Murakami in Russia: How Do They See Him?

An interesting take from Ivan Sergeevich Logatchov, on “What Russians See in Murakami,” written around 2005 as Murakami fever was hitting Russia, with an in-depth look at The Wind-up Bird Chronicle from a distinctly Russian perspective:

“In this article I would like to consider how Haruki Murakami is received in Russia today and what lies behind his current fame. The ‘Murakami boom’ reached Russian shores some twenty years behind Japan, where he rose to prominence in the 1980s, and spawned many fans of his works. At the time of his emergence in Japan, there were numerous other rising writers. In Russia, however, no contemporary Japanese writers were known when Dmitry Kovalenin’s translation of A Wild Sheep Chase ignited Murakami’s popularity. Thus, Murakami has become the yardstick by which other contemporary Japanese writers are measured in Russia. At least, the works of Ryu Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto, the next Japanese writers to be translated into Russian, have invariably been compared with Haruki Murakami’s works.

To the Japanese, Murakami is but one of many popular writers. In the eyes of the Russians, however, he both symbolizes contemporary Japan and epitomizes the Japanese mentality. Here, I believe, lies a fundamental difference in how his works are received in Japan and in Russia.

There are two well-known Murakamis in contemporary Japanese literature. Though their surnames are the same, Haruki Murakami and Ryu Murakami have highly contrasting lifestyles and little in common as writers. And yet, being familiar with the surname, Russian readers are quick to pick out a Murakami from among the exotic names of Japanese writers.

Needless to say, Haruki Murakami and Ryu Murakami are received in distinct ways. Unlike the works of Haruki Murakami, those of Ryu Murakami are replete with features that hardly suit the tastes of Europeans, such as the violence and explicit sexuality of his Almost Transparent Blue. The characters in Ryu Murakami’s novels take heroin and have sex after drinking whiskey. After reading all the details of the protagonist’s decadent life, readers may be left with such a sense of filth that they feel the urge to wash their hands.

Above all, Russian readers seek the sort of exoticism that they find in Haruki Murakami’s works. They are rather disappointed when they have finished reading a Ryu Murakami novel, therefore, not finding it entertaining at all. While Ryu Murakami’s works are far from primitive or banal, they are less accessible to Russians than those of Haruki Murakami.

Russian empathy with the protagonist’s self-awareness and loneliness

The protagonist’s self-awareness, and his loneliness arising from social alienation, an issue frequently addressed by Haruki Murakami, is one that is vitally important and familiar to Russian society today. Following the fall of the Soviet Union many Russians fell up against a similar problem, which might be phrased as, ‘How should I define my place in the society of the new Russia?’ or, ‘Am I a Russian, or am I a Soviet?’ Because life in Russia has lately become insecure and precarious, just as in Murakami’s world, Russian readers may be able to discover their own identity and resolve problems involving personal relationships by reading Murakami’s works. His protagonists, who embody contemporary society, offer answers to a variety of compelling questions, such as what human beings are about and what we are living for.

The anecdotes about Russia and Russians that often appear in Murakami’s works are also very interesting to Russian readers. Some examples are the nonsense about Leon Trotsky in Pinball, 1973 and the references to the Nomonhan Incident in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. These descriptions give Russian readers a good idea of how the Japanese envision Russians.

Acceptance as a modern writer by young Russians

Many Russian readers look upon Murakami as a sophisticated modernist writer. In fact, the very act of reading his books may be taking on the overtones of a fashion rather than a personal pursuit. It has recently become quite common to see someone reading a Murakami book on the Moscow subway. Typically, thinking it is stylish to be reading Murakami, the individual is reading the book without a protective cover, so as to draw the attention of those in the same car to its identity, and wearing a smug look as if to say, ‘I’m sure you all know exactly what I’m reading.’ We appear to be seeing the emergence of a new generation of Russians who try to assert that they are different from everyone else by reading books of the moment.

The vast majority of Murakami fans in Russia are either university students or people in their twenties and thirties employed in the financial and media industries. They represent a generation of people who have been groping for their place and a set of values to live by in a changing society. Perhaps they see a reflection of their own vacillation in Murakami’s cool and eccentric characters, who distance themselves from those around them. Moreover, his works are exciting and straightforward, and the stories are intriguing. Thanks to a steady stream of translations of works by such contemporary Japanese writers as Haruki Murakami and Ryu Murakami, Russian perceptions of Japan and the Japanese are likely to change substantially.

Speedy translations into Russian

Russian publishers are rushing to translate the works of Haruki Murakami. Three new translations of his works, including the masterpiece Portrait in Jazz, were issued in Russia in 2005. Russian readers are already enjoying After Dark, while readers in the United States are still working on Kafka on the Shore. The largest bookstores in Moscow, such as Biblio-Globus and Dom Knigi, not only offer large selections of Murakami’s books but have special sections set aside for them. The interest in his works is so high that even major publishers cannot keep up with the demand, and new works often sell out almost as soon as they arrive on store shelves.

Eksmo Press, one of Russia’s leading publishing houses, obtained the translation and publication rights for all of Murakami’s works in 2005 with a view to publishing a complete collection by the end of 2006. Meanwhile, the second printing of the Russian translation of Kafka on the Shore, which was published in December 2004, is almost sold out. Kafka on the Shore is the first major novel by Murakami to be translated into Russian before English.

Gripping descriptions of Japanese society

Below I will focus primarily on The Wind-up Bird Chronicle to discuss my observations regarding Murakami’s writing style. I believe that his works cannot be classified into a single genre. They are not suspense or horror stories along the lines of those of Stephen King, nor are they science fiction or fantasy. But there are views to the contrary, such as that offered by the critic Tetsuya Hatori. In an essay titled ‘The Modern Significance of Supernatural Powers (An Analysis of the Wind-up Bird Chronicle),’ published in the periodical Kokubungaku in 1995, Hatori wrote that A Wild Sheep Chase, with its numerous aspects of mysticism and occult horror, is ‘the Japanese version of the American horror film The Exorcist.’ Murakami can be said to have been greatly influence by famous Western writers of the twentieth century. His characters drink Heineken instead of sake and eat hamburgers instead of sushi, and this sort of un-Japanese lifestyle arouses the interest and curiosity of overseas readers.

As readers of Murakami are aware, most of his finer novels are in the first person. In this way he imbues readers with his distinctive manner of thinking and draws them into his fantastical universe. Murakami’s readers have a certain appeal to Russian readers simply by virtue of the abundance of scenes that bear no resemblance to Russian life. Moreover, contemporary Japanese society – the setting of many of Murakami’s novels – is a world apart to the ordinary Russian.

A hard-boiled world of pop culture

Murakami’s hard-boiled literature, overflowing with references to pop culture based on the American lifestyle, unfolds like a puzzle and draws readers into a postmodern world in a fantasy-like manner. The excitement is akin to that of a mystery novel. This aspect of his works, along with a literary style reminiscent of improvisational jazz, seems to account in part for his immense popularity.

Lately, Murakami has often been compared with such postmodernist authors such as Jack Kerouac and Umberto Eco (MY NOTE: Interesting combination!). A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World are said to show the strong influence of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., while Franz Kafka appears to have influenced The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. (MY NOTE: Now that I can see.) Murakami himself has been ambiguous at best when it comes to assessing literary influences on his career.

The critic Koichiro Koizumi compared Toru Okanada, the protagonist of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, with the protagonist of Kobo Abe’s Woman in the Dunes in his essay ‘Haruki Murakami’s Style: With a Focus on the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,’ published in Kokobungaku in 1995. Murakami himself has admitted that he has been strongly influenced by Kobo Abe, but he also remarks that he loves the writing style of Fyodor Dostoevsky. In one interview, for example, he referred to Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov as ‘an admirable, ideal novel.’

Incidentally, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle contains surprisingly few references to American culture, in contrast to Murakami’s earlier novels. A comparison of the novel’s first chapter, ‘Tuesday’s Wind-Up Bird: Six Fingers and Four Breasts,’ with the short story ‘The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,’ on which the novel is based illustrates this point well. The protagonist in ‘The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s women’ reads Len Deighton (a British-born author known primarily for spy novels), listens to Robert Plant (former lead singer of Led Zeppelin and a rock vocalist), and eats McDonald’s cheeseburgers. Toru Okada of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle listens to Rossini instead of Plant and cooks spaghetti instead of eating cheeseburgers. Although spaghetti could conceivably be likened to fast food like McDonald’s hamburgers, Rossini bears no comparison to Led Zeppelin.

Murakami typically blends several genres in a novel, adopting a flexible literary form spanning various categories that do not adhere to a single genre. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, for example, crosses over several genres. Aspects of domestic drama, postmodern utopianism, and historical fiction all coexist in the novel.

The domestic-drama part of the book centers on the life of Toru and Kumiko Okada. The opening chapters feature episodes involving their family life, and references are made to the background of their marriage and to the Watayas, Kumiko’s eccentric relatives. As the reader approaches part two of the book, whoever, scenes of everyday life recede and supernatural phenomena come to the fore, as if a disassociation of consciousness or a shirt to a different dimension (the otherworld) were taking place. Thanks to Murakami’s use of diverse artistic techniques, the labyrinthine plot is able to segue smoothly from the real world to the otherworld. The author lets his characters wander between reality and fantasy, organizing reality as he pleases. The wall separating reality from pseudo-reality gradually fades away, and the notion of the ‘here’ loses its former meaning. In other words, the ‘here’ simultaneously becomes the otherworld and the real world.

The very title of the novel and the names of its characters – the sisters Malta and Creta Kano, Nutmeg, Boris the Manskinner – have a postmodern feel. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle can also be defined as a postmodern work by the coexistence of the surreal scenes that inundate the novel and true-to-life scenes, most of which depict the Nomonhan Incident and the Sino-Japanese War. With The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami can be said to have combined for the first time the style of a historical novel with a fantastical postmodern utopianism.”

My next post will be on WEDNESDAY, July 16, on The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Book Three, Chapters 9-23.

Enjoy. And enjoy your weekend.

“Do you have some problem with the shape of your appendix?”

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
Book Two Chapters 14-16 and Book Three Chapters 1-8
By Dennis Abrams

Notes, Observations, and Favorite Things:

Creta Kano continues her story, her new self. “I had become an ordinary girl again…I needed time to get used to my new self. What kind of being was this self of mine?…My new self was able to feel pain, though not with that earlier intensity. I could feel it, but at the same time I had learned a method to escape from it. Which is to say, I was able to separate from the physical self that was feeling the pain. Do you see what I am saying? I as able to divide myself into a physical self and nonphysical self.”

Toru to Creta: “You could have been lost forever; you might have had to wander forever through genuine nothingness.”

“You and I joined our bodies together in my mind.” ‘When I heard myself actually speaking these words, I felt as if I had just hung a bold surrealistic painting on a white wall.”

Creta invites Toru to go to Crete. “Come to think of it, I have never once in my life said unambiguously to anybody, ‘I want to do this.’”

