I Love Murakami

7/28/2019 I Love Murakami

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I Love Murakami

AAAComments () By Daniel HandlerTuesday, Sep 26 2000

With all due respect toToni Morrison, Ian McEwan,Beverly Cleary,Muriel Spark,Gnter Grass, J.D. Salinger, Stephen Dixon, Lorrie Moore, Grace Paley, Gore Vidal,Gabriel Garca Mrquez,Rachel Ingalls,Tom Drury, Thomas Pynchon,Eudora Welty,J.P. Donleavy, Milan Kundera, Philip Roth,Naguib Mahfouz, David Foster Wallace,Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Don DeLillo, some people my editor cut, Alice Munro,DalePeck,Jos Saramago, Edmund White, E.L. Konigsburg,John Updike, W.G. Sebald,Russell Banks,Stephen Millhauser, Kazuo Ishiguro,Amy Bloom, Robert Cormier,Kenzaburo Oe, Francesca Lia Block,Rick Moody,Donald Antrim,Amos Oz,PaulAuster, Cynthia Ozick, Harry Crews,Denis Johnson, Gary Indiana, Howard Norman,Anne Tyler, Jonathan Lethem,J.G. Ballard, Dorothy Allison,Mary Gaitskill, andofcourseme, Haruki Murakamiis our greatest living practitioner of fiction. The ways he

has found to inhabit narrative are without precedent, and perhaps more importantly,without gimmick. The stories he tells are new but not particularly newfangled. He tweakstradition and gives equal air time to both the tradition and the tweak. Murakami's bestwork is as deep and decorative as those Easter Islandheads, but he doesn't make a bigdeal out of it. The novels aren't afraid to pull tricks usually banned from serious fiction:They are suspenseful, corny, spooky, and hilarious; they're airplane reading, but whenyou're through you spend the rest of the flight, the rest of the month, rethinking life. Ireally like his writing a whole lot.

photo: Marion EttlingerHaruki Murakami tweaks tradition and gives equal air time to the tradition and the tweak.

Details

Norwegian Wood

By Haruki Murakami
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Vintage, 296 pp., $13 paperBuy this book

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More About

Haruki Murakami

The Beatles

Stephen Millhauser

Arts, Entertainment, and Media

Books and Literature

After the bemused critical respect for the off-center promise of novels like Wild SheepChase, Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was widely regarded in this country as

an unusual blending of Eastern and Western cultures and one of the best novels of 1997.They got it wrong again. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is about one hundred and thirty-eight times better than that, a contribution to the culture up there with Madame Bovaryand Guernica and White Light/White Heat. If you haven't read it, you should do so rightnow. Go on; it's usually in bookstores. Call in sick if you have to. The rest of us will waithere. . . .
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0375704027/vlsthevillagevoiA/http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-09-07/books/the-arabian-nights-tales-of-1-001-nights-volumes-1-3-deluxe-boxed-set/http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-09-22/film/toronto-film-festival-recap/http://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/archives/2010/03/chef_michael_an_2.phphttp://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/archives/2010/03/chef_michael_an_2.phphttp://www.villagevoice.com/2008-09-23/voice-choices/it-s-eustace-tilly-s-party/http://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/archives/2009/12/chatting_with_t_2.phphttp://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/archives/2009/12/chatting_with_t_2.phphttp://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Haruki+Murakamihttp://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/The+Beatleshttp://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Stephen+Millhauserhttp://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Arts%2C+Entertainment%2C+and+Mediahttp://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Books+and+Literaturehttp://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0375704027/vlsthevillagevoiA/http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-09-07/books/the-arabian-nights-tales-of-1-001-nights-volumes-1-3-deluxe-boxed-set/http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-09-22/film/toronto-film-festival-recap/http://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/archives/2010/03/chef_michael_an_2.phphttp://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/archives/2010/03/chef_michael_an_2.phphttp://www.villagevoice.com/2008-09-23/voice-choices/it-s-eustace-tilly-s-party/http://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/archives/2009/12/chatting_with_t_2.phphttp://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/archives/2009/12/chatting_with_t_2.phphttp://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Haruki+Murakamihttp://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/The+Beatleshttp://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Stephen+Millhauserhttp://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Arts%2C+Entertainment%2C+and+Mediahttp://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Books+and+Literature


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So now you know, you've read this cohesive and boundless consideration of the weight ofthe world, the evil of battle, and what happens when your spouse suddenly leaves you,and you've seen how this bookand while you're at it, why don't you read the other onesyou can findis the evolved accumulation of Murakami's talent. So you join Murakamicognoscenti in their frustration over the sporadic publication of his work in English. The

Holy Grail's always beenNorwegian Wood. Published in 1987 to enormous acclaim, it'ssince been inexplicably impossible to find in the States, even though it's the book thatfirst catapulted Murakami to international attention.

