“…maybe I have another face, one no one can imagine, lurking just beneath the surface. Like the far side of the moon, forever cloaked in darkness.”

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage
Conclusion, Part Two
By Dennis Abrams

I’ll have some of my final thoughts, impressions, and favorite things about this book in my post next week (my last on Murakami!), but I do want to say that the more I think about it, the more moved I am by the book. I’m not sure that I’d say it’s my favorite, but it’s the on that has affected me the most personally.  But for today, I thought this was pretty great.

From Strecher:

“We now flash to the novel’s present. Much of the [early narrative], minus the parts about Haida, is related to Kimoto Sara, Tazaki’s new girlfriend and, significantly, the first woman Tazaki has seriously considered marrying. Sara listens to Tazaki’s narrative with great interest, then declares that he must then declares that he must confront this past, for clearly it has caused wounds that have not yet healed. Although Tazaki has, in the intervening years, largely suppressed his memories of the Nagoya incident, the matter becomes more urgent when Sara issues an ultimatum of sorts. She can sense that Tazaki is not wholly with her when they are in bed, that there remains something twisted inside him. Sounding very much like Tengo, explaining to Fukaeri the deeper meanings of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, she tells Tazaki that, ‘however well you’ve hidden your memories, however deeply you’ve buried them, you can’t erase that history.’ Sara looked straight into his eyes. ‘You should remember that. You can’t erase history, and you can’t change it. It would be the same thing as killing your own existence.’ This statement becomes a recurring mantra throughout the text.

As a result, Sara sends Tazaki out on a mission to confront his former friends, to determine what happened and why, and thus heal that ‘twisted’ part of himself. She does the preliminary research, learning that of the four friends, Ao and Aka are still in Nagoya. Ao is an award-winning Lexus salesman, while Aka runs a company that trains company workers to think more independently. Kuro, meanwhile, has married a Finnish man and moved to Helsinki; Shiro, however, has been dead for six years.

Tazaki initially travels to Nagoya, confronting Ao first at his Lexus dealership. Ao does not recognize him at first – a pattern that repeats itself with each of his friends – but after an initial period of awkwardness, the two men are able to discuss the past. The first thing Tazaki learns is that his expulsion from the group was the result of a serious allegation made against him by Shiro all those years ago:

‘Shiro said she had been raped by you,’ Ao said uncomfortably.
‘She said you had deliberately forced her to have sex with you.’
Tsukuru tried to say something, but no words would come out. He had just taken a sip of water, but his throat was painfully dry.
Ao spoke, ‘I couldn’t believe you would do something like that. The other two were the same, Kuro and Aka. No matter how we thought about it, you weren’t the type to force yourself on anyone, and even less the type who would use violence to do it. WE knew that. But Shiro was dead serious, and she was taking it really hard. She said you had two faces, one on the surface and another underneath. Shiro said you had an inner face that no one could ever imagine from the outer one. We couldn’t think of any way to respond to that.’

Ao claims – and later Aka will confirm this – that the question of his guilt and expulsion was largely determined by Kuro, who stood determinedly on Shiro’s side. Asked why they want along with his betrayal (Tazaki uses the verb kiru, ‘to cut’), both men answer that of the five friends Tazaki seemed like the one best equipped to handle the consequences of being cut from the group. As Ao puts it, ‘you lived with both your feet firmly on the ground, and that gave the group a sense of quiet stability. Like the anchor of a ship,’ while Aka describes him as ‘emotionally tougher than the rest of us. Remarkably so, more than you looked.’ Both of these comments, needless to say, come as a surprise to Tazaki.

