursed) people, and visible to none. Its eerie cry emerges at moments of great tension, such as when the animals at the zoo are shot, or when the Chinese prisoners are executed. Its cry also coincides, roughly, at least, with tiny, parenthetical prophesies about individual characters in the story. We are told, for instance, the final fate of the soldier under the lieutenant’s command who can hear the bird’s cry.

Finally, we are given the impressions of Cinnamon’s grandfather, and these are significant mainly because they tell us more about Cinnamon himself. Observing the executions of the Chinese prisoners, for instance, the veterinarian imagines himself to be split into two distinct halves, both executioner and executed. ‘The veterinarian watched in numbed silence, overtaken by the sense that he was beginning to split in two. He became simultaneously the stabber and the stabbed. He could feel both the impact of the bayonet as it entered his victim’s body and the pain of having his internal organs slashed to bits.’ This dualism is equally an aspect of Cinnamon, who was ‘split in two’ at the age of six. It is also a link with others in the novel who have experienced the same thing: Creta Kano, Kumiko, Nutmeg, and indeed Toru himself. At the same time, it provides a physical visceral quality to that sensation, linking it to the skinning of Yamamoto, and eventually to the murder of Nutmeg’s husband, whose body is found with all its internal organs missing.

The third narrative, then, manages to bring together many of the disparate elements of the first two: the clashing historical periods, the dichotomy between physical and metaphysical, the gap between the conscious and unconscious worlds. It even gives a common metaphorical reading, in the form of the computer, to the mystery of the unconscious. Cinnamon’s narrative manages to close the gaps between the three narratives, tying together elements that appeared unrelated at the end of the first two books.

By this time it must be reasonably clear that what really connects the three disparate narratives that make up The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is a crisis of identity that is both physical and metaphysical, real and magical. It is born of the separation, so to speak, of the various elements that make up one’s identity: a ‘core’ identity that resides within one, and the sum of one’s experiences and interactions with others. Identity is, naturally, tided to the individual will, but in this novel that will is constantly threatened by the controlling power of the State and its organs. In that sense the work can be read as a quasi-political novel, one of resistance to the State. On a more basic level, however, the novel depicts a more archetypal conflict between good and evil, the resolution of which has the potential to return fertility to the wasteland.”
…….
“Creta Kano’s experience [with Noboru Wataya] at once a physical and a metaphysical one, helps us to understand a little better some of the other physical mutilations in the story. We might comprehend, for instance, the murder of Nutmeg’s husband, whose body is found with all its internal organs removed and the face slashed to bits, as a similar, brutally physical attempt to remove both his external identity (his face) and his internal ‘core’ (his organs). Murakami’s focus on the organs in the abdominal cavity does have some cultural significance here that is worth noting. Unlike in the West, where the soul is thought to exist in the mind, or sometimes in the heart, Japanese tradition has it that the center of one’s being exists in the belly. This, according to some, is the origin of seppuku, ‘belly cutting,’ known in the West as ‘hara-kiri.’ Opening the abdomen by disembowelment literally opens the true essence of the individual, and thus is taken as a last demonstration of truth. This may helps us to understand the executions of the Chinese baseball players in Cinnamon’s story: looking beyond the practical reasons for bayoneting the prisoners (to save ammunition), the mutilation of their internal organs tear to pieces their ‘core selves’ as well as their bodies. It may also help explain why, despite having been beaten to death with a baseball bat, the last victim of this massacre still manages to sit up and grab the veterinarian by the hand. His ‘core’ has not yet been fully extinguished, and that ‘something’ within him still struggles to exert its own existence.

We gain a very clear picture of the physical side of the core identity quite early in the story from May Kasahara as well. She describes it as the ‘lump of death,’ but in the context of the above discussion we can understand that she really refers to the ‘core identity’ itself.

‘…the lump of death. I’m sure there must be something like that. Something round and squishy, like a softball, with a hard little core of dead nerves…it’s squishy on the outside, and the deeper you go inside, the harder it gets…and the closer you get to the center, the harder the squishy stuff gets, until you reach this tiny core. It’s sooo tiny, like a tiny ball bearing, and really hard.’

It is this ‘something (nani ka, an expression that recurs throughout the novel) that obsesses everyone in the story. Mamiya, despite his obviously unpleasant associations with wells, still feels the urge to climb down into any well he sees. Why? ‘I probably continue to hope that I will encounter something down there,’ he tells Toru, ‘that if I go down inside and simply wait, it will be possible for me to encounter a certain something…What I hope to find is the meaning of the life I have lost. By what was it taken away from me, and why?’ these are almost the same words used by Creta Kano in describing her experience with Noboru Wataya.

In sum, then, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is about the ‘core’ identity of the individual, how it can be located, understood, protected, or alternatively, removed or destroyed. It also lies at the heart of Kumiko’s disappearance for, as we later discover, Kumiko’s inner core has also been tampered with, leaving her lost, uncertain of who, or where, she really is.