Well, I hereby decree that anyone even remotely connected to Vintage International getsfree cocktails for life, because the Grail's in stores now, and guess what? Worth the wait.It's actually fitting, in a ramshackle way, to receive this early novel in the wake of theauthor's later coups. For American readers the book is as much a novel as it is a glimpseof his other novels, since the threads Murakami takes up in The Wind-Up Bird Chroniclefirst unravel here.

Not that the book doesn't stand alone.Norwegian Woodis probably Murakami's mostaccessible work, although the plot is both something we've heard a million times beforeand, well, something we haven't. Boy meets girl; girl goes away; boy can't decidewhether to pine or move on. Or, to put it less abstractly, Watanabe meets Naoko whenshe begins dating his best friend in high school. The friend commits suicide suddenly,and the two shattered survivors of the trio are left alone together. One night it happens. Inthe morning, Naoko has a breakdown and retreats to a strange, communal sanitarium,finding solace with an older woman. Watanabe goes to college, where he is cheered by askirt-chasing friend with an alluring, long-suffering girlfriend, only to meet Midori, a girlwho brings with her sexual freedom, an ailing father, and an overall less melodramaticopportunity for romance.

Like your first big love,Norwegian Woodfeels bigger than it is. The novel's '60s settingleftist student protests are gurgling in the backgroundtempts one to place a politicalcredo over our hero's maturation, but the book is less about a revolution than ourtemptation to find one in a novel set in the '60s. The story eludes the grasp of traditionalmeaning, which is really what makes it ring true: You cannot find a grand interpretativearc here, any more than you can in your own stumblings. InNorwegian Wood, Murakamiwarns us that falling into the arms of a longtime friend is not something you can clearlydefine as the awakening of a long-dormant passion or the vicarious revisit of lostinnocence. An older woman is not necessarily a mother figure, any more than a mandying in the hospital is a fading God, or a new romance a cosmic refutation of a previousone. Despite their antimetaphoric value, howeveror, perhaps, because of ittheorbitals of the novel make up a surprising and organic world. "Before you knew it,"Watanabe says, "story A had turned into story B contained in A, and then came C fromsomething in B."


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----------------------------------------------------The men who narrate Haruki Murakami's novels repeatedly claim to be utterly ordinary.They live blameless lives, keep their heads down, indulge moderately in jazz and beer,

hope things will stay the same. And yet something happens: the ordinary man iscatapulted into deranged circumstances. He might be forced to hunt down an evil sheepthat wants to take over the world, or to investigate his wife's spectral disappearance.Norwegian Wood, first published in Japan 13 years ago but only now translated for awestern audience, might therefore puzzle the reader who has grown to love Murakami'shaunting, melancholy surrealism: its action is resolutely realistic. And yet the narrator,Toru Watanabe, is just as baffled by life. At one point he writes: "I have never lied toanyone, and I have taken care over the years not to hurt other people. And yet I findmyself tossed into this labyrinth." There is no moral justice in Murakami's world; there isonly the duty - both epistemological and moral - to try to understand.

This duty also informs his first non-fiction volume, Underground. Murakami becameobsessed with the 1995 Tokyo subway attack, in which Aum cult members released Sarinnerve gas on five separate trains. The book consists largely of edited transcripts ofinterviews conducted with survivors or relatives of victims. "How on earth did thishappen to us?" one woman asks. "That 'How on earth...?' ", Murakami comments, "stuckin my head like a big question mark." No wonder: it is also the cry of pain that fires thedepths of his fiction.

Norwegian Wood is a love story. The Beatles song of the title, heard by the 37-year-oldToru Watanabe, is an aural Proustian madeleine that transports him back to his student

days. Watanabe has started at university in Tokyo the year after his best friend, Kizuki,killed himself. Kizuki's girlfriend Naoko and Watanabe have grown romantically closesince their friend's death, but their love is complicated by Naoko's depression. Naokoenrols at a sanatorium, and the lonely Watanabe meets another woman, the flirtatiouslyvulnerable Midori. Thus is his "labyrinth" woven: a choice between idealised love andeternally sworn loyalty or flesh-and-blood happiness in the present.The first chapter dreamily foreshadows the entire novel. Watanabe and Naoko, in thesaturated colours and hyperreal detail of burned-in memory, are walking in a field, andNaoko playfully relates the local legend of the field well. No one knows where it is, andthere is no encircling wall. You could fall down it at any time, and you would never getout.