Finally, Tazaki embarks on his greatest and most unnerving journey, a trek to Finland to confront Kuro, who was, according to Aka and Ao, the real driving force behind his expulsion from the group sixteen years earlier. When he arrives in Helsinki, however, he finds she has gone with her family to spend the summer at their country cottage in the woods surrounding the tiny town of Haemeenlinn, famous as the birthplace of composer Jean Sibelius. To reach this town, he must drive some distance, and in this journey, too, we find a kind of michiyuki, [MY NOTE: a passage – an essential part of classical Japanese theatre, particularly in love suicide plays – undertaken in order to prepare the traveler for death.] not quite as dramatic as those of Pinball, 1973, or A Wild Sheep Chase, to be sure, but nonetheless discernible. He drives through wooded areas of birch trees, great birds circling above them in search of prey on the ground. Finding the town of Haemeenlinn poses no particular difficulty, but on his arrival he realizes that locating this one cottage in the middle of a great forest will be no mean feat. Fortunately he meets an old man on a bicycle, who, asked for directions, without preamble or invitation climbs into Tazaki’s car and shows him the way. The old man’s fearsome appearance and demeanor are worth notice: ‘an old man of small stature…wearing an old hunting cap and long rubber boots. Great tufts of white hair emerged from his ears, and his eyes were red and bloodshot. Like he was filled with rage at something.’ The man’s language is confusing as well; he speaks a variety of languages all at once – English, German, Finnish, and at one point, ‘a language Tsukuru could not place. From its sounds it did not seem to be Finnish.’ Upon reaching the cottage, the old man turns around and storms off without a word and without looking back, ‘like the death god who guided the departed onto the path to the underworld.’ The old man bears certain similarities to the ‘Gatekeeper’ who removes Boku’s shadow at the outset of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but his function is more like the two soldiers who guide Kafka into the forest to meet Saeki in Kafka on the Shore. In both appearance and manner he is clearly marked as a guardian spirit of the forest and gives us our best indication that Tazaki has at last reached his destination ‘over there.’ This is not, however, the same ‘over there’ – the same metaphysical forest – as we have seen in previous Murakami fiction, for when Tazaki finally meets Kuro, he discovers her to be living, with her Finnish husband and her two daughters. This is not the underworld, per se. And yet, as Tazaki and Kuro face one another preparing to confront their shared past, Murakami offers a subtle clue to indicate that this is not entirely the world of the living either: Kuro, as a wife and mother, wears her hair pinned up, but just before they begin to talk in earnest, she removes the pins and lets her hair down so that ‘her bangs now covered her forehead. Now she looked more like the old Kuro.’ It is an updated version of the flickering back and forth between the teenage and the middle-aged Saeki confronted by Kafka at the end of HIS quest.

To Tazaki’s surprise, Kuro (who prefers now to be called by her adult name, ‘Eri,’ and suggests they refer to Shiro by the grown-up name of ‘Yuzu’ as well) confesses that, like Aka and Ao, she never truly believed that Tazaki had raped Shiro; she pursued his expulsion, rather, for the sake of Shiro, who was tottering on the brink of madness. But this was only one of the reasons. She confesses at length that she had always loved Tazaki, knowing all the while of his desire for Shiro. Partly out of awareness of Shiro’s beauty – ‘she was Snow White and I was the Seven Dwarfs,’ she quips – Kuro was simply afraid to confess her love. ‘I lacked confidence in myself as a woman. No matter how much I loved you, I figured you would never take someone like me as your partner. Your heart was set on Yuzu. That’s why I was able to cut you out so mercilessly. It was in order to cut out my feelings for you.’

In between catching up and Kuro’s confession to Tazaki, the two also discuss what had really happened to Shiro. Like Aka and Ao, Kuro notes that Shiro’s injuries were real; she truly had been sexually violated, but she hints that the incident may have occurred in the metaphysical world: ‘there is a certain kind of dream that is more real than reality itself,’ Kuro explains. ‘She had a dream like that.’ Somewhat later Kuro suggests that Shiro ‘had an evil spirit in her…it was always hovering at a slight distance behind her, breathing its icy breath on her neck, steadily pursuing her.’

Tazaki learns that Shiro had gone off to the mountains to hide out while awaiting the arrival of her child – she could not consider an abortion, because she was firmly against the practice – but had miscarried. After this, she drifted further and further from human contact, gradually cutting herself off from society. Like Tazaki, she starved herself to dangerous levels, until even her menstrual period stopped coming.

What Kuro describes is Shiro’s gradual but inexorable shift from flesh to pure spirit, a drive toward death that made it impossible for anyone to anchor her to this world. In the end Shiro moved to Hamamtsu to live by herself, but given her helpless state, Kuro interprets this as an act of suicide. When Shiro is murdered, found strangled to death on the floor of her kitchen, the circumstances are inexplicable; her room is locked from the inside, there is no sign of struggle or break-in, and nothing has been stolen. Tazaki is again assailed by the possibility that it was his own inner self that killed Shiro, perhaps in the ‘other world’:

‘Just as Shiro said, maybe I have another face, one no one can imagine, lurking just beneath the surface. Like the far side of the moon, forever cloaked in darkness. In some other place, without my ever knowing about it, in a totally different kind of time, maybe I really did rape Shiro, slicing deeply into her soul. Despicably, with all my strength. And maybe that dark inner side will eventually rise up, completely overwhelm the surface me, swallowing it whole.’