We now approach one of the really difficult aspects of this novel: the question of how the core identity is corrupted. The process is, I believe, one of division. That is, the entire Self (conscious ‘self’ and unconscious ‘other’) is divided in two, and from between them, the ‘core’ is removed. Without this essential link to the central body of memory and information there can be no real connection between them, and thus no possibility of the necessary communication that creates a ‘whole’ person.

This is what has happened to Kumiko. Like Creta Kano, she has been stripped of her core identity, leaving her conscious and unconscious selves divided and lost. One exists somewhere in the conscious realm – we never learn where – while the other lives in the unconscious, the mysterious hotel, in ‘Room 208.’

We cannot help noticing the opposite nature of these two sides of the same person. The Kumiko know to Toru as his wife, for instance, seems to be a perfectly ordinary young woman, an intelligent professional, leading a reasonably normal married life with him. But her unconscious ‘other’ is a mirror image of this Kumiko, sexually charged and driven by pure physical desire. This ‘other’ that has always lurked within Kumiko has remained suppressed by the conscious Kumiko, but is nevertheless a critical part of her What Noboru has done in removing her core identity is to eliminate the central reference point by which the conscious Kumiko keeps the unconscious side of herself under control thus released, the ‘other’ Kumiko is free to express herself in a characteristically sexual way. In one sense this is healthy; Toru’s wife confesses that she never found sexual fulfillment with him, perhaps because she maintained such a tight control over her ‘darker side.’ At the same time, however, it leaves her conscious self in a weakened position of submission, helpless against the power of her inner sexual desire.

Toru, of course, takes on the role of saving Kumiko from his fate, but his task is complicated by the fact that he too must struggle against the power of his unconscious ‘other.’ Compounding the difficulty of this task is that this ‘other side’ of Toru is Noboru himself.

This leads to an interesting question: If the ‘other’ exists in the realm of the unconscious, how then does Toru encounter his own ‘other’ in the conscious world? The answer lies in the concept of the ‘nostalgic image,’ something I have discussed at length in several previous writings on Murakami.

The concept of the nostalgic image is fairly straightforward, but demands a leap of faith on the part of readers, because it is heavily dependent on the magical elements in the text. It refers to a recurring motif in Murakami fiction in which the protagonist longs desperately for someone or something he has lost – a friend, a lover, an object – and in response, his unconscious mind, using his memories of the object or person in question, creates a likeness, or a surrogate, which then appears in the conscious world as a character in the story. There is, however, one major catch: nothing ever really looks quite the same in both worlds. Thus, to the protagonist as well as the hapless reader of Murakami fiction, the relationship between the ‘nostalgic image’ character and its origin is often obscure. This much is hinted in the final lines of Hear the Wind Sing, in a quote ostensibly from Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘We can never comprehend the depths of the gloom of night in the light of day.’ In the context of Murakami’s fictional world this means that nothing passes from the unconscious into the conscious world without experiencing some kind of radical transformation in appearance.

Nevertheless, we can usually spot these ‘image characters’ by their peculiarity: nameless twins and a talking pinball machine in Murakami’s second novel, Pinball 1973; the ‘Sheepman, made up of the protagonist’s unconscious conceptions of Rat and the Sheep in A Wild Sheep Chase; the strange little people, some seven-tenths of normal size, who invade the home of a man in the short story ‘TV People;’ the opaque image of a middle-aged woman who appears on the protagonist’s back in ‘The Story of the Poor Aunt;’ and so on.

Forming the connection between the unconscious memory and the image it becomes is usually a matter of linguistic relationship. For instance, a dead girlfriend from the protagonist’s student days named Naoko reappears as a pinball machine known as ‘the Spaceship.’ The connection lies in the fact that Naoko used to tell him stories about people on other planets. In the same novel, the protagonist’s missing friend ‘Rat’ emerges as ‘the Twins,’ nameless girls who suddenly turn up on either side of him one morning after a night of heavy drinking. In attempting to find some suitable names for them (reminding us of Nutmeg and Cinnamon), the protagonists comes up with ‘Entrance’ and ‘Exit,’ which leads him to think about things without exists, such as mousetraps, and this finally leads to Rat.

Similar ‘ image characters’ appear in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. It is possible to read the characters of Creta and Malta Kano, for instance, as images of Kumiko and her older sister, a character Toru knows only through Kumiko’s stories of her. The relationships and experiences are similar. Kumiko, for instance, suggests that she might have handled her difficult childhood better had her sister not died, thus denying her a confidant. Creta Kano, on the other hand, describes her own trials with pain, attempted suicide, and identity crisis in the absence of her sister, who was performing mystical divinations on the island of Malta during these critical years. We note also the various incarnations of Creta Kano – one living in pain, another in numbness, and finally one who balances the two – and perhaps think of the two ‘sides’ of Kumiko: one who is ‘numb’ to Toru’s sexual caresses, and another caught up in a torrent of uncontrollable sexual abandon.

Other clues, a little more prosaic, also suggest a correlation between Kumiko and Creta. The fact that Creta Kano is exactly the same size as Kumiko and is thus able to slip into her clothing with no difficulty is suggestive. We might also note the retro-look affected by Creta Kano that suggests her roots in a previous time; she is a mixture of Kumiko past and present. Finally, there is the slippage in identity between Creta and the ‘Telephone Woman’/Kumiko during their sexual encounter with Toru in the unconscious hotel room.