Finding oneself down a well, or otherwise underground, is an oddly charged possibility inMurakami. The well can furnish a kind of metaphysical holiday - the narrator ofMurakami's masterpiece to date, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, seeks out a well bottom inorder to "think about reality". Alternatively, as Naoko fears in Norwegian Wood, beingdown a well might mean suffering in despair, being swallowed up by madness,inexorably dying. The horror of the Tokyo subway shares this motif with Murakami's


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fiction: as one survivor tells him: "The fear of going underground in a metal box andsomething bad happening is overpowering."

Norwegian Wood, simply told on the surface, slowly reveals its own subterranean

currents. Chatting to Midori's dying father in hospital, for example, Watanabe mentionsthat he prefers Sophocles to Euripides. The implication is that conflicts will not be solvedby an interfering deus ex machina, but can only unravel in tragic violence. Subtleallusions to Thomas Mann and The Great Gatsby contribute further eddies.

Such is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami's writing that everything hechooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility: a shirt on a washing-line, a stringof paper cut-outs, a butterfly hairslide. Three times in the novel Watanabe reaches out toclutch light: first a sparkling mote of dust, next a firefly disappearing into the night. Thethird time he is strolling in the sanatorium gardens and becomes transfixed by Naoko's litwindow in the distance, "like the final pulse of a soul's dying embers". You cannot retain

the fleeting after-image of a firefly - similarly, perhaps, you cannot keep such embersalight by force of will. Maybe this bird, as John Lennon sang, has flown.

For all its metaphysical gloom, however, Norwegian Wood also flutters with sympatheticcomedy. What on first glance appear to be bathetic lapses into jovial innuendo orirrelevant cookery chat between characters make the point that people in real life do notreact to alarming or tragic situations in consistent or appropriate ways. Underground 'stestimonies reflect the same truth - some survivors are angry, some scared, others calm oreven lighthearted.

------------------------------------------------------

OAIA:

Author David Mazzotta Date July 9, 2002 Media Slashdot.org Linkhttp://books.slashdot.org/books/02/07/09/1438256.shtml?tid=99 The real and surreal clash in post-modern JapanIn A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) the main character and narrator lives a mediocreexistence. He is passionless; seemingly unaffected by his wife's betrayal and subsequentdivorce, and only attracted to his current girlfriend because he finds her ears to be"marvels of creation" that can incite irresistible desire in any man who sees them. This

shallow view of life is further emphasized by the fact that, throughout the book, nocharacters are referred to by proper names.

When the "Rat," a nomadic friend of the narrator, sends him a photograph of some sheepfrom Hokkaido, a chain of events is set in motion. The sheep picture comes to theattention of a shadowy figure simply known as the "Boss" -- a mythically powerfulunderworld kingpin -- who has a dire need to get a hold of one of the sheep in the photo.
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The Boss sends a messenger to the narrator making it clear that unless he finds thatsheep, he will face financial ruin, if not worse.

What follows is a surreal journey from Tokyo to Sapporo and points north, including ahotel that could be right out of a Kubrick film and creature known as the Sheep-Man,who is worthy of David Lynch. In the course of this journey, and in the face ofextraordinary events, our narrator confronts his superficial world view and the affect ithas had on his life.

Set six years later, Dance, Dance, Dance (1994) is murder mystery, but one in which theclues are revealed by chance rather than dogged investigation - often by a seeminglyrandom psychic encounter. Our narrator has resumed a normal life as a freelancecopywriter. He refers to this as "shoveling cultural snow" -- doing the thoughtless andthankless work that needs to be done to clear the path. He is fairly well disengaged from

humanity, spending a lot of time alone doing absolutely nothing. Yet, in the midst of thisanti-social life, he finds that his long missing girlfriend, the one with the amazing ears --is calling to him as if in a dream, and she is weeping.

Once again, a chain of events is set in motion. He travels back to the strange hotel to findit modernized and corporate. He has another encounter with the Sheep-Man who tells himto "keep dancing." In the course of story he encounters, and finds sympathy for, adisaffected adolescent girl from a dysfunctional family, and an old high-schoolacquaintance who has become a famous movie star. Through his relationship with these

characters he solves the mystery of his missing girlfriend, not through directedinvestigation but just by staying engaged with life and society -- by keeping up the"dance."