Tazaki cannot dismiss such fears, if only because his own past experiences – particularly with Haida – have convinced him that flesh-spirit separation is possible, and that he probably does carry within himself a darker self, capable of doing things his outer self would never consider. And yet, he also has a vague notion that this was what was supposed to happen all along:

‘Tsukuru had never in his life felt the urge to kill anyone. But maybe he had meant to kill Yuzu in the abstract. Tsukuru himself had no way of knowing what sort of dense darkness lurked within his soul. All he was sure of what that Yuzu had the same sort of dense darkness within herself. Perhaps their two darknesses had connected somewhere deep beneath the surface. And maybe being strangled by Tsukuru was exactly what Yuzu had wanted. Maybe he had heard her pleas through their connected darkness.’

He does not, however, tell all this to Kuro, opting instead for the more ambiguous statement that ‘I might actually have killed Shiro.’ The meeting between Tazaki and Turo ends shortly after this scene, marked by Kuro pinning her hair back up, signaling the return of the present and the recession of the ‘other world.’ At this moment Tazaki reflects that ‘the flow of time became just a little lighter.’

One important question that lingers here is why Shiro sought death. This is never recorded properly in the narrative, but Tazaki himself has a plausible answer: she simply could not face the idea of growing up. ‘In their high school days the five of them had lived in perfect, tightly knit harmony. They accepted each other as they were, and understood one another. Each of them felt a sense of profound happiness in that. But such happiness could not go on forever…Shiro’s spirit probably could not handle the pressure of what must come.’ This also helps us to understand Shiro’s determination not to become pregnant again – indeed, her general horror of sexuality – for these belong to the realm of the adult world in which, as Tazaki puts it, ‘each person must grow up at their own pace, and in their own direction.’ He concludes that Shiro’s urge toward death – using himself as a stepping stool – represented a flight from that inevitable destiny. From our vantage point, it may be added that Shiro’s drive toward the ‘other world’ is an attempt to escape the effects of time, of growth and change, and remain the young and innocent girl she has always been. This relates directly back to the ‘perfect, utopian circle’ that we have seen again in Murakami’s writing, most prominently in Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore, a perfect space in which nothing can disrupt the ideal happiness of Kizuki and Naoko, or Saeki and her boyfriend; yet we have also seen – in the village where the fifteen-year-old Saeki continues her unchanging existence – that this is a realm in which individual growth and development come to a halt. This realm represents perfect peace, but such peace is meaningless without the existence of conflict to define it.

The account above suggests that the ontological stance of this novel is closer to Norwegian Wood or South of the Border, West of the Sun than it is to some of [Murakami’s] more metaphysically imbued texts…in short, it is what might be termed a near-realistic text. Its narrative structure supports this, lacking the regular rhythm of alternating narratives that marks the works up through The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle but also lacking clear-cut forays into the forbidding darkness of the ‘other world.’ Instead, much as we see in Norwegian Wood, Tazaki Tsukuru’s ventures into the ‘other world’ are symbolically portrayed in his visits to Nagoya, his imagining of Shiro’s final home in Hamamatsu, his internalization of Haida’s story about a hot spring resort in Oita, and, most obviously, his journey to the village of Haemeenlinn, not far from Helsinki, to meet Kuro at her summer home in Finland. None of these locations is truly representative of ‘over there’; rather, like Hokkaido (as opposed to Rat’s villa) in A Wild Sheep Chase, it is their status as being ‘other than Tokyo’ that marks them as likely settings for close encounters with ‘over there.’ And if we are denied the familiar explorations of the ‘other world’ that made works like A Wild Sheep Chase and Kafka on the Shore so intriguing, we are perhaps compensated by the unnerving, yet thrilling sensation that the ‘other world’ is constantly, unblinkingly, observing us.

Incursions of ‘over there’ are most prominently depicted in the early sequences of this novel, particularly those that detail Tazaki Tsukuru’s peculiar transformation, from a youthful, naïve idealist suddenly faced with expulsion from a group that, in many ways, defined who he was, into a detached loner, or what he finally describes, at novel’s end, as a ‘defector from his own life.’ This transformation is brought about, physiologically speaking, through five months of near starvation, as the traumatized Tazaki flirts with the idea of suicide and does not take the trouble of feeding himself. During this time, his perception of the world around him is about as close as we get to a description of ‘over there’ in this work:

‘As far as he could see, the ground was strewn with shattered boulders. There was not a drop of water, not a blade of grass growing. No color, no light. No sun, nor any moon or stars. Probably no direction either. The bizarre twilight and fathomless darkness traded places at regular intervals. It was the ultimate frontier of consciousness.’