The long shadow of hatred. “When you cut the other person, you cut yourself.”

The hatred in Noboru Wataya’s heart was what split Creta in two.

Creta prophesizes that something bad will happen to Toru if he stays and doesn’t go to Crete.

A visit to May Kashara. “The only bad thing that’s happened in this house in the last ten years is that it’s so damned boring!”

Would she have let him die? Possibly.

The truth about the motorcycle accident. Her decision to go back to school.

“I don’t want to watch you going under, and I don’t want to sweat any more for you than I already have. That’s why I’ve decided to go back to a world that’s a little more normal. But if I hadn’t met you there – here, in front of this vacant house – I don’t thinks would have turned out this way. I never would have thought about going back to school. I’d still be hanging around in some not-so-normal world. So in that sense, it’s all because of you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. You’re not totally useless.”

I nodded. It was the first time in a long time anyone had said anything nice about me.

May licks Toru’s mark.

People watching. Doughnuts and coffee. The well-dressed middle-aged woman with the Virginia Slims. Do you need any money? Am I the only one who finds their off-kilter conversations very funny?

Toru follows and then beats the shit out of the musician he heard in Sapporo the night of Kumiko’s abortion. The baseball bat. The empty guitar case.

Letters from Kumiko’s family. An exchange of letters with Lieutenant Mamiya.

A visit to the real estate office to learn the price of the land where the Miyawaki house was.

“I have to have that well. Whatever happens, I have to have that well.”

Lottery tickets. The well-dressed woman “I guess I need some money now.”

The chapter “What happened in the Night?” What do you think that was about?

Toru shows for his appointment. The extraordinarily well-dressed young man, “possibly the handsomest man I had ever seen in my life.”

Was it Haydn? Bach?

The goggles. A women enters, licks his mark. “I close my eyes and separate from this flesh of mine.”

The envelope of money. New sneakers.

“One thing for sure: things had started to move.” The cat returns.

A letter from May.

Renaming the cat “mackerel”

The well-dressed woman takes Toru shopping for suits, shirts, shoes, a watch, a haircut, but tells him to go buy handkerchiefs, a wallet, a key holder and underwear on his own. I loved the scene – very…odd.

“This reminded me of several so-called art films I had seen in college. Movies like that never explained what was going on. Explanations were rejected as some kind of evil that could only destroy the films’ ‘reality.'”  Could this apply to Murakami’s work as well?

The dinner. “Bring me a salad and a dinner roll, and some kind of fish with white meat. Just a few drops of dressing on the salad, and a dash of pepper. And a glass of sparking water, no ice.”

“Do you have some problem with the shape of your appendix?”

“…I want the people around me to look right, even if I have to pay for it myself.”

Nutmeg Akasaka and Cinnamon Akasaka.

The Mystery of the Hanging House – why did Murakami decide to do these kind of “injected” chapters in Book Three?

A new house has been built on the property, along with a new well with a steel ladder. Toru tries to break through the wall.

——————————
From Jay Rubin:

“When the wife strays into the dark realm of desire and begins sending her husband ambiguous cries for help from that unknown world, he is understandably confused. Afraid to follow her into that darkness, he waits for a sign to tell him what to do. He receives a letter from her asking for a divorce and containing a graphic description of her affair. This would have been more than enough evidence for most men to end the relationship, but still he hesitates to ask. He considers escaping to Europe with another woman and leaving all of his troubles behind, but in the end he decides to stand and fight.

Toru, the husband, works through his anger by directing it at someone else, beating up the folk singer he saw perform on the night of his wife’s abortion. The loss of this child, he finally realizes, signaled the beginning of the end of their marriage. But the love they shared for six years is too important to abandon. If it was meaningless, then his life at the time was meaningless, too, and perhaps his whole life has been meaningless. This he cannot accept and he vows to fight for his wife’s return.

Toru decides to purse his wife, Kumiko, to preserve the integrity of his own personality as much as the continuity of his marriage. ‘I had to get Kumiko back. With my own hands, I had to pull her back into this world. Because if I didn’t, that would be the end of me. This person, this self that I think of as ‘me’ would be lost.’

Thus, rather than doing anything so practical as hire a private detective or search the streets himself, Toru launches his quest inwards. He goes down into the earth, into a well, to brood on his past. What he finds there has implications that go far beyond his own inner world. As his young friend May Kasahara tells us (almost too directly), in choosing to fight for his wife Toru will become a kind of culture hero, fighting battles not only for himself as an individual but ‘fighting for a lot of other people’ as well. In trying to find out who he is, Toru discovers elements of his identity that have wide-ranging cultural and historical significance.

The psychologist Hayao Kawai reads Kumiko’s disappearance as an allegory for the kind of emotional barrenness that can overtake a modern marriage when one partner psychologically withdraws from the relationship; this in turn can be seen as emblematic of human relations in general, which call out for the often painful process of ‘well-digging’ on both sides.

The well thus holds out the promise of healing, which is why Toru goes to inordinate lengths to assure himself of an opportunity to spend time inside it, but the process of ‘well-digging’ is by no means pleasant. Indeed, it suggests the threat of a slow, painful, and most of all lonely death, as we saw in Norwegian wood, and as May Kasahara reminds Toru after she has pulled up his rope ladder:

‘If I just walked away from here, you’d end up dead. You could yell, but no one would hear you. No one would think you were at the bottom of a well…they’d never find your body.’

Toru spends so much time in the well in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle that many readers want to know if Murakami himself has been down one. The answer, quite simply, is no. He would be ‘too scared’ to do such a thing he told Laura Miller in an interview for the web magazine Salon, adding that he associates the well with the story of Orpheus descending to the land of death. He also became visibly excited when he told an audience at a benefit reading he did after the Kobe earthquake that he had recently read about a hunter who had survived several days trapped down a well. Many of the details of sound and light in the report matched what he had written entirely from his imagination.

The name ‘Toru’ (literally ‘to pass through’) was used in Norwegian Wood, perhaps to indicate that the protagonists was making his passage into adulthood. In The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, however, Toru learns to ‘pass through’ the wall separating the ordinary world from the world of the unknown. In the original, his name first appears in the katakana phonetic script, though it is later written with a Chinese character meaning ‘to receive,’ which suggests passivity. It therefore seems to imply both activity and passivity. Most of the time, Toru is a typical Murakami Boku, a first-person narrator of interest to us less for himself than for the stories he hears – the stories he ‘receives’ through his ears – from the more colorful, even bizarre characters who surround him. Toru listens to one ‘long story’ after another, and one of the major attractions of the novel is the stories themselves.

His wife’s name is also significant. The ‘kumi’ of “Kumiko’ could have overtones of neatly bundling things together, arranging things, or, from another ‘kumu,’ to draw water from a well. The connection with water and wells brings to a kind of culmination the well symbolism we have seen since Murakami’s earliest works.

If the well is the passageway to the unconscious, the water at the bottom represents the contents of the psyche. When Toru goes down into the dry well, he takes on the role of its water, becoming almost pure psyche. In the darkness, he all but loses track of his physical existence and becomes pure memory and imagination, floating in and out of consciousness, unsure of where he ends and the darkness begins. Only the wall against his back seems to provide a barrier between the physical world and that deeper darkness he seeks. But then Toru passes through the wall, and he discovers his fears concentrated in a place known as Room 208, which is reminiscent of Room 101, the repository of every person’s greatest fear, in George Orwell’s 1984. (The Orwell connection may not be accidental.)

The number 208 may also strike the reader as strangely familiar: the twin girls 208 and 209 in Pinball, 1973. In that early novel, the cute twins evoke the mystery of memory. Without any explanation, they show up in Boku’s bed one day and go back just as suddenly to their ‘original place’ in the depths of his mind.

Room 208 exists in Toru’s (or perhaps even Kumiko’s) mind and is accessible only through a dreamlike state. For Toru, Room 208 is a place of irresistible sexual allure, where the faceless telephone sex woman lies in bed, seemingly naked, waiting for him amid the suffocating fragrance of flowers; a place where his half-conscious attraction for Creta Kano blossoms into a sexual fantasy so intense it cause him to ejaculate in ‘reality,’ an adolescent throwback perhaps related to Creta’s Sixties-style hair and clothes. 9though, born in April 1954, Toru would have been only nine in 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated.) Finally, Room 208 is a place of danger where there is a threat of death involving sharp knives and it is somehow related to his brother-in-law, the evil Noboru Wataya.

Toru hesitates to confront his fears, but he is determined to wrench some kind of ‘meaning’ out of his existence. Whereas most of Murakami’s earlier characters were content to leave things unexplained and even relished their absurdity, Toru wants answers. He wants to understand another person, the woman to whom he is married – and, by extension, himself.

‘Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?…
That night, In our darkened bedroom, I lay besides Kumiko, staring at the ceiling and asking myself just how much I really knew about this woman…
I might be standing in the entrance of something big, and inside lay a world that belonged to Kumiko alone, a vast world that I had never known. I saw it as a big, dark room. I was standing there holding a cigarette lighter, its tiny flame showing me only the smallest part of the room.
Would I ever see the rest? Or would I grow old and die without ever really knowing her? If that was all that lay in store for me, then what was the point of this married life I was leading? What as the point of my life at all if I was spending it in bed with an unknown companion?’”

From Matthew Strecher:

“Sexuality does play a role in Toru’s life…and it has greater importance to him than he is willing to admit. The novel begins, in fact, with Toru receiving telephone calls from a woman whose voice he does not recognize, who begs him for ‘ten minutes’ of his time so that they might ‘understand one another.’ He finds it exceedingly strange that she knows so much about him – his exact age, the fact that he is out of work – and yet he has no clue as to who she might be. When she calls again later her talk is unmistakably sexual, and he prudishly hangs up on her.

Early on we suspect a connection between this woman, pleading for mutual understanding with Toru, and his self-admission that he knows nothing about his wife…

Sexuality also plays a key role in Toru’s relationship with the Kano sisters, Malta and Creta. Malta Kano, a clairvoyant brought in by Kumiko to help locate their missing cat, is assisted by her sister, Creta, whose connection with Toru is that she just happens to have been sexually assaulted by Noboru Wataya, causing some kind of ‘defilement’ that has displaced her ‘self,’ forcing her to construct a new identity for herself. This in turn leads Creta Kano to pursue a sexual relationship with Toru, in order to help reverse the damage done by Noboru. Appearing in his dreams on two separate occasions while he naps, she has sex with him, causing him to ejaculate. At the time Toru believes he has simply had erotic dreams that spilled over (literally) into the waking world, but when Creta visits him in reality she is able to describe the scenes in detail, making it clear that they really happened, but in a different realm of consciousness. ‘Of course, we did not have relations in reality. When you ejaculated, it was not in me, physically, but in your own consciousness. Do you see? It was a fabricated consciousness. Still, the two of us share the consciousness of having had relations with each other.’ This is possible, she explains, because she is a ‘prostitute of the mind,’ able to join her mind sexually with those of others. Later she explains that she is ‘able to divide myself into a physical self and a nonphysical self’, and thus to move some mental aspect of herself – her mind, her soul, her consciousness – to another place.

