Murakami and Laika, part two

Part one is here.

Appropriately enough for the novel that followed the tales-within-tales of Murakami's grandly ambitious The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the uncanny enters Sputnik Sweetheart through a story, told by a woman with whom Sumire has fallen in love. It's a stunningly creepy account of a late-night experience at a carnival that turned her hair white and, she says, essentially broke her--and her life--irrevocably into two pieces. From there, the strangeness builds, and the Greek island begins to resemble a de Chirico painting, shadowy and depopulated, but with hints of threatening life around every corner; following more than a hundred pages of straightforward realism, the eruption of the fantastic--and chilling--is all the more believable and compelling. From the start we knew that the novel would end with loss, and the strange events surrounding that loss, never clearly explained, serve both to deepen its impact and make it seem sadly inevitable.

My friend Kristi calls Murakami a pessimist, while I've argued before on this blog that he strikes me as at worst a grudging optimist. After I read Norwegian Wood, I wrote that Murakami's vision, without denying life's traumas, seems to honor the simple effort of daily living:

Norwegian Wood is crowded with suicides, nearly all by teenagers. . . . . Some of the kids have fairly clear reasons, while others are essentially inexplicable, but the overall sense is that, faced with the quotidian difficulties of life, they decided they were unable to continue. In the face of so much death, there is a real sense of hard-won victory, of tangible achievement in the simple fact that the narrator is still alive twenty years later, able to vividly recall and tell us this story of his youth. His life has included great loss, disappointment, and sorrow, but he has kept going.

We don't know for sure that the narrator of Sputnik Sweetheart will make that choice, but the book closes on a note of quiet determination.

Which brings me back to Laika. What is Murakami trying to say by linking his story to that one? Is Kristi right about Murakami's pessimism? That doesn't seem so far-fetched: after all, Laika's story is one of sheer hopelessness--there was never a way out for her, just as it seems that there was no way Murakami's narrator in could have kept his love.

I recently told a friend that an essential part of writing a blog like this is a willingness to make decisions about works of art and seem reasonably confident about them--despite knowing that somewhere down the road I might change my mind, or be convinced that I was wrong. In interpreting Laika's story I will admit to being less confident than usual; Murakami's stories are richly multivalent, and I fear that I may be seeing what I want to see. As I continue reading my way through Murakami's oeuvre, I realize that I may reach a different position.

But for now I prefer to read the story as support for my view of Murakami the grudging optimist. We are all like Laika to some extent, set in motion by forces we don't know and can't understand, heading to a destination we can't even conceive clearly. Of course, most of us are much luckier than Laika, our fates nowhere near as horrid--but at the same time, like her we are constantly watching people and things we love and cherish fall away beneath us, loss perhaps the only constant in our long lives.

Yet our space capsule keeps moving, ultimately out of our control, and we have to keep moving with it--so we might as well look out the window and continue thinking about what we see. Faced with the inevitability of loss, we must find a way to give that loss meaning while simultaneously attempting to retain what we can't afford to lose, our very self. So we tell stories, and we pass them on, and meanwhile we pay attention to the things of the world--the art, yes, but also the ephemera and the junk, the very stuff that hedges us about and helps, whether we like it or not, to define who we are.

We can't possibly come through life whole, but if we shore up enough of that everyday stuff, after a terrible loss we just might be able use it as a sort of mold, a place in which to re-form the shattered self. The first step, Murakami seems to remind us again and again, is simply to keep taking the first step.

Norwegian Wood

While reading Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood (1987) a few weeks ago, I wrote:

For all that Murakami's books get discussed as weird pageants of contemporary life, icons of postmodernism, the ones I've read have all featured narrators driven by loss, alienated from their past or from the world by people they can't have back, decisions they can't unmake, times they can't recapture. There is a similarity in tone between Murakami and Berry, or Murakami and Anthony Powell, or Proust, that I would never have guessed when I first opened him.

Having finished the novel and spent a few weeks idly thinking about it, I still agree with what I wrote, but I think it gives an inappropriate sense of the book, making it sound melancholy rather than wistful. Instead, I think it's probably more important to focus on the loving attention to the material stuff of the world (and, thus, of memory) that lies at Norwegian Wood's core—and that fundamentally ties it to Murakami's other works, however different they may seem at first glance.

Take this description, for example:

Sunday morning I got up at nine, shaved, did my laundry, and hung the clothes on the roof. It was a beautiful day. The first smell of autumn was in the air. Red dragonflies were flitting around the quadrangle, chased by neighborhood kids swinging nets. With no wind, the Rising Sun hung limp on its pole. I put on a freshly ironed shirt and walked from the dorm to the streetcar stop. A student neighborhood on a Sunday morning: the streets were dead, virtually empty, most stores closed. What few sounds there were echoed with special clarity. A girl wearing sabots clip-clopped across the asphalt roadway, and next to the streetcar barn four or five kids were throwing rocks at at a line of empty cans. A flower store was open, so I went in and bought some daffodils. Daffodils in the autumn: that was strange. But I had always liked that particular flower.