But more than anything it is the similarity of her experience with Kumiko’s – and the central role of Noboru Wataya – that is suspicious. The scene in which Noboru draws out Creta Kano’s core consciousness, for instance, has the unmistakable signs of childbirth, or of an abortive birth. Might the ‘defilement’ of Creta not be another way of looking at the operation in which Kumiko’s own fertility is negated? Finally, there is the dream in which Malta tells Toru that her sister has given birth to a baby, and named it Corsica; this, Toru tells May Kasahara at the end of the novel, is what he will call his baby if he and Kumiko should have one.

Another character who bears a strong image quality is ‘Ushikawa,’ an unsavory little man who acts as go-between for Toru and Noboru in the latter stages of the book. Readers of A Wild Sheep Chase will certainly recognize similarities between this man, whom Toru describes as ‘without question, one of the ugliest human beings I had ever encountered…less like an actual human being than like something from a long-forgotten nightmare,’ and the ‘Sheepman,’ whose unkempt appearance is the more unique for the fact that he walks around in an ill-fitting, poorly-stitched sheep suit.

But the point is less their grotesque appearance than their function. Just as the ‘Sheepman’ is a combination of Rat and the antagonist Sheep, ‘Ushikawa seems to be created out of Kumiko, on the one hand, and his arch-nemesis Noboru, on the other. The association with Kumiko helps us to understand both ‘Ushikawa’s’ evident closeness to her (‘I’m taking care of her,’ he tells Toru cryptically), and yet his lack of knowledge about the details of her imprisonment (‘Not even I know all the details.’) the connection to Noboru, (who, lest we forget, is also part of Toru) accounts for his violent side, expressed in how he used to beat his wife and children. We can also hear the warning, megalomaniacal tones of Noboru in ‘Ushikawa’s’ assertion that Noboru ‘has a very real kind of power that he can exercise in this world, a power that grows stronger every day.’ This is Noboru speaking directly to Toru.

…

“As Creta Kano says, Noboru is the opposite of himself, existing in a ‘different world.’ This opposition is manifested in their behavior throughout the novel; whereas Toru is a mild, passive, unobtrusive figure, Noboru is violent, dominant, and ambitious. Yet there is crossover, or rather, there are points when this dark, violent side overcomes him, just as Kumiko’s dark, sexual side gradually takes hold of her. We see Toru lose control of himself in the scene when he beats the guitar player with his own baseball bat.

‘My mind was telling me to stop. This was enough. Any more would be too much. The man could no longer get to his feet. But I couldn’t stop. There were two of me now, I realized I had split in two, but this me had lost the power to stop the other me.’

This enraged Toru is, one supposed, a manifestation of Noboru, who gains strength in the darkness and takes control of Toru’s actions in the real world. We might note in passing that Toru’s description above is almost identical to ‘Ushikawa’s monologue about beating his wife and children, hinting at the connection between them:

‘I’d try to stop myself, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t control myself. After a certain point I would tell myself that I had done enough damage, that I had to stop, but I didn’t know how to stop.’

The object of ‘Ushikawa’s’ beating vis-à-vis the object of Toru’s is not important here; what matters is the expression of uncontrollable violence, for as Toru listens to ‘Ushikawa,’ he really confronts himself.

…

Wells (and other similarly shaped structures) are a major motif in Murakami fiction as a conduit between the conscious and unconscious worlds. In Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, for instance, the protagonist’s only potential escape route from his unconscious mind is through a pond that appears to flow beneath the walls that enclose the area, presumably bringing him back to the conscious world. In Dance Dance Dance, the protagonist boards an elevator in a modern high-rise hotel, but when the doors open finds himself in a much older structure from his past. More recently, the heroine of Sputnik Sweetheart, Sumire, dreams that her long-lost mother comes back from the dead to tell her something, but is sucked into a kind of hollow tower before she can convey her message, leaving Sumire wondering whether to follow her into that world.

The well in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle becomes a central point of contention as well, and both Toru and Noboru seem to recognize the importance of controlling this important link between their two worlds. Toru’s work as a healer grows directly from his need to own and control the land on which the well is located. Achieving this at least temporarily when Nutmeg purchases the land and holds in trust for Toru, the well also serves as bait to draw Noboru out, forcing him to bargain. Eventually Noboru even concedes the possibility of returning Kumiko to Toru in exchange for giving up the well, making clear how critical control of this portal between worlds is for him.

Fortunately for Toru (and for us, his loyal cheering section), he maintains possession of the well long enough to accomplish his task, and as he moves from Room 208 to the well for the last time, the well fills with water. Even Toru, by this time, understands the importance of the water that fills the well: ‘It had been dried up, dead, for such a long time, yet now it had come back to life. Could this have some connection with what I had accomplished there? Yes, it probably did. Something might have loosened whatever it was that had been obstructing the vein of water.’ The fact that he might drown in the well as it fills with water does not seem to trouble him much; ‘I had brought this well back to life, and I would die in its rebirth. It was not a bad way to die, I told myself.’