Toru learns much from this experience with Creta. He is intrigued by the fact that in their second unconscious meeting she not only wore one of Kumiko’s dresses, but even seemed to turn into Kumiko during their intercourse. This gives him the idea that the key to finding Kumiko may lie in developing the same ability that Creta uses to enter his own unconscious realm more or less at will. After hearing Mamiya’s story about a near-vision at the bottom of his well in Mongolia, and having been told that there is a dry well in the yard of a nearby house by May Kashara, Toru decides that the well is the gateway to his inner self, and this is where he goes to pursue his quest.

The dreamscape in which this part of the story takes place in a vast, labyrinthine hotel (mirroring the chaos of the unconscious), the core of which for Toru is Room 208. There, he re-encounters the seductive ‘telephone woman’ – and sometimes Creta herself – and shares the details of his quest with her. More importantly, however, he is not permitted to see her – the voice is shrouded in darkness – but can only hear her voice. Her voice, however, remains unfamiliar to him.

Clearly, this unconscious hotel is the key to solving the mystery of Kumiko’s disappearance, a fact that Toru himself comes to understand by the middle of the novel. At the same time, it is also a realm of danger, hiding unknown enemies who seek to harm Toru for reasons he cannot yet fathom. He learns this during one of his ‘visits’ when the door to Room 208 suddenly opens, and a shadowy figure enters with something that gleams like the blade of a knife. Frantically he makes his escape through the wall, but not before the ‘telephone woman’ joins herself to him in a different way:

‘I felt the woman’s tongue coming into my mouth. Warn and soft, it probed every crevice and it wound around my own tongue. The heavy smell of flower petals stroked the walls of my lungs. Down in my loins, I felt a dull need to come. Clamping my eyes closed, I fought it. A moment later, I felt a kind of intense heat on my right cheek. It was an odd sensation. I felt no pain, only the awareness that there was heat there. I couldn’t tell whether the heat was coming from the outside or boiling up inside me.’

What has happened here may be as unclear to us as it is to Toru initially, but after emerging from several days in the well he returns home and shaves off his beard, upon which he discovers a dark purple mark on his right cheek, ‘about the size of an infant’s palm.’ He, of course, has no idea what the mark signifies, but cannot help noticing as time goes on that it is warm, and seems to be alive. ‘Perhaps the mark was a brand that had been impressed on me by that strange dream or illusion or whatever it was,’ he tells himself. ‘That was no dream, they were telling me through the mark: ‘It really happened. And every time you look in the mirror now, you will be forced to remember.’

But there is much more to the mark than just this. It signifies yet another kind of joining, through which the ‘telephone woman’ has placed something inside of him. The mark is a new, embryonic consciousness, one that will live and grow in his cheek until it is ‘born,’ coincident with the completion of his quest…”

Questions? Thoughts?

My next post: Friday, July 11, Our next reading: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Book Three, Chapters 9-23.

Enjoy

“Have you ever had that feeling – that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?”

 

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
Book Two, Chapters 3-13
By Dennis Abrams

Some observations and favorite things:

The meeting with Malta Kano and Noboru Wataya, “In order to make sure that I had not suddenly turned transparent, I put a hand on the table and watched it as I turned it over and back a few times.”

Wataya’s mask.

Wataya’s demand that, since Kumiko has run off with another man that Toru divorce her immediately. “All you’ve accomplished in six long years is to quit your job and ruin Kumiko’s life. Now you’re out of work and you have no plans for the future. There’s nothing inside that head of yours but garbage and rocks.”

“…the ability to have complete faith in another human being is one of the finest qualities a person can possess.” Lovely.

The story of shitty island. Toru threatens Wataya.

“There are no sides in this case. They simply do not exist. This is not the kind of thing that has a top and bottom, a right and left, a front and back, Mr. Okada.”

Another letter from Mamiya about his time in the well, which foreshadows Toru’s own time in the well:

“Under these special circumstances, I believe, my consciousness had attained such a viscid state of concentration that when the intense beam of light shown down for those few seconds, I was able to descend directly into a place that might be called the very core of my own consciousness. In any case, I saw the shape of something there…” There’s more, worth rereading, and a more in-depth look at Murakami’s take on core consciousness later in this post.

Creta Kano and her relationship with Toru, “Of course, we did not have relations in reality. When you ejaculated, it was not into me, physically, but in your own consciousness. Do you see? It was a fabricated consciousness. Still, the two of us share the consciousness of having had relations with each other…I used to be a prostitute of the flesh, but now I am a prostitute of the mind.”

Toru holds Creta (similar to the office worker?)

May: “Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, just how many women do you have hanging around you – aside from your wife?”

“You know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, you’re a grown man. Why don’t you use your head a bit?”

Toru goes into the well. The half-moon.

In the dark. Memories of meeting Kumiko.

His hatred of jellyfish: “What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habit of thinking, This is the world, but that’s not true at all. The real is in a much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things. We just happen to forget that.”

Kumiko’s detachment while having sex.

The darkness. Time slowing. Kumiko’s pregnancy and abortion. Her odd question, “You think I might have had an affair? Haven’t you thought about the possibility?”

Toru in Sapporo, the performer in the bar who seemed to be burning his flesh.

Toru’s “dream” that wasn’t a dream. The faceless man. Room 208. The smell of flowers. The mysterious woman. Going through the wall back to the well.

May takes away Toru’s ladder and seals him in so he can think better.

May’s second visit – will he starve to death? What’s going on with her? Jealous about the other women?

“I saw myself as the wind-up bird, flying through the summer sky, lighting on the branch of a huge tree somewhere, winding the world’s spring. If there really was no more wind-up bird, someone would have to take on its duties. Someone would have to wind the world’s spring in its place. Otherwise, the spring would run down and the delicately functioning system would grind to a halt. The only one who seemed to have noticed that the wind-up bird was gone, however, was me.”

May: “I mean…this is what I think, but…people have to think seriously about what it means for them to be alive here and now because they know they’re going to die sometime. Right? Who would think about what it means to be alive if they were just going to go on living forever? Why would they have to bother? Or even if they could bother, they’d probably just figure, ‘Oh, well, I’ve got plenty of time for that. I’ll think about it later.’ But we can’t wait till later. We’ve got to think about it right this second. I might get run over by a truck tomorrow afternoon. And you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird: you might starve to death. One morning three days from now, you could be dead in the bottom of a well. See? Nobody knows what’s going to happen. So we need death to make us evolve. That’s what I think. Death is this huge, bright thing, and the bigger and brighter it is, the more we have to drive ourselves crazy thinking about things…You’re literally facing death right now. I’m not kidding around. I told you before, it’s up to me whether you live or die.”

Toru: “Have you ever had that feeling – that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?” May: “You might think you made a new world or a new self, but your old self is always going to be there, just below the surface, and if something happens, it’ll stick its head out and say ‘Hi.’ You don’t seem to realize that.”

The pain of hunger. Examining his ears. The flow of time through the darkness. “Time moved backward in the dark, to be swallowed by a different kind of time.”

Saved by Creta Kano

The letter from Kumiko, her affair. She’s no longer with her lover.

“What had I ever known about Kumiko?…Could it be true that the Kumiko I had thought I understood, the Kumiko I had held close to me and joined my body with over the years as my wife – that Kumiko was nothing but the most superficial layer of the person Kumiko herself, just as the greater part of this world belongs in fact to the realm of the jelly fish? If so, what about those six years we had spent together? What had they been? What had they meant?”

The call from Malta Kano. Creta at the bottom of the well. Toru shaves, finds the physical change Malta had asked about – “a blue-black stain of some kind” on his right cheek – where it had touched the wall.

A naked Creta Kano appears in his bed, not sure how she got there or what happened to her clothes and shoes.

Her “rape” by Noboru Wataya. “In the midst of this pain and pleasure, my flesh went on splitting in two. …And when I regained consciousness, I was a different person.”

—————————————-

From Jay Rubin, to continue our look at Murakami and WWII:

“What does all this talk of war and imperialism have to do with an unemployed paralegal whose marriage is on the rocks? Well, nothing – except that he is Japanese. And he is looking inside himself. Murakami has always written about half-remembered things that lurk in the mind until they unexpectedly jump out and grab us. In The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Murakami’s most ambitious novel to that point, what leaps out at his narrator from the depths of his individual memory is Japan’s dark and violent recent past. ‘It’s all there, inside me: Pearl Harbor, Nomonhan, whatever,’ Murakami has said of himself.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle continues a debate that still rages in Japan today about the official recognition of the crimes Japan committed against the other peoples of Asia. After decades of official silence in which history textbooks hid the unpleasant facts from schoolchildren, Japan has begun to face up to its past, and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle can be seen as part of that painful process. The Japanese now recognize that they were not simply victims of the atom bomb, that Japanese soldiers carried out the Rape of Nanking, and that this was but one episode in Japan’s rape of an entire content. Murakami was indirectly hinting at this truth in his very first short story, ‘A Slow Boat to China.’

Searching deep down in the least accessible areas of memory after a head injury, Boku in ‘A Slow Boat to China’ comes up with the totally inexplicable words: ‘That’s OK, brush off the dirt and you can still eat it.’ In themselves, they are meaningless, but their vary lack of logical connection to anything implies they have somehow surfaces from his unconscious.

‘With these words,’ he writes, ‘I find myself thinking about…Death…And death, for some reason, reminds me of the Chinese.’

At the end of the last episode in the story, which illustrates Boku’s ambivalence towards the Chinese, he declares: ‘I wanted to say something…I wanted to say something…about the Chinese, but what?…Even now, I still can’t think of anything to say.’ He continues in an epilogue: ‘I’ve read dozens of books on China…I’ve wanted to find out as much about China as I could. But that China is only my China. Not any China I can read about. It’s the China that sends messages just to me. It’s not the big yellow expanse on the globe, it’s another China. Another hypothesis, another supposition. In a sense, it’s a part of myself that’s been cut off by the word China.’

In the end, Boku cannot explain what it is that causes him to feel so ambivalent towards China and the Chinese, but The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is far more direct. One of the last images in the book is ‘a young moon, with a sharp curve like a Chinese sword,’ by which China has come to stand for the horrifying slaughter perpetuated by Japanese soldiers in the war.

While writing Book Three, Murakami was asked in an interview: ‘Why should your generation take responsibility for a war which ended before it was born?’ He replied:

‘Because we’re Japanese. When I read about the atrocities in China in some books, I can’t believe it. It’s so stupid and absurd and meaningless. That was the generation of my father and grandfather. I want to know what drove them to do those kinds of things, to kill or maim thousands and thousand of people. I want to understand, but I don’t’

[MY NOTE: The grandfather in Hard-boiled Wonderland?]