As we have seen…the lack of sun and moon, indeed, of light itself, suggests the timelessness of that realm, its dark and forbidding nature. His description, within the context of the novel’s structure, could be read as a metaphorical representation of the darkest despair, but I am more inclined to read this passage as a hint that Tazaki Tsukuru, facing the abyss of death and the unknown, actually exists more inside his mind than outside it during these five critical months. It is in this gloomy no-man’s land, on the border between the world of the living and that of the dead, that he loses his youthful idealism and becomes a new man. And when at least he does emerge, his appearance is altered significantly and appropriately for a man who has faced the brink of death and returned. It is not, to be sure, quite the same level of transformation one finds in the earliest texts – he has not become a talking pinball machine, for instance – but enough that people who know him are shocked by the change. Not only has his body wasted away, but ‘his face has also changed. Looking at himself in the mirror, no traces remained of the soft face of that mediocre, unfocused youth. The face looking back at him was that of a young man, whose protruding cheek bones were sharp, like they’d been carved with a garden-trowel.’ His body and face have at last transformed to match the change in his core self, so that Tasaki Tsukuru is an entirely new man, inside and out. And this new ‘him’ is wholly without regrets for the passing of the old; indeed, we even catch a hint of the dark determination that lurks beneath the surface of this sharply featured new man. Significantly, it is precisely at this moment that we catch another glimpse of that hidden forest that so many previous Murakami heroes have found, for better or worse:

‘Look at it how you may, the youth who had been Tazaki Tsukuru was dead. He had gasped out his last breath in desolate darkness, and as buried in some tiny forest clearing. Secretly, quietly, while everyone else slept. With no headstone. He who stood here breathing as a ‘new Tazaki Tsukuru,’ whose contents had been completely replaced. But no one besides himself knew this, nor did he have any intention of telling anyone the truth.’

Words such as ‘contents’ (naiyo) remind us yet again that the physical body in Murakami fiction is frequently little more than a container (yoki), housing a core identity – a soul, a kokoro – that is, by no means permanently fixed to that container. This was a prominent motif in Kafka on the shore, as we have seen, and casts into sharper perceptive the reason for Kafka’s loathing of his own body; while the ‘contents’ of that body may well be the ‘soul’ of Nakata, the vessel itself is the product of Johnny Walker, and as such is bears the physical curse of that origin. Clearly a similar operation goes on in 1Q84 with the construction of the dota (‘daughter’) characters, more empty vessels destined to receive the seeds of the Leader in the hopes that that material will be conveyed to yet another type of container: the womb. This last image strikes a resonant chord with Tazaki Tsukuru, for in his transformation, Tazaki himself is in a sense ‘reborn’ – a term Ando uses as well – from the dark and mysterious ‘womb’ of ‘over there.’ It is a function of the metaphysical world we have already seen employed with considerable effect in Kafka on the Shore, After Dark, and 1Q84, namely as a symbolic location for growth, gestation, and eventual reemergence into the light as something new. Beginning with Tamura Kafka and continuing through Tazaki Tsukuru, the hero who ventures into that dark and unsettling place has the potential to emerge stronger and better able to cope with the world than before.

But this is not always the case. Shiro, for her part, is the one other character in this novel who almost certainly encounters the world ‘over there,’ and she is destroyed by it. Of the five friends in this novel, clearly Shiro is the most fragile; a delicate, sensitive musician, Shiro struggles with a general tendency to withdraw from interaction with others. Perhaps due in part to her father’s profession as an obstetrician gynecologist, she has developed a basic fear of sexuality, which fits in well with Tazaki’s perception that their high school group avoids any romantic entanglements among the various parties. In any case, as Kuro tells Tazaki near the end of the novel, Shiro (now called ‘Yuzu’) never felt sexual attraction for anyone. ‘Yuzu had a powerful loathing for anything sexual that bordered on terror.’ This is why, following her rape and miscarriage, Shiro virtually starved herself. ‘It was because she wanted to stop her menstrual periods,’ Kuro explains. ‘When you drop below a certain weight, your period stop. That’s what she wanted. Not only did she want to ensure she would never get pregnant again, but she probably wanted to stop being female altogether. If it had been possible, she would have removed her uterus.’

These feelings are worth pursuing for just a moment, because if we observe Shiro’s situation dispassionately, we see certain similarities with Tamura Kafka. Recall that Kafka’s primary source of discomfort is the irrefutable fact of his genetic connection to his father, whom he considers to be evil; Shiro, too, is to some extent uncomfortable about her father’s chosen profession. Why, we might wonder, did Shiro never consult her father regarding her condition? Presumably it is because, as Kuro explains to Tazaki, she could never have considered terminating the pregnancy. ‘Whatever the circumstances, there was no way she could have killed anything…From way back she was highly critical of the fact that her father also performed abortions. We used to argue about that a lot.’ This fits the overall profile of Shiro’s character; particularly her abhorrence of sexual contact, and lends a certain pathos to the fact that the assault upon her was of a sexual nature.