But Toru, as we know, is rescued in the end by Cinnamon, and this leaves us with one interesting question: How will Toru maintain his own identity if his unconscious ‘other’ no longer exists? Are we to imagine that Noboru Wataya in his unconscious mind is still alive somewhere, back where he belongs? On this one point we might, perhaps, quibble with Murakami’s decision to save his hero from death at the end of the novel.

In terms of the overall quest of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, then, the novel provides a successful conclusion. By beating his ‘other’ to death in the unconscious world, Toru has achieved his goal, and if proof is required, Murakami provides it in the restoration of the well – Toru’s own private conduit to the ‘other world’ – with the flow of water – significantly, warm water, offering the promise of new life.

…

I noted above that ‘flow that is so important a metaphor for life and fertility is also a metaphor for time, and this brings us, at last to the ‘wind-up bird’ itself. The wind-up bird is, of course, an ‘open’ symbol, like Melville’s whale, and can thus be read simultaneously in a number of ways.

Toru himself offers several suggestions within the narrative. Upon reading Cinnamon’s ‘Wind-up Bird Chronicle #8,’ for instance, he suggests that the bird is a harbinger of doom, a source of deadly fate. ‘The cry of the bird was audible only to certain special people who were guided by it toward inescapable ruin.’ In this sense, the bird takes on a god-like role, as controller of human destiny. People, according to this suggestion, are like puppets set in motion for the bird’s amusement, or, as Toru puts it, like wind-up dolls.

‘People were no more than dolls set on tabletops, the springs in their backs wound up tight, dolls set to move in ways they could not choose, moving in directions they could not choose. Nearly all within range of the wind-up bird’s cry were ruined, lost. Most of them died, plunging over the edge of the table.’

Based on this reading we might see the wind-up bird as symbolic of the power of the State itself, manipulating and using the people in ways they cannot control. Indeed, this is the essential structure of A Wild Sheep Chase, in which the Sheep, a source of unimaginable power, takes control of the weak-minded and rules human destiny through them. It is thought, in that book, to have been the source of the military genius of Genghis Khan, as well as the root of power in elements of the Japanese State during World War II.

If we choose to view the wind-up bird in this sense, then Noboru’s ‘special power’ to take control of people’s core identities is surely connected to it. As a politician, a representative of political power in Japan, Noboru’s transformation from a sloppy, socially inept college professor into a slick, yet artificial, politician could easily be attributed to some mysterious relationship with the wind-up bird.

This is a plausible reading of the wind-up bird, and could be pursued in much greater depth…But I wish to offer an alternative reading, one that takes into account the motif of flow and time. I wish to read the ‘wind-up bird’ as a metaphor for time and history.

Toru himself offers a reading of the bird in this way from the earliest part of the novel: the bird’s real function, he believes is to ‘wind the spring of our quiet little world.’ In other words, the turning of the world – and its attendant creation of ‘time’ – rests in the hands of this mystical bird, whose task is to keep time flowing forward, creating temporal distance between past and present.

But the springs, like all springs, do wind down, and must be rewound by the bird. These are the points at which the bird’s cry is heard, and also the moments of tension in the novel, when disparate worlds seem to crash into one another. The bird’s cry is heard when historical moments – past and present, present and future – slam into one another as a result of the loss of momentum in time. According to this reading, the bird is not the cause of catastrophe, then, but naturally appears in order to set the flow of time going again. This may help us to understand the prophesies that appear at various points in the book: Cinnamon’s discovery of the buried heart, prophesying the death and mutilation of his father; the various parenthetical prophesies concerning the soldiers in Manchuria, and even Honda’s prophetic warnings to Toru and Mamiya.

This also allows us to comprehend better why May Kasahara nicknames Toru ‘Mr. Wind-up Bird;’ his function, like the bird’s is to restore the ‘flow,’ reestablishing a fertile relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other.’ In this context, he and the ‘wind-up bird’ may have more in common than he realizes.”

[MY NOTE: I also wonder if the bird could be an allusion to the birds in Slaughterhouse Five – we know Murakami is an admirer of Vonnegut.]

“Like the well, filling at last with water at the end of the novel, the human ‘self’ is characterized as a vessel into which stimuli are poured like water, to be stirred in the crucible of the unconscious, processed into the memories and experiences that make us who we are. When the process is permitted to continue smoothly, according to the flow of energy back and forth between the two modes of consciousness, human identity is stable and secure.

But, as we have seen, identity does not always work so smoothly. Human identity in this novel is altogether too fragile, too vulnerable to removal, transport, or even destruction. It can be replaced by another. When Cinnamon awakens from his terrifying dream of seeing another ‘him’ sleeping in his bed, for instance, he intuitively understands that his ‘self’ has been placed into another body that looks like his own, but is not. ‘He felt as if his self had been put into a new container…There was something about this one, he felt, that just didn’t match his original self.’