Beneath the curved Chinese moon, Toru finds in the water of his heart’s well the sins committed by the generation of his ‘uncle’ – or, rather, the dangerous, media-exploiting Noboru Wataya’s uncle. An elite army officer, Noboru’s uncle can be seen as the heir to Norwegian Wood’s ‘Storm Trooper,’ the roommate who stuttered every time he tried to pronounce the word ‘map.’ Noboru’s uncle believes wholly in the science of logistics, for which maps are an indispensable tool. He comes under the influence of the actual historical figure Kanji Ishiwara (1889-1949), a believer in Japan’s mission in Asia and notorious leader of the Manchurian Incident, the Japanese Army-manufactured ‘attack’ on Japanese troops that started the Pacific War. By inheriting this uncle’s seat in the National Diet, Noboru somehow inherits his legacy of imperialism. Thus it is China that lurks behind his appearance as a modern intellectual on TV, an image that gives Noboru such power over a superficial society. In ‘TV People’ the television screen was blank, filling people’s lives with a numbing nothingness; here, the threat of the invasive medium is tied to the darkest aspects of Japan’s recent history.

Boku of ‘A Slow Boat to China’ may not know what to say about that country, but in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle Murakami knows exactly what he wants to say. Japan’s recent history is alive inside Toru, even though he is one of the most apolitical beings imaginable. This is hinted at in a scene in Book One, Chapter 5, when Toru’s 16-year-old neighbor, May Kasahara, asks him his name:

‘Toru Okada,’ I said.
She repeated my name to herself several times. ‘Not much of a name, is it?’
‘Maybe not,’ I said. ‘I’ve always thought it wounded kind of like some pre-war foreign minister: Toru Okada. See?’
‘That doesn’t mean anything to me. I hate history. It’s my worst subject.’

In fact, Keisuke Okada (1868-1952), Prime Minister from July 1934 to March 1936, was a key player in events leading to the ideological extremism that led to Japan’s disastrous decision to go to war. A retired admiral, Okada headed a government that promoted the worship of the mystical ‘national essence’ (kokutai) and of the Emperor, and squashed the more rational, widely accepted ‘organ theory’ of the Japanese state; nevertheless, he was still not considered right-wing enough for the renegade young officers who staged a coup on 26 February 1936. They tried to assassinate him, but killed his brother-in-law instead. Okada resigned after this incident. He never served as Foreign minister, but Toru’s vague reference to pre-war politics hints at dramatic events such as these.

The 30-year-old Toru Okada recognizes a certain indefinable bond with Japan’s pre-war government and displays some interest in the history of the war, but the shadow of history has yet to fall on the young May. She remains a virgin to the end, uninitiated into the ways of either sex or history. The young readers that Murakami has cultivated, however, may lose their historical ‘virginity’ with regard to the war as they follow him from the sunlit beach at Ipanema into Toru’s dark room.

Some commentators have criticized Murakami for fabricating fictional wartime episodes rather than using specific incidents, but this misses the point. The ‘war’ in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is not presented as a series of historical facts, but as an important part of the psychological baggage of Murakami’s generation and beyond. For most Japanese, the war exists in the same half-known realm as Rossini’s opera The Thieving Magpie, the title of which occurs on the first page of the novel and is the title of Book One. All Toru knows about the opera is its overture and the title: it is a thing half-remembered from childhood, something he has taken for granted, but never questioned or pursued.

‘What kind of opera was The Thieving Magpie? I wondered. All I knew about it was the monotonous melody of its overture and its mysterious title. We had had a recording of the overture in the house when I as a boy. It had been conducted by Toscanini. Compared with Claudio Abbado’s youthful, fluid, contemporary performance, Toscanini’s had had a blood-stirring intensity to it, like the slow strangulation of a powerful foe who has been drowned after a violent battle. But was The Thieving Magpie really the story of a magpie that had engaged in thieving? If things ever settled down, I would have to go the library and look it up in a dictionary of music. I might even buy a complete recording of the opera if it was available. Or maybe not. I might not care to know the answer to these questions by then.’

The opera features prominently in the book not because its plot provides a key to the novel but precisely because it is just out of reach, on the periphery of most people’s consciousness. Parts of the overture can be heard in TV commercials, and some readers may associate it with the violent Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange, but for Toru The Thieving Magpie will always be something he hasn’t quite understood. It is familiar, and yet its meaning eludes him. This is one instance when Murakami and his Boku are almost indistinguishable. I was with Murakami when he bought a video of La Gazza Ladra [The Thieving Magpie] in San Francisco in November 1992. He wanted to find out once and for all what it was about – long after he had written Book One of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.”

And from Matthew Strecher:

“It should be borne in mind that identity in Murakami fiction is as much a physical thing as it is an abstract concept of the mind. That is to say, while identity is constructed of one’s memories, experiences and personality traits, it also has a physical manifestation in the author’s world, endowed with a real, tangible quality. Its existence is asserted again and again in Murakami’s work, and the way he characterizes it is consistent enough that it merits some discussion here.

Identity for Murakami is always a combination of two primary elements: the conscious self – the person we know as ourselves in daily life; and the unconscious ‘other,’ a mysterious alter ego who dwells in the depths of our unconscious. These two sides of our identity ideally share the task of identity formation, but perform different roles. The conscious self, as might be expected, encounters new situations and acts upon them, providing experiences to be processed by the unconscious ‘other;’ the inner self, or ‘other,’ the processes these experiences into memories, simultaneously creating links between the various other memories that are stored in the unconscious. In simple terms, the conscious self tells the unconscious other what it sees, and the unconscious ‘other’ tells the conscious ‘self’ what that means in light of previous experiences.

The relationship between these ‘sides’ is a symbiotic one; both are necessary for the construction of a solid identity. The two are virtual opposites, yet neither can stand alone. Together, they form – and then control – what might be called the ‘core identity,’ or ‘core consciousness,’ of the individual. This ‘core’ is the source of identity, the heart and soul of the individual. May Kasahara describes it as a kind of ‘heart source’ that keeps us living. ‘Everyone’s born with some different thing at the core of their existence,’ she tells Toru. ‘And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside.’

This is the most important aspect of identity in Murakami, and lies at the heart of movement and desire of the Murakami hero. That is to say, the recurring motif in Murakami fiction is the hero’s desire to come into contact with that ‘something’ that lies at the core of his identity, to know more about it. At the same time, to come into contact with this ‘core’ engenders a certain risk, for in so doing one threatens to influence, even alter, the essential nature of the thing, leaving one in doubt as to who one really is.

Fortunately for Murakami characters, that ‘core identity’ is well protected, guarded by heavy walls within the mind. it is sometimes described by the author as a ‘black box,’ something like the flight data recorder on modern aircraft. Armored against tampering, fire, and the force of impact in a crash, the black box is designed to retain its information regardless of what is done to it. Only when it is opened does it become corrupted.

Of course, it can always be removed from the aircraft. Once this is done, the machine from which it has been removed will no longer carry any record of where it has been, or what it has done.

This may seem like an odd metaphor for human identity, but it is an appropriate one…It is what happens to Creta Kano, for instance, whose ‘defilement’ by Noboru Wataya is both physical and psychological. Reaching directly into Creta Kano’s body, Noboru splits her in two, then draws out the ‘core’ of her identity, leaving her empty and lost. We cannot fail to note here the very physical manifestation of that ‘core.’

‘Out from between the two cleanly split halves of my physical self came crawling a thing that I had never seen or touched before. How large it was I could not tell, but it was as wet and slippery as a newborn baby. I had absolutely no idea what it was. It had always been inside me, and yet it was something of which I had now knowledge. The man had drawn it out of me.’

Like other characters who suffer this fate, Creta Kano wants desperately to see for herself what this ‘something’ is — to know ti firsthand, and thus know who she really is. But no one is ever permitted to know this. Malta Kano says much the same thing, a little cryptically: we are never permitted to see ourselves directly: we must rely on the gaze of another (an ‘other’) to tell us what it looks like. ‘One cannot directly at one’s own face with one’s own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one’s reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all.'”

 

More on this later.

My next post: I figure we’ll take the 4th of July off, so my next post will be on Tuesday, July 8, on The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Book Two, Chapters 14-16 and Book Three, Chapters 1-8.

Enjoy.

“I don’t know how to put it, but it seems to me that no matter how far we go – or rather, the farther we go – the things we discover are more likely to be nothing more than ourselves.”

Murakami and Nomonhan

Some background (and a fascinating story that sounds like it came from one of his books) for you all) on Nomonhan and Murakami:

From Jay Rubin:

“Murakami traced his own inward search in a series of articles written after visiting the site of the Nomonhan Incident on the border between Manchuria and Mongolia in June 1994. The timing is significant. Books One and Two of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle had just appeared, while Book Three was still growing in his computer. Which is to say that Murakami had never set foot on the Asian continent or seen the Khalkha River or Nomonhan before he conceived of Mr. Honda, the mystic who survived the Nomonhan slaughter, or before he wrote the scenes of cross-border espionage that bring Book One to its horrifying close with the flaying of the still-living Yamamoto. Only Book Three can be said to have benefited from Murakami’s first-hand observation of a battlefield that had haunted him as a schoolboy.

From a history book he read as a child Murakami remembered certain photographs of weird, stubby, old-fashioned tanks and planes from what he calls the Nomonhan War (generally referred to in Japan as the Nomonhan Incident and in Mongolia as the Khalkha River War), a fierce border clash that book place in the spring and summer of 1939. It involved Japanese soldiers stationed in Manchuria and a combined force of Soviet and Outer-Mongolian troops. The image of the event remained vivid in his memory for reasons he could never explain to himself, and he read the few books he could find on the subject.

Then, almost by chance, he came across several old Japanese books on Nomonhan in the Princeton library and realized he was as mesmerized by the event as ever. He sought out Alvin Coox’s massive two-volume study and was particularly pleased to discover that Coox, too, had been fascinated by the subject since childhood but found it hard to explain why. Continued rumination, however, led Murakami to a tentative explanation for his own unflagging interest: perhaps, he thought, ‘the fascination for me is that the origin of this war was all too Japanese, all too representative of the Japanese people.’

The same could be said of the Second World War, he admits, but that war is just too big, too much of a towering monument to grasp in its entirety. It was possible to get a handle on Nomonhan, however: a four-month undeclared war staged in a limited area that may have been Japan’s first experience of having its un-modern worldview – it’s ‘warview’ – trounced by a country that knew how to establish supply lines before going to war rather than simply hoping for the best. Fewer than 20,000 Japanese troops lost their lives in Nomonhan, but the number soared to over 2,000,000 in the Second World War. In both cases, they were the victims of a system that will make any sacrifice to preserve ‘face’ and that blindly trusts to luck rather than efficient modern planning. ‘They were murdered,’ says Murakami, ‘used up like so many nameless articles of consumption – with terrible inefficiency within the hermetically sealed system we call Japan.’ It happened first in Nomonhan, but Japan learned nothing from that harsh experience, and so it went to fight the Second World War. ‘But what have we Japanese learned from that dizzying tragedy?’