As a Westerner reading these novels, I was struck by how different the Japan portrayedhere is from the hyper-efficient, sanitized, sexless and safe Japan of common impression.This is late twentieth-century post-modern Japan. References to Western pop culture areincessant. Call girls abound. Characters find themselves entangled in confusing, neuroticrelationships worthy of HBO original programming. And nobody is practicing Kendo.

These books are hard-boiled -- that is to say, they are written in the hard-boiled styledefined in the mid-twentieth century by U.S. mystery writers Raymond Chandler andDashiell Hammet. There is a stark contrast between the blunt, gritty realism of hard-boiled style and the surreal, supernatural events that occur. This causes the stories toseem solidly planted in the real world, despite the occasional bizarre episodes.


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There are certain shortcomings; the camera's eye perspective of the hard-boiled schoollends itself to a bit too much dwelling on the details of setting. This is primarily inevidence at the beginning of A Wild Sheep Chase. And one suspects something is lost inthe translation from the original Japanese. For example, this passage from Dance, Dance,Dance:

"... and if you consider the telephone as an object, it has this truly weird form. Ordinarily,you never notice it, but if you stare at it long enough, the sheer oddity of its form hitshome. The phone either looks like it's dying to say something, or else it's resenting thatit's trapped inside its form. Pure idea vested with a clunky body. That's the telephone."There is a certain vagueness that may not be intentional. One is left with the feeling that"form" doesnt quite convey the same meaning it did in the original language.

Reading Murakami has been described feeling like you've just awakened from a deep

sleep and you arent sure if you're still dreaming. These are fascinating, engrossing booksthat will leave you full of ideas and impressions to dwell on for a long time to come

Author Herbert Mitgang Date October 21, 1989 Media The New York Times Linkhttp://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/21/books/murakami-sheep.html Young and Slangy Mix of the U.S. and Japan

''A Wild Sheep Chase'' by Haruki Murakami is a bold new advance in a category ofinternational fiction that could be called the trans-Pacific novel. Youthful, slangy,

political and allegorical, Mr. Murakami is a writer who seems to be aware of everycurrent American novel and popular song. Yet with its urban setting, yuppie charactersand subtle feeling of mystery, even menace, his novel is clearly rooted in modern Japan.

This isn't the traditional fiction of Kobo Abe (''The Woman in the Dunes''), YukioMishima (''The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea'') or Japan's only Nobellaureate in literature, Yasunari Kawabata (''Snow Country''). Mr. Murakami's style andimagination are closer to that of Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Carver and John Irving. Infact, the 40-year-old author, one of the most popular novelists in Japan, has translated theworks of several American writers, including Irving and Carver. His outlook isinternational; he now lives in Rome.

There isn't a kimono to be found in ''A Wild Sheep Chase.'' Its main characters, men andwomen, wear Levis. They are the children of prosperity, less interested in what Toyota orSony have wrought than in having a good time while searching in jazz bars for self-identity.
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They take comfort in drinking, chain-smoking and casual sex. Listening to theirconversation, they could be right at home on the Berkeley campus in the 1960's. It mayhelp that the novel is racily translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum, anAmerican who grew up in Tokyo and who studied at the University of California.

The unnamed, newly divorced 30-year-old protagonist of ''A Wild Sheep Chase'' hasmoved on, somewhat haphazardly, from college life into advertising and public relations.He and a partner turn out corporate newsletters and display the proper degree of contemptfor their clients - and themselves.

In describing a right-wing magnate simply named the Boss, who has cornered theadvertising business in Tokyo and extended his power into national politics, theprotagonist's partner could pass for an ad man sounding off at the end of the day onMadison Avenue or Fleet Street:

''To hold down advertising is to have nearly the entire publishing and broadcastingindustries under your thumb. There's not a branch of publishing or broadcasting thatdoesn't depend in some way on advertising. It'd be like an aquarium without water. Why,95 percent of the information that reaches you has already been preselected and paid for.''

Their own cynical newsletters, he continues, contribute to corporate concealment: ''Everycompany's got a secret it doesn't want exploded right in the middle of the annualshareholders' meeting. In most cases, they'll listen to the word handed down. In sum, the

Boss sits squarely on top of a trilateral power base of politicians, information servicesand the stock market.''

But Mr. Murakami isn't simply taking a swipe at big business here. As part of hisdeveloping plot, he is setting up the characters of his young people and distancing themfrom the godfatherly Boss and his sleazy lieutenant, who has a degree from StanfordUniversity. As a former war criminal who has escaped trial, possibly with the collusion ofthe American occupation leadership, the Boss seeks something more than to sit on top ofa domineering communications empire. Dying, he wants to gain the spiritual power of alegendary foreign sheep with a star on its back - the only one of its kind in all of Japan-that dwells somewhere in the lonely mountainous snow country.