At the same time, identity that has been lost can also be recreated. Creta Kano has suffered a catastrophe even greater than Cinnamon’s, and now describes herself as ‘empty,’ but she is rebuilding her identity, piece by piece. ‘I am now quite literally empty. I am just getting started, putting some contents into this empty container little by little,’ she tells Toru, for ‘Without a true self…a person cannot go on living. It is like the ground we stand on.’ Like the well that fills with water at the end, all of the victims of the Wind-up Bird Chronicle attempt to refill the empty vessels left behind after their core identities have been removed. Some, like Creta Kano and Cinnamon, are partially successful; others, such as Mamiya, end in dismal failure.

Whether the central quest to ‘save’ Kumiko will be successful is left uncertain as of novel’s end. Toru has reestablished contact with her by the end of the work, but we cannot say whether she will ever be able to reconstruct her identity. An educated guess might lead us to believe (or at least to hope) that Toru will recover Kumiko and, following the restoration of fertility he has achieved, that they will have a child together. ‘If Kumiko and I have a child, I’m thinking of naming it Corsica,’ he tells May Kasahara, again, returning to what Malta tells him in his dream. If my reading is correct, and if Creta Kano and Kumiko are indeed one and the same, than Malta Kano’s words are the final prophesy in this book, and a harbinger of healing and restoration.”

So…we’re come to an end of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. My take?  Great book, complex, messy (no, not everything comes together smoothly despite Murakami’s best efforts) and endlessly fascinating. It’s my second time reading it, and this time I think I have a much better handle on how it works together and how is WWII is central to the story. By “killing” Noboru Wataya, are Kumiko and Toru killing off the remains of the “force” that brought about the war?

Some questions for the group:

Any other ideas how to read/interpret the wind-up bird?

Who is Cinnamon really? Is he the force that created all the events in the story? Is it possible that everything that happens to Toru is part of a structure constructed BY Cinnamon with his computer?

Who is the “man without a face” in the unconscious hotel? He knows his way through most of the hotel but not its structure as a whole – is he Cinnamon? Is he Toru himself?

What are the other ways that things connect? I discussed in my last post Toru’s progression, but what happens when you try to break down what is true, what is one of Cinnamon’s stories what is magic what is real what is past and what is present?

And finally – does the ending satisfy? Does the book work as a cohesive whole? Since the book seems to be structured along the lines of a detective novel, does it matter that there are unresolved questions at the end?

Please…share with the group your thoughts, your take, your questions!

My next post: Tuesday, July 29th – my introduction to our next book, my favorite novel of Murakami’s (at least to date) – Kafka on the Shore.

Enjoy.

“It’s a world made of tricky things.”

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
Book Three, Chapters 9-23
By Dennis Abrams

Some notes and observations:

Nutmeg’s escape, the slaughter of the animals at the Hsin-ching zoo before the arrival of Russian troops. “All they could do was pray that their deaths would not be too painful. None of them wanted to be crushed under the treads of a slow-moving tank or roasted in a trench by flamethrowers or die by degrees with a bullet in the stomach. Better to be shot in the head of the heart. But first they had to kill these zoo animals.”

The young soldier hears the call of the wind-up bird. What does it mean? Symbolize?

Nutmeg’s difficulty in telling stories.

Toro’s desire to save Kumiko and The Magic Flute. Nutmeg: “In the opera, the prince and the birdcatcher are led to the castle by three children riding on a cloud. But what’s really happening is a battle between the land of day and the land of night. The land of night is trying to recapture the princess from the land of day. Midway through the opera, the heroes can’t tell any longer which side is right – who is being held captive and who is not. Of course, at the end, the prince gets the princess, Papageno gets Papagena, and the villains fall into hell…Anyhow at this point you don’t have a birdcatcher or a magic flute or bells.” “But I do have a well,” I said.

“Maybe the world was like a revolving door, it occurred to him as his consciousness was fading away. And which section you ended up in was just a matter of where your foot happened to fall. There were tigers in one section, but no tigers in another. Maybe it was as simple as that. And it was precisely because of this lack of logical continuity that choices really didn’t mean very much.”

“The phantom empire of Manchukuo was disappearing into history. And caught unawares in the wrong section of the revolving door, the veterinarian with the mark on his cheek would share the fate of Manchukuo.”

Another letter from May, life in the wig factory. Poor May.

Cinnamon and the “other” in his bed, no more speech.

The newspaper continues its investigations: M’s Secret Cure

The appearance of Ushikawa: “He was, without question, one of the ugliest human beings I had ever encountered. And not just physically ugly: there was a certain clammy weirdness about him that I could not put into words – the sort of feeling you get when your hand brushes against some big, strange bug in the darkness. He looked less like an actual human being than like something from a long-forgotten nightmare.”

Uchikawa’s threats: “There are things in this world it is better not to know about. Of course, those are the very things that people most want to know about.”

Cinnamon and Nutmeg. Cinnamon’s natural cleanliness.

Toru in the well: “I could feel a certain warmth in the mark of my check. It told me that I was drawing a little closer to the core of tings…Eventually…silence descended and began to burrow its way into the folds of my brain, one after another, like an insect laying eggs. I opened my eyes, then closed them again. The darkness inside and out began to blend, and I began to move outside of my self, the container that held me. As always.”