‘We did away with the pre-war emperor system and put the Peace Constitution in its place. And as a result we have, to be sure, come to live in an efficient, rational world based on the ideology of a modern civil society, and that efficiency has brought about an almost overwhelming prosperity in our society. Yet, I (and perhaps many others) can’t seem to escape the suspicion that even now, in many areas of society, we are being peacefully and quietly obliterated as nameless articles of consumption. We go on believing that we live in the so-called free ‘civil state’ we call ‘Japan’ with our fundamental human rights guaranteed, but is this truly the case? Peel back a layer of skin, and what do we find breathing and pulsating there but the same old sealed national system or ideology.’

As far as Murakami is concerned, nothing has changed in all the decades since Nomonhan. Perhaps the peeling of the skin of the spy and nationalist zealot Yamamoto is a metaphor for the need to look beneath the outer layer to discover why Japan, even in peacetime, continues to regard its own people as expendable commodities.

The border dispute in which the Japanese military became embroiled in 1939 was still very much alive when Murakami made his visit in June 1944. In order to get to the village of Nomonhan, he and Elzo Natsumura had to take a plane, then two trains, and eventually a Land Cruiser, to see the Chinese side of the Khalkha River. They then had to go all the way back to Beijing, take another two planes and a long journey by jeep across the steppe to see the Mongolian side. Direct border crossings were impossible between China’s Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region and the independent nation of Mongolia.

But it was worth it. Having overcome these difficulties, Murakami found himself standing on one of the best preserved battlefields in the world – preserved not by government mandate for historical research but by nature. The place was so fly-ridden, remote, arid and useless to anyone that tanks and mortars and other detritus of war had been left where they had been abandoned under the vast sky, rusting but still intact, more than half a century later. Seeing this vast graveyard of steel, where so many men had suffered and lost their lives for no good reason, Murakami wrote:

‘I suddenly realized that in historical terms we probably belong to the later iron age. The side that managed to throw the greater amount of iron more effectively at the enemy and thereby destroy the greater amount of human flesh would achieve victory and justice. And they would be able to take victorious command of one section of this drab plane of grass.’

There were more metal scraps of war on display at a large war museum in a nearby town, but a power cut hid most of them from view. On the way back to the military guest quarters where they were to spend the night, Murakami and Matsumura clung on amid the reek of petrol fumes from the extra tanks on board the bouncing jeep as their chain-smoking Mongolian Army guides took a detour to hunt down and kill a she-wolf. They arrived at one o’clock in the morning, and Murakami flopped into bed exhausted, but unable to sleep. He felt the presence of some ‘thing,’ and began to regret bringing back a rusty mortar and other war souvenirs that now lay on the table in his room.

‘When I awoke in the middle of the night, it was causing the whole world to pitch wildly up and down, as if the room were in a shaker. The darkness was total. I couldn’t see my own hand, but I could hear everything around me rattling. I had no idea what was going on, but I jumped out of bed to turn on the light. The quaking was so violent, though, I couldn’t stay upright. I fell, and then managed to pull myself to my feet by holding onto the bed frame…I made it to the door and felt for the light switch. The instant I turned it on, the shaking stopped. Now everything was silent. The clock showed 2:30 a.m.

Then I realized: it was not the room or the world that was shaking: it was me. At that moment, a chill froze me to the core. I was terrified. I wanted to cry out, but my voice wouldn’t come. This was the first time in my life I had ever experienced such deep, violent fear, and the first time I had ever seen such utter darkness.’

Too frightened to stay where he was, Murakami went to Matsumura’s room next door, and sat on the floor by his sleeping friend, waiting for the sun to come up. As the sky began to lighten after 4 a.m., the chill inside him began to abate, ‘as if a possessing spirit had fallen away.’ He went back to his room and fell asleep, no longer afraid.

‘I have thought about this incident a great deal, but could never find a satisfactory explanation for it. Nor is it possible for me to convey in words how frightened I was at the time. it was as if I had accidentally peered into the abyss of the world.

In the [month or so] since it happened, I have come to think of it more or less this way: It – that is, the shaking and the darkness and that strange presence – was not something that came to me from the outside, but rather may have been something that had always been inside me, that was part of who I am. Something had seized a kind of opportunity to rip open this thing inside me, that was part of who I am. Something had seized a kind of opportunity to rip open this thing inside me, whatever it was, just as the old photos of the Nomonhan War I that I had seen in a book as a grammar school boy had fascinated me for no clear reason and brought me some 30-odd years later to the depths of the Mongolian steppe. I don’t know how to put it, but it seems to me that no matter how far we go – or rather, the farther we go – the things we discover are more likely to be nothing more than ourselves. The wolf, the mortar, the war museum darkened by a power cut, all of these were parts of me that had always been there, I suspect: they had been waiting all this time for me to find them.

I do know this much, though: I will never forget those things that are there – that were there. Because that is probably all I can do: to keep from forgetting.’

Reading this description in a supposedly factual essay, it is hard not to share Ian Buruma’s reaction when he heard the story from Murakami: ‘I was skeptical. The scene sounded too much like one from his novels. It was if he had started to take his metaphors literally.’ However, Murakami insists that he described the event exactly as it had happened to him, and he even repeated it to the psychologist Hayao Kawai, stipulating at the outset that he did not believe it was a paranormal phenomenon, but resulted from his ‘utter commitment’ to (or perhaps we could say ‘obsession with’) Nomonhan. Kawai could reply only that he believed such experiences could happen, but that one had to resist interpreting them with ‘phoney science’ – for example, claiming that there was some ‘energy’ in Murakami’s battlefield souvenir.

Elzo Matsumura had no idea Murakami had come into his room that night. He only found about the whole strange experience when he read about it in Murakami’s magazine article. He had no difficulty in believing it to be true. He too had felt very strange about the Nomonhan battlefield. Although he knew nothing about its history, it had given him goose flesh (something he says almost never happens to him, and for weeks after going there he dreamed about the place That night, although Murakami found him fast asleep, Matsumura had had difficulty sleeping, despite the fact he was absolutely exhausted, and had drunk a beer to knock himself out.

Once, asked if he believed in the sort of paranormal phenomena depicted in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Murakami laughed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t believe in that stuff.’ He enjoyed writing about such things, he said, but in his own life he was strictly a realist. Having said that, he added without irony that if he ‘concentrated’ on people he could tell a lot about them – for example, how many siblings they had, or what kind of relationship they had with their parents. This was the technique that palmists used, he said, ‘Reading’ the lines on the palm was just a bit of fakery. But this kind of ‘concentration’ takes enormous energy and is extremely draining, so he reserves it for his writing. As for Malta Kano’s practice of divination using the water in a person’s house, this was not, as far as he knew, a venerable (if suspect) practice like palmistry. He had simply made it up for the book.

Murakami also has evocative things to say about the relationship between the world of the living and the world of the dead. After telling a British interviewer about Japan’s version of Orpheus descending to Hades to find Eurydice (the story of Izanagi and Izanami), he claimed it was his ‘favorite myth,’ before adding, with regard to certain deceased friends: ‘I feel the dead people around me sometimes. It’s not a ghost story. Just a kind of feeling, or, a kind of responsibility. I have to life for them.’ Asked by a reader if he believes in reincarnation, Murakami replied: ‘My stock answer for that is: ‘I’ll think about it when I’m dead.’’

In other words, Murakami sits on the fence as far as the supernatural is concerned. He is quick to deny belief in it, and yet feels the mind is capable of things science cannot explain. And so his visit to Nomonhan is of some value in illuminating what he went on to write: the third book of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Here Toru encounters the war and violence inside himself, as if they had been waiting for him all that time.”

My next post: Tuesday, July 1st, on The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Book Two, Chapters 3-12.

“…and the more it betook of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called strange.”

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
Book One Chapters 9-13, Book Two Chapters 1-2
By Dennis Abrams

 

Some observations and favorite bits:

Dreaming about Malta Kano, but distracted by Malta Kano’s Tyrolean hat — why Tyrolean?  A sex dream.

Kumiko notices something strange about his voice, “Her sensitivity to such things was frightening.”

Toru’s sexual morality – never cheated on Kumiko, even with the co-worker from the law firm who needed to be ‘recharged.’ “I’m out of electricity now.”

Interesting that when Kumiko learns about the recharging, after getting over her anger and accepts that he’s telling her the truth that nothing happened tells him, “I’m probably going to do the same thing to you someday. And when that time comes, I want you to believe me. I have that right.”

May Kashara and her ubiquitous Hope regulars.

Loved the three categories of baldness – and May and Toru are such an interesting combo.

“I’m only sixteen,” she said, “and I don’t know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I’m pessimistic, then the adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots.”

The story of the Miyawaki’s house. “Well, obviously, this story can’t have a bright, happy ending.”

The old-fashioned letter (heavy rice paper, brush-written bold black characters) from Tokutaro Mamiya, letting Toru know that the fortune-teller Mr. Honda had died, and had left him a keepsake.

The reminder of Mr. Honda’s verse: “Dying is the only way/For you to float free: Nomohan.”

Once again, Kumiko is late. Her surprise at the news. “I don’t understand people like that, what’s in their minds.”

Toru’s inability to tell his wife about May and the wigs. “My relationship with her was not that big a deal, finally: whether I mentioned it or not was of no consequence. Once it had flowed down a certain delicate channel, however, it had become cloaked in the opacity of secretiveness, whatever my original ‘intention’ may have been. The same thing had happened with Creta Kano…Maybe Kumiko had the same kind of secrets that she was keeping from me. With my own fund of secrets, I was in no position to blame her if she did.” Once again flow. And secrets and not knowing the other person.

Kumiko cleaning her ears with a cotton swab. What other novelist mentions stuff like that that grounds what is, let’s face it, an increasingly odd story with the utterly mundane. Plus, of course, ears.

Noboru Wataya running to become a Diet member.

Kumiko’s story of catching her brother masturbating while smelling her dead sister’s clothes. Their eyes caught.

Loved this: “Brushing my teeth in the bathroom, I studied my face in the mirror. For over two months now, since quitting my job, I had rarely entered the ‘outside world.’ I had been moving back and forth between the neighborhood shops, the ward pool, and this house. Aside from the Ginza and that hotel in Shinagawa, the farthest point I had traveled from home was the cleaner’s by the station. And in all that time, I had hardly seen anyone. Aside from Kumiko, the only people I could be said to have ‘seen’ in two months were Malta and Creta Kano and May Kasahara. It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it became, and the more it betook of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called strange. They had been there all the while, it seemed, waiting in the shadows for me to stop moving. And everytime the wind-up bird came to my yard to wind its spring, the world descended more deeply into chaos…I rinsed my mouth and want on looking at my face for a time…I can’t find the image, I said to myself. I’m thirty, I’m standing still, and I can’t find the image.” – Marvelous. And what is the wind-up bird?

Kumiko’s new cologne – never a good sign. The hidden box, the gift to Kumiko.