It's simple, straightforward writing, relating an inconsequential morning in the young narrator's life. But the concrete details of this scene, joined to the host of other elements of everyday, non-noteworthy life that accrue throughout Norwegian Wood, form a backdrop of consequence, a sense of a real, lived life moving forward day by day, laundry load by laundry load. The elements of everyday life may not seem worthy of notice, but Murakami's attention to them reminds us that they're all we have—that in a very real sense, our attention to the world around us is us. By taking notice of the seemingly inconsequential, we both sharpen our ability to attend to what is truly consequential—human lives and emotions—and we simultaneously invest the everyday, material world with consequence. We thus impregnate the world with a numinous quality that, in its best moments, reflects back to us with increased weight and potency. The following passage, in which the older narrator recalls the powerful emotions evoked by a friend's ill-treated girlfriend, demonstrates some of what I'm talking about:

It finally hit me some dozen or so years later. I had come to Santa Fe to interview a painter and was sitting in a local pizza parlor, drinking beer and eating pizza and watching a miraculously beautiful sunset. Everything was soaked in brilliant red—my hand, the plate, the table, the world—as if some special kind of fruit juice had splashed down on everything. In the midst of this overwhelming sunset, the image of Hatsumi flashed into my mind, and in that moment I understood what that tremor of the heart had been. It was a kind of childhood longing that had always remained—and would forever remain—unfulfilled. I had forgotten the existence of such innocent, all-but-seared-in longing: forgotten for years to remember that such feelings had ever existed inside me. What Hatsumi had stirred in me was a part of my very self that had long lain dormant. And when the realization struck me, it aroused such sorrow I almost burst into tears. She had been an absolutely special woman. Someone should have done something—anything—to save her.

The physical and inconsequential stores, amplifies, and reflects the emotional and consequential, either directly, as when Proust tells of the madeleine, or obliquely, as when Murakami's narrator is overcome by the sunset. Attention to the world, however minor its manifestations, is repaid with moments of knowledge, clarity, beauty, insight, transcendence. That sense of the importance—the necessity, even—of the everyday is, for me, the strongest connection between the straightforward love story of Norwegian Wood and the superficially very different Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. In those novels, the details are, in their strangeness, more immediately arresting. But the care that Murakami lavishes on the physical things of this world is similar and so is its effect, both grounding and arguing for the importance of even the most mundane events of the novel.

I wrote back in July about the near-mythological ordeals that the narrators of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle endure. There's no comparable ordeal in Norwegian Wood, but I think the novel nevertheless mounts a strong argument for the value of simply carrying on. Norwegian Wood is crowded with suicides, nearly all by teenagers. [When we were discussing this book the other day, by the way, Stacey reminded me of the historical place of suicide in Japanese culture and how very different it is from our conception of the act. I'm choosing to avoid that complexity by arguing that the aggressively Western and modern orientation of Murakami's fiction limits the role of traditional interpretations—but I know I might be on shaky ground in doing so.] Some of the kids have fairly clear reasons, while others are essentially inexplicable, but the overall sense is that , faced with the quotidian difficulties of life, they decided they were unable to continue. In the face of so much death, there is a real sense of hard-won victory, of tangible achievement in the simple fact that the narrator is still alive twenty years later, able to vividly recall and tell us this story of his youth. His life has included great loss, disappointment, and sorrow, but he has kept going. Like the narrator in Hard-Boiled Wonderland swimming across the subterranean lake in the dark, he has chosen to muddle along despite having no idea of what's to come:

I looked back over my shoulder as I swam. I saw the Professor's light retreating into the distance, but my hand had yet to touch solid rock. How could it be so far? Decent of him to keep us guessing.

There are hints of the grudging optimism of Beckett in this vision of life: "I can't go on, I'll go on." We keep going, dealing with things as they come up, be they as straightforward as a fragile-souled lover or as complicated as unseen subterranean flesh-eaters. Effort itself is success, and it's decent of the future to keep us guessing. A reasonable note, it seems to me, on which to enter, blind as usual, a new year.

Murakami postscript

One advantage to writing about books on a blog, rather than for a print publication, is that I can return to topics if I feel I need to clarify a thought. (Of course, a related disadvantage is that there’s a constant self-imposed pressure to go ahead and publish a post, just to keep current, even if I’m bothered by a niggling feeling that I haven’t said exactly what I meant.) So today I’m going back to Murakami.

I wrote a few days ago that the protagonists of Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle return to a state of aloneness at the end of the book, but one that is “pregnant with possibility, with previously unseen connections and a sense that there is an actual self, existing separate from the clutter of the world around it.”