Another letter from May: “I have absolutely no idea where I’m going from here. For me, this could be the end of the line…Can I be honest with you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? I mean, really, really, really honest? Sometimes I get sooo scared! I’ll wake up in the middle of the night all alone, hundreds of miles away from anybody, and it’s pitch dark, and I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen to me in the future, and I get so scared I want to scream. Does that happen to you Mr. Wind-Up Bird? [MY NOTE: Again, the dark – and contrasted with Toru’s desire for the pitch-dark well.] When it happens, I try to remind myself that I am connected to others – other things and other people…On the list, of course, is you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. And the alley, and the well, and the persimmon tree, and that kind of thing.”

Another visit from Ushikawa – what is he up to? “You’re going to burn out sooner or later. Everybody does. It’s the way people are made. In terms of evolutionary history, it was only yesterday that men learned to walk around on two legs and get in trouble thinking complicated thoughts. So don’t worry, you’ll burn out. Especially in the world that you’re trying to deal with: everybody burns out. There are too many tricky things going on it, too many ways of getting into trouble. It’s a world made of tricky things.”

Ushikawa’s offer — Noboru Wataya wants to buy the house and property.

The fitting room. Nutmeg as “healer” her exhaustion, she finds her successor “the moment she saw the mark on the cheek of the young man who was sitting in front of a building in Shinjuku, she knew.”

Another letter from May: I LOVED this:

“Anyway, it seems to me that the way most people go on living (I supposed there are few exception), they think that the world or life (or whatever) is this place where everything is (or is supposed to be) basically logical and consistent. Talking with my neighbors here often makes me think like that. Like, when something happens, whether it’s a big event that affects the whole society or something small and personal, people talk about it like ‘Oh, well, of course, that happened because such and such,’ and most of the time people will agree and say, like ‘Oh, sure, I see,’ but I just don’t get it. ‘A is like this, so that’s why B happened.’ I mean, that doesn’t explain anything. It’s like when you put instant rice pudding mix in the microwave and push the button, and you take the cover off when it rings, and there you’ve got rice pudding. I mean, what happens in between the time when you push the switch and when the microwave rings? You can’t tell what’s going on under the cover. Maybe the instant rice pudding first turns into macaroni gratin in the darkness when nobody’s looking and only then turns back into rice pudding. We think it’s only natural to get rice pudding after we put rice pudding mix in the microwave and the bell rings, but to me that’s just a presumption. I would be kind of relieved if, every once in a while, after you put rice pudding mix in the microwave and it rang and you opened the top, you got macaroni gratin. I suppose I’d be shocked, of course, but I don’t know, I think I’d be kind of relieved too. Or at least I think I wouldn’t be so upset, because that would feel, in some ways, a whole lot more real.”

May’s line of disconnected things. “Every time the bell rings and I take off the cover, I seem to find something I’ve never seen before.”

“Sometimes I think that the reason I’m sitting here making like wigs like this every day is because I kissed your mark that time. It’s because I did that that I made up my mind to leave that place, to get as far away as I could from you.” Kumiko and May had to leave to get away from Toru?

Ushikawa arranged for Toru to talk online with Kumiko (in what was obviously something new when the book was written).

Cinnamon’s computer system. His passwords: ZOO and SUB

Nutmeg’s story. Her success as a designer, her husband, his brutal murder – drained of blood, heart, stomach, liver and both kidneys and pancreas missing, head “severed from the torso and set on the lid of the toilet, facing outward, the face chopped to mincemeat” Why?

Nutmeg finds her calling.

Toru and Kumiko chat: jellyfish and metamorphoses. “’Going bad’ is something that just happens over a longer period of time. It was something decided in advance, without me, in a pitch-dark room somewhere, by someone else’s hand…I want you to think about me this way if you can: that I am slowly dying of an incurable disease – one that causes my face and body gradually to disintegrate. This is just a metaphor, of course. My face and body are not actually disintegrating. But this is something very close to the truth…”

Toru refuses to give up and forget everything: “I can accept the fact that one Kumiko is trying hard to get away from me, and she probably has her reasons for doing so. But there is another Kumiko, who is trying just as hard to get close to me. That is what I truly believe. No matter what you say here, I have to believe in the Kumiko who wants my help and is trying to get close to me…I can never just forget about you, I can never push the years we spent together out of my mind. I just can’t do it because they really happened, they are a part of my life, and there is no way I can just erase them. That would be the same as erasing my own self…I know this. I know that I want to find my way to where you are – you, the Kumiko who wants me to rescue her. What I do not know yet, unfortunately, is how to get there and what it is that’s waiting for me there. In this whole long time since you left, I’ve lived with a feeling as if I’d been thrown into absolute darkness. Slowly but surely, though, I am getting closer to the core, to that place where the core of things is located….”

It’s got to be in that hotel room, right?