Lieutenant Mamiya. His story. The Manchuria/Mongolia adventure. Yamamoto’s skinning (one of the more horrific scenes I’ve ever read).

Mamiya left to die at the bottom of the dark well (yes, another well!). “I don’t think you will ever be able to understand what it like – the utter loneliness, the feeling of desperation – to be abandoned in a dark well in the middle of the desert at the edge of the world, overcome with intense pain in total darkness.”

The momentary sunlight, it’s disappearance. And this: “For a long time, I simply remained huddled where I was, my face bathed in tears. As if beaten down by some huge power, I was unable to do – or even to think – anything at all, unable to feel even my own physical existence. I was a dried-up carcass, the cast-off shell of an insect. But then, once again, into the empty room of my mind, returned the prophecy of Corporal Honda: I would not die on the continent. Now, after the light had come and gone, I found myself able to believe his prophecy. I could believe it now because, in a place where I should have died, and at a time when I should have died, I had been unable to die. It was not that I would not die: I could not die. Do you understand what I am saying, Mr. Okada? Whatever heavenly grace I may have enjoyed until that moment was lost forever.”

Miraculously saved by Mr. Honda, his return to Japan: “I simply performed the mundane tasks that were handed to me one after another. I never had one real friend, no human ties with the students in my charge. I never loved anyone. I no longer knew what it meant to love another person. I would close my eyes and see Yamamoto being skinned alive. I dreamed about it over and over. Again and again I watched them peel the skin off and turn him into a lump of flesh. I could hear his heartrending screams. I also had dreams of myself slowly rotting away, alive, in the bottom of the well. Sometimes it seemed to me that that was what had really happened and that my life here was the dream…After returning to Japan, I lived like an empty shell. Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it may go on. The heart and flesh of an empty shell give birth to nothing more than the life of an empty shell. This is what I hope I have made clear to you, Mr. Okada.” A perfect warning for Toru.

All that Mr. Honda had left Toru was an empty box. What? Why?

Kumiko’s disappearance: “Kumiko never came back that night….there was nothing more for me to do.”

His incredible calm, the soapy tasting coffee.

A call from Malta Kano (who seems to know something is up): “I don’t know anything for sure. I’m trying to work it out in my own mind. But I think my wife has left me.”

Kano’s response is a festival of generalities (albeit probably correct); “You must be very worried. There is nothing I can say at this point, but things should begin to come clear before too long. Now all you can do is wait. It must be hard for you, but there is a right time for everything. Like the ebb and flow of the tides. No one can do anything to change them. When it is time to wait, you must wait.” Again…flow.

More spaghetti – he does love his pasta, doesn’t he?

Kano’s prediction that Toru will receive a phone call from a person whose name begins with “O” comes true – the Omura liquor store.

It seems like the only clothes Kumiko took with her was the blouse and skirt she picked up at the cleaners before getting on the train.

Another wet dream about Creta Kano, in which the telephone woman takes her place. Why does she seem familiar? “Some kind of memory was trying to find its way out. I could feel it in there, bumping around. All I needed was a little hint. If I pulled that one tiny thread, then everything would come unraveled. The mystery was waiting for me to solve it. But that one slim thread was something I couldn’t find….I gave up trying to think. “Forget everything. You’re asleep. You’re dreaming. You’re lying in nice, warm mud. We all come out of the warm mud, and we all go back to it.”

May comforts Toru.

A call from Malta, setting up a meeting for the next day between her, Toru, and Noboru Wataya.

May calls Toru: “Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” she said in the end. “Have you had any good news since I was there?” “No good news,” I said. “Nothing.”

————-

We’re always taking a close look at the heroes of the books we read, which is why I found this, a look at the charming May Kasahara from Matthew Strecher, particularly interesting:

“Murakami heroes rarely undertake [their] quests without help; in A Wild Sheep Chase the hero is guided by a clairvoyant girlfriend who uses her psychic abilities to lead him to precisely the right locations, speeding the narrative along considerably…in the sequel to that work, Dance Dance Dance, the same hero searches for the girlfriend (who disappears near the end of A Wild Sheep Chase), as well as his lost idealism, with the help of a clairvoyant teenage girl named Yuki…

In The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Toru has help from a variety of psychics – the enigmatic Kano sisters, Malta and Creta, and old Mr. Honda – and from others who simply fill in the historical details for him. But no one seems to have the answers he finally needs, or the temerity to ‘tell it like it is,’ more than May Kasahara, a sixteen year-old high school dropout who lives in Toru’s neighborhood.

May Kasahara performs a central, even critical role in this story by expressing directly much of what we, the reader, might wish Toru to understand on his own. As a person, she is not much to look at, a skinny, awkward-looking girl in sunglasses and shorts, nearly always smoking one of her ‘Hope regulars,’ a popular brand of cigarette in Japan. But she is astute, and somehow manages to put her finger directly on the source of Toru’s problems. Her naturally candid nature allows her to tell Toru the truth about himself. It is she who wonders how Toru can know so little about his wife, despite having lived together for six years, and who asks the really tough questions, like whether he would take Kumiko back if she had been sleeping with someone else.

In a technical sense, May Kasahara also allows us to see Toru’s moral superiority, in contrast with the darkly sexual nature of Noboru Wataya. There is always a sexual tension between May Kasahara and Toru, expressed more by her than him. She often touches him, gently strokes him, making him keenly aware of her body. She talks freely with him about the size of her breasts, and dresses in ways that reveal her girlish, yet obviously female, body to him. When he is tired, she has him lie quietly while she caresses his hand, or kisses his flushed cheeks. In one of her letters, she even expresses (or almost expresses) her willingness to be raped by him.

But Toru’s inner nature, one of forbearance and self-control, will not allow him to betray the trust that May Kasahara shows in him by committing what would be, for him, an unpardonably immoral act. This, too, is something that has occurred before in Murakami’s writing: the hero of Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, for instance, is propositioned suggestively by a sexy seventeen-year-old who clearly wants him to provide her first sexual experience, but he defers. The protagonist of Dance Dance Dance similarly will not respond to the infatuation of a teenage girl for whom he is temporarily responsible. The purpose of these relationships is always to determine the control with which Murakami’s heroes handle their sexual drives, not to suggest that sexuality is bad, but that there is ‘good’ sexuality and ‘bad’ sexuality, and the morally superior character knows the difference. This, as we shall see, contrasts with the behavior of Noboru Wataya, for whom sexuality is a means to power and control.”

And this, on water and flow:

“The word ‘flow’ occurs more than once…and not by accident, for with the possible exception of sexuality, there is no more important motif in this novel than flow and water.

As a symbol of course, water has a number of meanings that might be considered orthodox in literary circles: it can represent the flow of time, not unlike sand in an hourglass; it can represent fertility, the origin of all live; it can suggest constant change (one can never look twice at the ‘same’ river); it can indicate cyclicity; in the sense that water flows to the sea, is drawn up to the clouds, and falls again to the earth, eventually returning to the river to make its way to the sea again; and so forth.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle makes use of all these conventional readings of water, and while Murakami likes to claim not to know what his own symbolism means (the ‘wind-up bird’ is a case in point!), water is one symbol that he understands well, and carefully crafts from one end of the novel to the other. Indeed, without too much difficulty we can read this entire novel as a ‘river of narrative, occasionally obstructed (at which point the narrative stops, at the end of Book Two), sometimes flowing rapidly and violently. The river of narrative, like a real river, flows sometimes above the ground, and sometimes beneath it. Perhaps most importantly, especially as a metaphor for time, most rivers meander in places, giving the impression of flowing in more than one direction. This may help us to envision [coming up in a later post] how time operates in this story.

We are clear on the critical importance of water and flow from the earliest stages in the text. Malta Kano, for instance, tells Toru that ‘something has obstructed the flow’ around his house, though whether she refers to real water or simply some metaphor of it is difficult to say. Later in the book, Toru recalls the cautionary advice of Honda, who warns him to beware of water. Sounding like a Buddhist sermon, Honda prophesies the conflict between Toru and Noboru, the roots of which lie in resisting the natural flow of things. ‘If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness.’”

So what do you all think so far? Thoughts? Questions?

My next posts: Friday, June 27, some background on Murakami and Nomohan; Tuesday, June 1, on The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Book Two, Chapters 3-12. (Is the reading pace OK with everyone? Too slow, too fast, just right?

Enjoy.

“I felt confident that I was reading Murakami as he intended with Rubin’s translation.”

By Dennis Abrams

I know we’ve talked a lot about translation in these “off book” posts, and I hope you’re finding it as interesting as I do.

One thing I’ve been wondering about is the style of Murakami’s prose. In translation, the prose seems fairly simple and straightforward (one can sense, at least in translation I think, a bit of his admiration of Raymond Carver), but how close is that to the original version?

This from Matthew Strecher:

“One of the more interesting reviews to come out in the United States was that by Luc Sante (New York Magazine, Oct. 13, 1997), both for its on-the-mark estimation of the force that drives Murakami as a writer, and for its rather naïve criticism of the translation of the work.

“Sante points out, to begin with, that Murakami teases us with a series of facts and ideas, but probably does not himself understand fully the connections that hold them together. ‘He is writing you a letter, artless, urgent, perplexed – in which he tries to make sense of some odd events, giving you all the facts in proper order, hoping you will see the pattern that eludes him. This of course is a measure of just how devious he is.’ This is probably truer than Sante realizes, for Murakami…has always seen writing as a process by which he himself my comprehend the events in his life and the society that surrounds him. As he writes hoping to enlighten his readers about their place in the world, he hopes equally to enlighten himself.

“By and large, Sante’s view of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is positive; the work, like all literature, he says, ‘is not a tool or a code or a map but an object, period.’ Its potential, in other words, lies in what the readers makes of it.

“He has harsher words on the subject of Rubin’s translation of the work, which he describes as ‘slipshod,’ and in which he suspects elisions and even inaccuracy.

The dialogue in particular has all the rhythm and nuance of a hastily overdubbed foreign movie: ‘Look, I know how busy you are, but give me a break. I want to know what’s going on. What’s with the cat?’ To come across such formulations in a novel not written by Franklin W. Dixon raises questions about how many shadings the translator might have flung overboard expeditiously, both there and in the less demotic passages.

“I am not inclined to be very sympathetic to Sante’s complaint here. As one who has read both the original and the translation of the novel carefully, as Sante obviously has not, I can detect no major flaws either in the idiom or in the tone of Rubin’s rendering. What he has done, and quite effectively in my opinion, is to reproduce the flavor of Murakami’s original brand of what might be termed ‘plainstyle,’ an intentionally simplified writing style popular among many contemporary writers in and outside of Japan. This style claims as one of its integral parts the very idiosyncrasies noted by Sante in his review.