There is, however, another important aspect to consider regarding Shiro, namely, that if Tazaki Tsukuru possesses a ‘darker inner self hidden by his outer mask,’ who is to say that Shiro herself does not have the same sort of ‘dark inner self,’ one that – like that of the ‘nine-figured girl,’ of Naoko, of Kumiko, of Aomame, indeed, of Tazaki himself – is grounded in bestial emotion and raw sexuality? If Tazaki’s inner self is grounded by this uncontrollable sexual desire – is, in fact, the very ‘evil spirit’ of whom Kuro spoke – then we have no reason to assume that Shiro did not possess an inner sexuality that drove her into the hands of that evil spirit, to the possibility that Shiro’s dreams were quite as erotic – as ‘forbidden’ – as Tazaki’s own.

If that is so, than Shiro’s absolutist stance against sexuality and its natural result speaks of a basic resistance to something within herself; thus, her gradual movement toward the world of death is finally an effort to resolve the dilemma within herself, which must end either in the restoration of her ‘innocence’ within the other world or in the triumph of her inner demon. Furthermore, it is not difficult to see that same struggle occupying Tazaki as well. We recall that Tazaki, prior to his expulsion from the group, fought to suppress his growing sexual desire for Shiro (which he did not feel for Kuro). ‘I always did my best not to be conscious of her as a member of the opposite sex. I was careful not to be alone with her,’ he tells Sara, an admission that may shed light on the fact that following his expulsion, Tazaki regularly dreamed about having sexual relations with both women yet – puzzling even to himself – when the climactic moment came, he inevitably ejaculated into Shiro’s body rather than into Kuro. On the unconscious – the metaphysical – level, Tazaki Tsukuru was equally a prisoner of his own ‘evil spirit,’ whose sexual desire for Shiro could no more be stopped than Shiro’s secret desires )for Tazaki? It is unclear) could be suppressed. Within the model of the ‘other world’ we have constructed throughout this text, then, it is quite plausible that Tazaki Tsukuru’s concerns about a dark inner self are correct, that he has acted out his inner fantasy, within the inner dreamscape, and caused irreparable to the woman he wanted more than any other. But was it all perhaps a dream?

By novel’s end Shiro’s pregnancy is left as one of the several unanswered riddles to which we are now accustomed in Murakami fiction. Did Shiro’s dark inner spirit really connect with that of Tazaki Tsukuru, leading to their sexual liaison? Did Tazaki really rape, and later murder, the woman he loved most/ Or was Shiro’s condition, as Ando suggests, just another ‘immaculate conception,’ the result of her own powerfully repressed sexual urges? All we can say with any certainty is that the fact of that conception forced Shiro to confront the ‘evil spirit’ that lurked within her, a confrontation she could not hope to win. And yet, not all has been lost, even for Shiro. In one of the more moving scenes in the novel, as Kuro and Tazaki reminiscence about Shiro at Kuro’s summerhouse in Haemeenlimn, they hold a sort of impromptu funeral for her – neither was able to attend her actual memorial service – by playing a recording of Liszt’s Le Mar du Pays. We can almost feel, as Tazaki and Kuro seem to do, Shiro’s presence joining them once more through this melody, and Kuro tells him that ‘in a lot of ways, she still goes on living.’ One of those ways, in spirit, at least, is through Kuro’s daughter, whom she has named ‘Yuzu’ in honor of their friend. Once again, the ‘other world’ functions symbolically as the womb, in conjunction with Kuro’s actual womb, to facilitate the ‘rebirth’ of Shiro.”

My next post, Tuesday, November 24th, final thoughts.

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

Kafka on the Shore
Conclusion
By Dennis Abrams

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

OK…Kafka.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And…Nakata’s story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EXPLOITING THE MIND-BODY SPLIT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—————-

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

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

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

 The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

Conclusion

by Dennis Abrams

——————-

 

To continue with Strecher:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some questions for the group:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy.

“It’s a world made of tricky things.”

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

Some notes and observations:

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

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

Nutmeg’s difficulty in telling stories.

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

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

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

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

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

The newspaper continues its investigations: M’s Secret Cure

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

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

Cinnamon and Nutmeg. Cinnamon’s natural cleanliness.

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

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

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

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

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

Another letter from May: I LOVED this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nutmeg finds her calling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Matthew Strecher:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image and Artifice

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

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

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

Violence and Sexuality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy.

“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.

“…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.