Toru reads about Manchukuo and the Wataya family’s history. And then this extraordinary paragraph:

“I put the book away and, folding my arms behind my head, stared out the window in the vague direction of the front gate. Soon the gate would open inward and the Mercedes-Benz would appear, with Cinnamon at the wheel. He would be bringing another ‘client.’ These ‘clients’ and I were joined by the mark on my cheek. Cinnamon’s grandfather (Nutmeg’s father) and I were also joined by the mark on my cheek. Cinnamon’s grandfather and Lieutenant Mamiya were joined by the city of Hsin-ching. Lieutenant Mamiya and the clairvoyant Mr. Honda were joined by their special duties on the Manchurian-Mongolian border, and Kumiko and I had been introduced to Mr. Honda by Noboru Wataya’s family. Lieutenant Mamiya were joined by our experiences in our respective wells – his in Mongolia, mine on the property where I was sitting now. Also on this property had once lived an army officer who had commanded troops in China. All of these were linked as in a circle, at the center of which stood prewar Manchuria, continental East Asia, and the short war of 1939 in Nomonhan. But why Kumiko and I should have been drawn into this historical chain of cause and effect I could not comprehend. All of these events had occurred long before Kumiko and I were born.”

And that, I think, might be the question. Why? Is it just that they are the inheritors of that past, the post-war generation?

From Matthew Strecher:

The “Other” Strikes Back: Who is Noboru Wataya?

If Noboru Wataya really is Toru’s ‘other’ self, as I have suggested, however, then his antagonistic nature makes him something of an anomaly. Whereas in other Murakami fiction the unconscious ‘other’ has always been a benign existence whose aim is to help the conscious protagonist discover himself, in this novel the ‘other’ is fiercely hostile to Toru. The reason for this is not difficult to discern, however: whereas ‘self’ and ‘other’ maintain a healthy, symbiotic relationship when living in their respective worlds, here the ‘other’ has broken out of the unconscious realm, and seeks to coexist with Toru in ‘this’ world. Since by its nature the two aspects of the Self cannot live together in the same place, Noboru’s emergence into Toru’s conscious world can only bring trouble. No one makes this clearer than Creta Kano:

‘Noboru Wataya is a person who belongs to a world that is the exact opposite of yours,’ said Creta Kano. Then she seemed to be searching for the words she needed to continue. ‘In a world where you are losing everything, Mr. Okada, Noboru Wataya is gaining everything. In a world where you are rejected, he is accepted. And the opposite is just as true. Which is why he hates you so intensely.’

Toru seems to understand this much himself, particularly in his inability simply to ignore Noboru’s existence. ‘I can distinguish between myself and another as beings of two different realms,’ he notes early in the book. ‘When someone gets on my nerves, the first thing I do is transfer the object of my unpleasant feelings to another domain, one having no connection with me.’ But with Noboru this is not possible. ‘I was simply unable to shove Noboru Wataya into a domain having no connection with me.’ Why should this be, if not for the fact that Noboru is a part of him, and he can never entirely ignore or run away from himself?

As Creta Kano says, Noboru is the opposite of himself, existing in a ‘different world.’ This opposition is manifested in their behavior throughout the novel; whereas Toru is a mild, passive, unobtrusive figure, Noboru is violent, dominant, and ambitious. Yet there is crossover, or rather, there are points when this dark, violent side overcomes him, just as Kumiko’s dark, sexual side gradually takes hold of her. We see Toru lose control of himself in the scene when he beats the guitar player with his own baseball bat.

‘My mind was telling me to stop. This was enough. Any more would be too much. The man could no longer get on his feet. But I couldn’t stop. There were two of me now, I realized. I had split in two, but this me had lost the power to stop the other me.’

This enraged Toru is, one supposes, a manifestation of Noboru, who gains strength in the darkness and takes control of Toru’s actions in the real world. We might note in passing that Toru’s description above is almost identical to ‘Ushikawa’s’ monologue about beating his wife and children, hinting at the connection between them:

‘I’d try to stop myself, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t control myself. After a certain point I would tell myself that I had done enough damage, that I had to stop, but I didn’t know how to stop.’

The object of ‘Ushikawa’s’ beating vis a vis the object of Toru’s is not important here; what matters is the expression of uncontrollable violence, for as Toru listens to ‘Ushikawa,’ he really confronts himself.

Image and Artifice

If Noboru Wataya is indeed an ‘image’ character, then his emergence as a politician and television commentator are particularly appropriate for this role. Interestingly, his artificiality is obvious to Toru even when meeting Noboru face-to-face:

“[L]ooking at his face was like looking at a television image. He talked the way people on television talked, and he moved the way people on television moved. There was always a layer of glass between us. I was on this side, and he was on that side.’

Noboru’s ideas, according to Toru, are equally phony, though they take in the vast majority of the people. ‘[I]f you paid close attention to what he was saying or what he had written, you knew that his words lacked consistency. They reflected no single worldview based on profound conviction. For Toru, who detests artifice so profoundly that he feels uncomfortable even putting on a suit for his meeting with Malta Kano, such chicanery is intolerable, and for this reason as much as any other his attitude toward Noboru has a touch of extremism in it, as he tells Ushikawa, ‘I don’t simply dislike him: I cannot accept the fact of his very existence.’