“As part of his emphasis on using simple language, Murakami’s writing comes across as neither polished, nor even especially neat. It lacks the subtlety that many associate with other major Japanese writers of this century, and this too is intentional. Perhaps more than any other writer alive in Japan today, Murakami rejects the idea of complex language as an art form, and focuses instead on getting his story across with as little distraction as possible. One thing Murakami has done with his language – and this is an achievement for Japanese writing as a whole – is to redefine its expression in ways that reflect the increasing influences on Japan of other languages and cultures around the world. His purpose in doing his is not to destroy the uniqueness of Japanese language, but rather, as he told Jay McInerney in 1992, to bring Japanese culture – including its literature – into closer proximity with the rest of the world.

I think what young Japanese writers are doing is trying to reconstruct our language. We appreciate the beauty, the subtlety of the language Mishima used, but those days are gone. We should do something now. And what we are doing as contemporary writers is trying to break through the barrier of isolation so that we can talk to the rest of the world in our words again.

“In this regard Murakami and his contemporaries have been remarkably successful, and this has been picked up by a great many scholars and critics around the world who remark on the seamlessness with which Murakami’s prose seems to slide into other languages and cultural contexts. Rubin’s translation of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle reflects Murakami’s attempts to refine his language, and while some will, like Sante, find it troubling and unsatisfactory, there is no denying that the plainstyle developed and employed by Murakami has achieved its objective: in ways that the works of Mishima and Tanizaki never could, it has helped to dispel much of the cloud of mystery that has shrouded popular perceptions of Japanese literature in the West since it began to be widely translated into English in the 1950s and 1960s.”

And there’s this, from Brian Fee at The Airship:

“A few fun-facts about Haruki Murakami, Japan’s most celebrated contemporary author and the man behind the year-end publishing sensation1Q84: he name-drops classical études as frequently as 20th century jazz and rock greats; he once ran a coffeehouse-jazz bar in Tokyo; and he’s a triathlete. The man is a well-rounded badass.
I knew little of Murakami when I began reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle—some six hundred pages of potent modern-day Surrealism—back in university. Jay Rubin, one of his three longtime translators, handled the English edition, a necessary thing for me then as a just-budding student of Japanese. In addition to the silky prose, I was enraptured by the directness of dialogue and description despite Murakami’s continual bending of reality.

I compared Rubin’s translation with an earlier one by Alfred Birnbaum, who’d translated the first chapter of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women (it originally ran in The New Yorker several years prior but reappeared in the short story collection The Elephant Vanishes), and instantly sided with Rubin. The interplay between Murakami’s classic thirtyish male protagonist, Toru Okada, and the author’s equally classic weirdo teenage girl, May Kasahara, just felt better in Rubin’s words:

Strange, the girl’s voice sounded completely different, depending on whether my eyes were open or closed.
“Can I talk? I’ll keep real quiet, and you don’t have to answer. You can even fall asleep. I don’t mind.”
“OK,” I said.
“When people die, it’s so neat.”
Her mouth was next to my ear now, so the words worked their way inside me along with her warm, moist breath.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
She put a finger on my lips as if to seal them.
“No questions,” she said. “And don’t open your eyes. OK?”
My nod was as small as her voice.
She took her finger from my lips and placed it on my wrist.

Compare that with Birnbaum’s earlier translation. That directness, that humidity-induced curtness, is lost:

Strange, I think, the girl’s voice with my eyes closed sounds completely different from her voice with my eyes open. What’s come over me? This has never happened to me before.
“Can I talk some?” the girl asks. “I’ll be real quiet. You don’t have to answer, you can even fall right asleep at any time.”
“Sure,” I say.
“Death. People dying. It’s all so fascinating,” the girl begins.
She’s whispering right by my ear, so the words enter my body in a warm, moist stream of breath.
“How’s that?” I ask.
The girl places a one-finger seal over my lips.
“No questions,” she says. “I don’t want to be asked anything just now. And don’t open your eyes, either. Got it?”
I give a nod as indistinct as her voice.
She removes her finger from my lips, and the same finger now travels to my wrist.”

Years later, after moving to New York, I re-engaged my Japanese language studies hardcore. I picked up The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in its original Japanese at Kinokuniya. This was my first attempt at reading novel-length Murakami, and I reveled in it. His prose is delightfully unembellished, and while it will prove difficult to first-time language students accustomed to manga or Harry Potter in Japanese, I found myself speeding through it. Comparing the original Toru-May passage to the translations, I believe Rubin still captures its mood better than Birnbaum. He nails the girlish, fearless ‘tude of May’s back-and-forth with this older, slightly naïve guy.
I felt confident that I was reading Murakami as he intended with Rubin’s translation. It’s a fairly well-known fact that large chunks were excised in the English text (highlighted here in a roundtable email conversation between Murakami translators Rubin and Philip Gabriel, with Knopf editor Gary Fisketjon). Did I miss these sections when I first read it in English? No, but discovering them in Japanese—like an entire chapter’s worth—was welcoming. Still, I’ve spent so much time living in Rubin’s translations, navigating well-worn pages, that I return to the comforts of the English-language book without hesitation.”

Thoughts? Questions?

My next post: Tuesday, June 24th, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Book One Chapters 9-13, Book Two Chapters 1-2

Enjoy. And enjoy your weekend.

“Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?”

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
Chapters 1-8
By Dennis Abrams

Instead of a straight forward synopsis (unless you all really want one) I’m going to open with a few observations and favorite bits and impressions:

I love how on just the first page we’ve got spaghetti, Rossini, and the beginning of the “mystery.”

It took him an entire 15 pages to get to his first description of an ear: “…her hair swung away to reveal a beautifully shaped ear, smooth as if freshly made, its edge aglow with a downy fringe.”

Another husband who does the cooking.

A missing cat.

“Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close are we able to come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?” I have a feeling this is what the book will be, at least in part, about.

The humor (and sadness) of Toru and Kumiko’s argument about blue tissues and flower-pattern toilet paper and her disappointment that he didn’t know she hated them. And green peppers. “You’ve been living with me all this time,” she said. “but you’ve hardly paid any attention to me. The only one you ever think about is yourself.”

The well in the Miyawaki’s yard, Kumiko telling Toru “Maybe you’ve got this deep well inside, and you shout into it, ‘The king’s got donkey ears!’ and then everything’s OK.”

More sandwiches

Toru’s lack of distinguishing characteristics.

The missing polka-dot tie. The thin layer of dust on his brown shoes.

The mysterious Malta Kano. Her red vinyl hat.

“There was something strange about her eyes. They were mysteriously lacking in depth. They were lovely eyes, but they did not seem to be looking at anything. They were all surface, like glass eyes. But of course they were not glass eyes. They moved, and their eyes blinked.”

Malta and water.

Malta’s younger sister, raped by Toru’s brother-in-law, Noboru Wataya.

Why did the cat leave? “That I cannot tell you. Perhaps the flow has changed. Perhaps something has obstructed the flow.”

“Mr. Okada,” she said, “I believe that you are entering a phase of your life in which many different things will occur. The disappearance of your cat is only the beginning.”

“Different things,” I said. “Good things or bad things?”

She tilted her head in thought. “Good things and bad things. Bad things that seem good at first, and good things that seem bad at first.”

Kumiko’s good day. The importance of the cat.

Mr. Honda. First talk of World War II, Manchuria/Mongolia.

Again, flow. “The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you’re supposed to go up and down when you’re supposed to go down. When you’re supposed to go up find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there’s no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. if everything dries up, the world is darkness.” ‘I am he and/He is me: Spring nightfall.’ Abandon the self, and there you are.’”

“Just be careful of water.” I have a feeling this is an important warning. Given wells and flow and all.

The Nomonhan Incident

Finding the tie at the cleaners – easy listening music.

The wind-up bird winding its spring.

The stone bird, whistling “Thieving Magpie.”

“Somebody told me gays are lousy whistlers. Is that true?”

Toru Okada introduces himself to May Kasahara. Does May remind anyone of the chubby girl in Hard-boiled World?

The dried up well. “I leaned over the edge again and looked down into the darkness, anticipating nothing in particular. So, I thought, in a place like this, in the middle of the day like this, there existed a darkness as deep as this.”

Kumiko and Noboru’s stories. “Noboru Wataya was young and single and smart enough to write a book that nobody could understand.”

Toru’s intense dislike of his brother-in-law. “He was a despicable human being, an egoist with nothing inside him. But he was a far more capable individual than I was.”

Another sandwich.

Creta Kano. “She did a remarkable job of preserving the look of the early sixties. She wore her hair in the bouffant style I had seen in the photograph, the ends curled upward. The hair at the forehead was pulled straight back and held in place by a large, glittering barrette. Her eyebrows were sharply outlined in pencil, mascara added mysterious shadows to her eyes, and her lipstick was a perfect re-creation of the kind of color popular back then. She looked ready to belt out ‘Johnny Angel’ if you put a mike in her hand.”

Creta’s story. An Inquiry into the Nature of Pain.

The dryness of this:

“Just as Malta had to find her own way by herself, I had to find my own way by myself. And when I turned twenty, I decided to kill myself.”

Creta Kano took up her cup and drank her remaining coffee

“What delicious coffee!” she said.

Love it.

A life without pain becomes a life without feeling
From Matthew Strecher’s Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, an interesting perspective on the book:

“A Walk Around the Brain”

“Another review, somewhat less concerned with the chaotic nature of the story, comes from David Mathew, whose more upbeat commentary “On the Wind-up Bird Chronicle from a Rising Son’ came out on-line some months after the novel was released in the United Kingdom in 1999.

Calling The Wind-up Bird Chronicle ‘an incredible achievement,’ Mathew hits very accurately on the central motivation of the story: ‘This is a novel which endeavours to explain what it is to be a young man with a flexible approach to his own life: will life break him or merely bend him? What happens when routine is abolished? What does it mean: to be alone?”

Mathew…notices the flaws in the novel, and these are unavoidable. The text is, as he notes, ‘frequently meandering, occasionally baffling, repetitive or overwritten…’ This, too, is a regular aspect of Murakami’s writing, and it can be exasperating. But Mathew also reflects on the fact that Murakami’s style is the result of the author’s distaste for planning his stories; instead, he allows them to flow directly from his imagination onto the page. ‘[T]he author is well known to prefer freefalling through his novels, rather than planning, and a certain cumulative force is felt during the reading, possibly as a result of this technique (or lack of technique); writes Mathew. On this subject Murakami himself frequently tells interviewers that he himself does not know where his stories will go. Speaking to Salon in 1997, the author says of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, ‘I was enjoying myself writing, because I don’t know what’s going to happen when I take a ride around that corner…it’s very exciting when you don’t know what’s going to happen next. The same thing happens to me when I’m writing. It’s fun.’

Ultimately, Mathew finds something fresh and exciting in the fact that The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is, by and large, a walk around the lead character’s brain,’ despite the fact that ‘some of it is disorganized, some of it is unwanted ephemera.’ But, after all, the inner mind is not a well-organized machine, but a place of dark, disturbing forces, containing the roots of identity, but also the potential for madness. How can one really discuss chaos in concrete, logical terms, much less expect a well-reasoned conclusion?”