I think a more clear way to put that is that, at the start of these two novels, the narrators are solitary selves who aren’t quite sure who they are. They exist almost entirely in the space left over by the impingement of contemporary culture and material objects, pressed into a vaguely defined shape by their jazz CDs, Bogart and Bacall movies, fine whiskeys, television sets, stir-fries, and Russian novels. Solitude for them is a way to avoid having to actively define the self or make emotional or ethical choices.

In both novels, the men undergo ordeals—a period at the bottom of a well in one, an escape from an underground flood in another—that, while acutely physical and realistically described, are essentially mythological, trials of the flesh and the spirit. The ordeals serve to separate the men from much, if not all, of what they thought defined them, and they emerge free to think about who they actually are and the ways they belong in (and to) the world. That's the great movement of the two books, what gives birth to a new understanding of the solitary self.

I’m still not certain that this reading is exactly what Murakami intends. I don’t think his actual, legitimate strangeness should ever be discounted, and multiple readings of his novels will always be possible. But this is the one I’ll carry with me the next time I open one of his books; we’ll see how it stands up.

Haruki Murakami, part two

Part one is here.

The Murakami I’ve been reading lately (and that thus justifies his presence in this blog) is Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1991, English translation 1993), which I read while on a work trip to New York back in May. It’s a mark of Murakami’s singular strangeness (or my limitations as a critic) that I’ve only now, two months later, figured out how to write about him.

I noted above that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is generally regarded as Murakami’s best; Stacey (and my co-worker Jim) prefer Hard-Boiled Wonderland. I may have to join them. In it, Murakami achieves something truly rare, telling two seemingly separate stories, wildly different in tone, in alternating chapters. The first relates the adventures of a typical Murakami narrator, whose job as a human encryption key leads him into a dangerous netherworld of hit men, flesh-eating monsters, and a mysterious scientist who warns of the impending end of the world, while the second story is a spare, parable-like tale set in a sparsely populated walled village known as the Town.

The pairing works largely because Murakami adapts his prose carefully for each world. Here’s the book’s opening paragraph, set in Murakami’s version of the ordinary human world:

The elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent. Or at least I imagined it was ascent. There was no telling for sure: it was so slow that all sense of direction simply vanished. it could have been going down for all I knew, or maybe it wasn’t moving at all. But let’s just assume it was going up. Merely a guess. Maybe I’d gone up twelve stories, then down three. Maybe I’d circled the globe. How would I know?

And here’s the opening of the section set in the Town:

With the approach of autumn, a layer of long golden fur grows over their bodies. Golden in the purest sense of the word, with not the least intrusion of another hue. Theirs is a gold that comes into this world as gold and exists in this world as gold. Poised between all heaven and earth, they stand steeped in gold.

Throughout the book, Murakami employs the affectless, conversational tone of that first paragraph to domesticate the bizarre plot twists and unusual characters the narrator encounters; their strangeness becomes almost normal in light of the narrator’s unflappable ordinariness. As the title suggests, the plot resembles a cracked version of a noir mystery; like Philip Marlowe (especially Robert Altman’s version), the narrator gets threatened and beaten up by men looking for valuable items he doesn’t have. But he keeps going regardless, looking for answers to questions he doesn’t even understand, as if movement and effort themselves are a sufficient answer to uncertainty.

Meanwhile, Murakami does the opposite in the interlarded chapters set in the town, freighting every description with a sense of immanence. Every object is numinous and every scene deeply strange and loaded with meaning that is just beyond our—and the narrator’s—grasp. Objects (unicorn skulls, paper clips) appear in both stories, and characters, too, maybe, somewhat refracted and reconfigured, but recognizable. Compelling and distinct, the two stories travel in parallel to an ending that, to me at least, was completely surprising, playing on assumptions I didn’t even realize I’d made. It’s an ending that led me to sit quietly in my hotel room for a while, thinking about the book and listening to the white noise, alone.

And that’s probably a good place to end this, with the idea of aloneness. At the heart of both novels is a sense that loneliness—or perhaps it’s better stated as solitariness, or isolation—may be our essential condition. But Murakami doesn’t necessarily see aloneness as a inherently problematic: though his characters eventually are forced to recognize their solitariness, they ultimately, in these two novels at least, are left with (or choose) a new form of aloneness. But, far from being pathological, this new solitude is pregnant with possibility, with previously unseen connections and a sense that there is an actual self, existing separate from the clutter of the world around it.

This post, for what it’s worth, also serves as a goodbye of sorts to my co-worker, Jim, who is moving to a new job and a new town. When he saw that I was reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Jim said, “Oh, you’re going to love that. But you’ll like Hard-Boiled Wonderland more.” He was right; in the seven years we've worked together, he’s rarely been wrong about a book he’s recommended to me. Add a wry sense of humor, a deep understanding of people, and the skills and repertoire of a raconteur, and what more could you want in a co-worker? I'll miss him.