Violence and Sexuality

The oppositional relationship between Noboru Wataya and Toru Okada is, as I suggested earlier, observable most of all in their respective approaches to sexuality. If indeed the two men represent diametric oppositions – dominance vs. passivity, ambition vs. modesty, artifice vs. sincerity – then this is demonstrated in their practice of sexuality as well, a fact that is particularly critical in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, in which sexuality is the means both to destroying, and also to restoring, the ‘core consciousness.’ The negative effects of sexual violence are visible in Noboru’s attempt to take control of Creta Kano, resulting in the loss of her identity, and something similar presumably happened to Kumiko’s elder sister, causing her to commit suicide. A rampant, dominating sexuality is also at the root of Kumiko’s disappearance, as we have seen. At the center of each of these incidents stands Noboru Wataya, whose sexual energy expresses itself in destructive ways.

An entirely different aspect of sexuality is seen, however, in the work that Toru performs at the ‘clinic’ operated by Nutmeg and Cinnamon Akasaka. As the healer of internally unbalanced women, Toru’s role is to help a very elite clientele to restore something that is missing from their inner selves. And yet, though I call this ‘work,’ his role is wholly a passive one, that of a medium through which the women establish contact with the ‘shared consciousness’ in which so much of this novel is played out. Toru’s ability to serve as medium is grounded in the mark on his cheek, literally a sign on his face that he has access to that place, and carries a tiny conduit to it. His work is also aided by his growing skill at dividing his mind from his body, much as Creta Kano does. Through him, as a result, psychic energy flows between the two worlds, a mysterious source of healing for those in whom that flow has been disrupted. One might say that by establishing direct contact with that flow of psychic energy, his patients are able to restart the flow within themselves.

The process sounds simple enough: Toru sits in a darkened room, his eyes covered with dark goggles, and he allows his mind to empty until he has reached a state of existence between the conscious and unconscious worlds. While he sits in this state of repose, the clients touch and manipulate the mark on his cheek, establishing direct contact with the ‘other world’ of the shared unconscious. What they find there is impossible to say with certainty, but we sense that they touch, fleetingly, that mysterious ‘heat source’ that lies at the center of their existence as individuals, and find temporary peace.

But the operation is also unquestionably sexual. While Toru sits utterly still and passive, the women essentially make love to the mark on his cheek, causing him to climax.

‘She then stood up, came around behind me, and instead of her fingertips, used her tongue…she licked my mark…With varying pressure, changing angles, and different movement [her tongue] tasted and sucked and stimulated my mark. I felt a hot, moist throbbing below the waist. I didn’t want to have an erection. To do so would have been all too meaningless. But I couldn’t stop myself.’

But this is by no means a ‘meaningless’ joining, for in his passive role as sexual stimulus/unconscious conduit, Toru mirrors in reverse the violent, penetrating assaults of Noboru, whose violent sexuality has the effect of destroying the flow between the conscious and unconscious, closing off the necessary movement between inner and outer selves, and thus, in figurative terms, shattering the fertile relationship between the two worlds in which identity and individual selfhood develop.

This helps us to understand better the nature of Toru’s sexual relations with Creta Kano, as well. We note, for example, that in both of their sexual encounters Toru takes the less aggressive role: Creta fellates him in the first instance, while in the second he lies on his back as she mounts him, foreshadowing his task as a healer. The result is that the two of them share some metaphysical aspect of their inner selves with one another. They literally bring their inner ‘cores’ into contact with one another, establishing a flow of energy that allows them to communicate in a mystical way. ‘It felt as if something inside her, something special inside her, were slowly working its way through my organ into me,’ says Toru. At the same time, something of Toru’s – a part of his ‘core,’ perhaps – works its way into Creta Kano, helping her to rid herself of the sense of defilement left behind by Noboru.

The same thing, on a slightly more chaste level, occurs between Toru and May Kasahara: a ‘flow’ is established between them that allows their core identities, however fleetingly, to come into contact with each other. As Toru rests in the sunshine with her shortly after the appearance of the mark on his cheek, his eyes closed, May Kasahara begins to kiss the mark on his cheek, just as Nutmeg’s customers will later do. At the same time, she places his hand on a nearly-healed cut over her eye, received in her recent motorcycle accident. While she applies her tongue to his mark, Toru strokes the wound on her face, and as he does so, ‘the waves of her consciousness pulled through my fingertips and into me – a delicate resonance of longing.’

Surely, this is the point of the entire book, the one act that can save the world, this contact between the core identities on the individual level. May Kasahara certainly sense it. Her greatest desire, aside from understanding more about the core that lurks within her, is to share her awareness of its existence with someone else. ‘What I’d really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person,’ she tells Toru immediately before the scene described above. ‘But I can’t seem to do it. They just don’t get it. Of course, the problem would be that I’m not explaining it very well…’

The real problem, of course, is that she tries to convey in words what can only be experienced through the senses. How can one explain what can only be felt through the pulsing flow of pure energy?”

(Of course, as we saw above, it was, at least in part, this “contact between core identities” that cause May to flee, first back to school, and then to the wig factory.)

OK – where do you think this is all going end? Thoughts on the book so far? Are you enjoying it? Questions?

My next post: Tuesday, July 22, on the rest of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

Enjoy.