From Jay Rubin, quoting from a lecture Murakami gave at Princeton in 1992, which gives an idea of what constitutes “pure” Japanese literature,” and where his works stand in opposition:

“It seems to me that in a country like America, with its ethnic variety, communication is a matter of special importance. Where you have whites and blacks and Asians and Jews and people of all different cultural and religious backgrounds living together, what is needed to convey one’s ideas clearly is not in-group complacency but writing styles that have an effect ton a broad range of people. This calls for a broad range of rhetorical devices and storytelling and humor.

In Japan, with its relatively homogeneous population, different literary customs have evolved. The language used in literary works tends to be the kind that communicates to a small group of like-minded people. Once a piece of writing is given the seal of approval with the label junbunaku – ‘pure literature’ – the assumption takes hold that it only needs to communicate to a few critics and a small segment of the populace there’s nothing wrong with writing like that, of course, but there’s nothing that says that all novels have to be written this way. Such an attitude can only lead to suffocation. But fiction is a living thing. It needs fresh air.

The fact remains, of course, that whatever I may have found in foreign literature, I wanted to write – and I continue to write – Japanese fiction. Using new methods and a new style, I am writing new Japanese stories – new monogatari. I have been criticized for not using traditional styles and methods, but, after all, an author has the right to choose any methods that feel right to him.

I have been living in America for almost two years now, and I feel very much at home here. If anything, I am more comfortable here than in Japan. I am still very much aware, however, that I was born and raised in Japan, and that I am writing novels in Japanese. Furthermore, my novels are always set in Japan, not in foreign countries. This is because I want to portray Japanese society using the style that I have created. The longer I live abroad, the stronger this desire of mine becomes. There is a tradition whereby Japanese writers and artists who have lived abroad come home with new feelings of nationalism. They undergo a re-conversion to Japan and sing the praises of Japanese food and Japanese customs. My case is rather different. I like Japanese food and Japanese customs, of course, but what I want to do is live in a foreign country, observe Japan from here, and write what I see in novels.

I am now writing a new novel, and as I write I am aware that I am changing bit by bit. My strongest awareness that I have changed is this new awareness that I must change. Both as a writer and as a human being. I have to become more open to the world around me. I know. And I know, too, that in some cases I am going to have to engage in a struggle.

For example, until I came to America, I had never spoken like this before an audience. I had always assumed that there was no need for me to do such a thing because my job is to write, not to speak. Since coming to live in America, however, I have gradually begun to feel that I wanted to speak to people. I have come to feel more strongly that I want the people of America – the people of the world – to know what I, as one Japanese writer, am thinking. This is an enormous change for me.

I feel certain that novels from now on will have a far more diverse mixture of cultural elements. We see this tendency in the writings of Kazuo Ishiguro, Oscar Hijuelos, Amy Tan, and Manuel Puig, all of whom have taken their works beyond the confines of a single culture. Ishiguro’s novels are written in English, but I and other Japanese readers can feel in them something intensely Japanese. I believe that in the global village, novels will become in this way increasingly interchangeable. At the same time, I want to go on thinking about how, in the midst of such a powerful tide, people can manage to preserve their identities. What I must do, as one novelist, is to carry this thought process forward through my work of telling stories.”

Rubin continues:

“The ‘new novel’ of which Murakami speaks is, of course, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle which had just begun to be serialized in the Japanese magazine Shincho. This massive project would occupy most of his time and energy for the next three years. Having grown out of the story ‘The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,’ Books One and Two of the novel were published simultaneously on Tuesday, 12 April 1994; the 500-page Book Three, however, finally appeared on Friday, 25 August 1995. Murakami was exhausted, as he had been after writing Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

South of the Border, West of the Sun and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle may have appeared separated from each other ‘through a mysterious process of cell division,’ but the points of contact lie in the shared theme of the difficulty of one person’s knowing another and the affluent 1980’s setting. Where South of the Border, West of the Sun might be seen as a novel-length exploration of the mystery of ‘The Elephant Vanishes,’ The Wind-up Bird Chronicle opens up new areas of exploration. It is a sprawling work that begins as a domestic drama surrounding the disappearance of a couple’s cat, then transports us to the Mongolian desert, and ends by taking on political and supernatural evil on a grand scale. Longer than Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, it was clearly a turning point for Murakami, perhaps the greatest of his career. As Murakami said, this is where he finally abandons his sense of cool detachment to embrace commitment, and though much of the action still takes place in the mind of a first-person Boku narrator, the central focus of the book is on human relationships.

This was a bold move for a writer who had built his reputation on coolness, but Murakami had come to feel strongly that ‘mere’ storytelling was not enough. He wanted to care deeply about something and to have his hero’s quest lead to something.”

Thoughts so far? Questions?

My next posts: Friday, June 20th on translation and more, then Tuesday, June 24th, on The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Chapters 9-13, Chapters 1-2. How’s the pace for everyone? Too fast? Too slow? Let me know in the comments!

And enjoy.

“You’ll never take for granted the ordinariness of spaghetti or your wife’s cat ever again.”

An Introduction to The Wind Up Bird Chronicle

by Dennis Abrams

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Now that we’ve warmed up as it were with Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, it’s time to move on to one of the “big” works, the altogether extraordinary The Wind Up Bird Chronicle.
I don’t want to do to much to spoil the surprises this book has to offer. (And if you think Hard-boiled World was surprising…) But I do want to say this: It occurs to me (among other ways of looking at them) that there are two kind of novels: small, perfectly formed classics like, let’s say, The Great Gatsby or Persuasion or…I’m sure you can name your own. And then there are the big sprawling messy classics like Moby Dick, or Karamazov, or…(again, I’m sure you can name your own). Not everything is completely resolved, not every plotline is neatly tied up, but they provide a satisfaction (at least to me) that the “perfect” novels never quite do.

The Wind Up Bird Chronicle falls squarely into the second camp.

Murakami at times throws so much into the novel, tries to do so much, that at times it seems like he’s losing control. And then there’s the end of the book.

But none of it matters. It’s a great, enjoyable, thought-provoking beast of a novel. You’re going to love it.

A few different introductory perspectives:

From Book Slut

“Murakami aims to provoke not just a frisson of unsettlement, but a deeper, more consequential unease,” said Newsday, waxing unusually poetic, about Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
Stumbling down Alice’s rabbit hole into a strange, hyperreal universe, complete with ghosts, mind games, ciphers, symbols, puzzles, and a cast of characters you’re not sure is real, you find yourself in a deep well with no white rabbits running late. You’re in Japan, somewhere on a slippery slope between science and fiction, between awake and dreaming, between history and the future. In this peculiar darkness, this psychonautical suspension of disbelief, you go deep into your own preconceived notions of what is real.

Every great work of literature must at least allude to that great unknown, the meaning of life. This one leaves you in the cool dark abyss at the bottom of a spooky well, to contemplate this very theme, as you mine 600 pages of daily routines, unanswered phone calls, indecipherable dreams, depressions, mounting debts, unborn babies, and the unknowable heart of the people you love, looking for that meaning.

You’ll never take for granted the ordinariness of spaghetti or your wife’s cat ever again.

And though it’s quite likely that if this were your project, your editor would hurl it back at you for its clunky overcrowding of symbols and signs, for half finished stories, abrupt departures, missing pieces, and missed connections. Under the exquisite craftsmanship of Haruki Murakami, however, the density manages to resonate as streamlined, supremely minimalist, and utterly believable. New York Magazine said it best: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is as “sculpted and implacable as a bird by Brancusi.”

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From Slate:

If you’re in the market, Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle will teach you how to 1) kill with a bayonet (thrust deep under ribs, drag in slow, deep circle to scramble organs); 2) skin a man alive (slit skin at shoulder, peel slowly down right arm); and 3) eliminate a zoo full of carnivores (four snipers per tiger best). It will steep you in the bizarre lives and roles of 30ish Toru Okada, an out-of-work law clerk, bent-tip-tailed-cat owner, house husband, toupee researcher, well dweller, and prostitute. It will titillate you with red-hatted mind readers and sexy phone calls, oozing pols and hot dreams, ill-omened houses and unwaveringly plastic characters named Nutmeg and Cinnamon. Hanging over the overwrought whole are an overcast sky and an elusive “wind-up” bird–so named for its creeeak, creeeak song, which nauseates and dooms the select few who hear it. Stripped of their powers of volition, they become “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, … most of them died, plunging over the edge of the table.”

How dystopian is Murakami’s Japan, how sterile and subwayesque. Not for him the cherry-blossom viewings and golden pavilions of Yukio Mishima, the monarchist who disemboweled himself in 1970. No nostalgic ramblings, only details that overrun the canvas and add up to nothing. A best-selling author in his country, Murakami’s most recent work before Wind-Up was Underground, a mammoth exploration of the Aum Shinrikyo cult’s sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway. Away at Princeton when they occurred, he returned to examine Japan’s fascination with the cult and its tubby, half-blind leader. Underground describes a nation bored and isolated by its successes and its failures alike. Wind-Up fictionalizes that world–but barely, and to less effect.

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From The Chicago Center for Literature and Photography:

As far as Wind-Up’s storyline, perhaps it’d be best to start with the haiku-like minimalism of what can be found at its Wikipedia entry:
“The novel is about a low-key unemployed man, Toru Okada, whose cat runs away. A chain of events follow that prove that his seemingly mundane life is much more complicated than it appears.”

King of the understatements, Wikipedia! Because what happens here to make Toru’s life more “complicated” is no less than Lynchian in its surrealism and grandiosity: he learns that his brother-in-law may perhaps be the Antichrist, that deep meditation while sitting at the bottom of a dry well from Medieval times that can still be found in a back alley of his neighborhood will actually transport him to a dreamlike alternative universe, and that his wife has been secretly seeing a kind of psychic therapist who doubles as a famous matron of the Japanese fashion industry, who is convinced that the couple’s missing cat holds the key to the eventual fate of the entire universe. And yes, I’m deliberately throwing a bunch of random details at you, because I don’t want to spoil any of the fascinating plot, so will just toss out some tidbits that won’t ruin things by you knowing; because as this long story continues, like a Christopher Nolan movie it starts magically coming together more and more, until reaching a climax that will make you smack your forehead and go, “Oh, so that’s what all this chaos was leading up to!”

And in fact it’s no coincidence that I compared Murakami to David Lynch in the previous paragraph; because what both are masters at are creating these complicated but real-feeling total mythologies just completely out of whole cloth, a sort of dark fairyland that the artists only hint at in their stories and reveal only the tiniest details of, but while adding a heft and weight to these glimpses that make you feel like there’s a thousand years of history and ten thousand alt-universe rules behind them.”

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To my mind, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle is an almost ideal summer read – I hope you enjoy it.

My next posts: Friday I’ll post a bit on how the book was translated. Next Tuesday will be my first post on the book proper, let’s say…chapters 1-8? (I’m taking a stab here – let me know if we’re going too fast or too slow – I’ll adjust accordingly.)

Enjoy.