On the surface, ''A Wild Sheep Chase'' is just that: a mystery story with a long chase. Aphotograph of the wild sheep has appeared accidentally in a newsletter; like DashiellHammett's Maltese falcon, the singular sheep is pursued by clashing interests. Is thesheep a symbol of something beyond the reach of an ordinary man, a devilish temptation?Does this wild sheep represent heroic morality or a Nietzschean superpower? Nietzsche is


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mentioned in the novel; so is the obsessive quest for Moby-Dick. The answer, if any, isleft to the reader's perception.

Along the chase route, we meet interesting characters. One is called the Sheep Professor,another the Rat, a rather nice fellow despite his name. The most appealing is the

protagonist's girlfriend, who is plain-looking except for one feature that arouses him - andreveals the author's offbeat sense of humor and style. Here is how she is described, withechoes of the hard-boiled California school of detection:

''She was 21, with an attractive slender body and a pair of the most bewitching, perfectlyformed ears. She was a part-time proofreader for a small publishing house, a commercialmodel specializing in ear shots and a call girl in a discreet intimate-friends-only club.Which of the three she considered her main occupation, I had no idea. Neither did she.''

What makes ''A Wild Sheep Chase'' so appealing is the author's ability to strike commonchords between the modern Japanese and American middle classes, especially the

younger generation, and to do so in stylish, swinging language. Mr. Murakami's novel isa welcome debut by a talented writer who should be discovered by readers on this end ofthe Pacific.

Haruki Murakami and the Art of the Day

By Kevin Hartnett posted at 6:16 am on May 24, 2010 11

1.

One of the most pleasant surprises Ive had in the past couple years involves three

encounters with the work ofHaruki Murakami. In isolation, I would not haveconsidered any one of them to have been revelatory but all together they comprised aunique way of getting to know an author and left me with several ideas that have affectedthe way I think about my day-to-day life.

I was introduced to Murakami when The New Yorkerpublished an essay called TheRunning Novelist that was an excerpt from his forthcoming memoirWhat I Talk AboutWhen I Talk About Running. The piece appeared in the late spring, at the time of the yearwhen I am traditionally most enthusiastic about running, and it was fronted by anillustration of Murakami in his marathon gear that caught my eye.

The essay described how when he was thirty Murakami remade himself from a jazz clubowner into a novelist. The process did not happen all at once. He wrote his first novel inthe predawn hours after hed finished tallying receipts and washing down the bar. Hiswriting sessions sometimes lasted only half an hour, at which point hed fall asleep.Even under those conditions Murakami was able to mine the talent that would eventuallymake him famous. He submitted his manuscript, later titledHear the Wind Sing, to acontest for aspiring novelists. Some months later he found out hed won.
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Over the next two years Murakami wrote two more novels in this same way (Pinball,1973 andA Wild Sheep Chase) but eventually he realized there were limits to what hecould accomplish so long as writing remained a secondary activity in his life. When hewas thirty-two Murakami sold his jazz club and with his wife moved to Narashino, a ruraltown fifteen miles outside of Tokyo. There he set about reordering his life. He began

waking up around the time hed formerly gone to bed and went to sleep when the sunset. He gave up alcohol and meat, cut down on rice, and decided that from then on wedtry to see only the people we wanted to see, and, as much as possible, get by withoutseeing those we didnt. He would write in the morning, do errands in the afternoon, andread at night. He started running every day.

What appealed to me most about Murakamis essay was the way it joined something verybig, like writing a novel, with something very small, like what time each day to go tobed. I was twenty-seven at the time and still very much befuddled by the large-scaleproject of adult life. Murakamis essay was not a panacea, but it did sketch a type of paththat I thought I might be capable of following. While I may not have known exactly what

I wanted from the next fifty years, with a little reflection I could parse the minordecisions in my dayswhat to eat, who to see, how to spend the last hour before bed. Ihoped, maybe against odds, that the answers to larger questions would resolve themselvesout of the gradual buildup of small but deliberate choices.

2.

My next encounter with Murakami took place a year laterin August 2009when Ifinally got around to reading his memoir. What I Talk About When I Talk About Runningis a short book (I read it in a single night) that is framed by Murakamis preparation forthe 2005 New York Marathon and gathers together his reflections on his more than thirtyyears as a writer and a runner.

The prose in the memoir is spare even by Murakami standards. Not all reviewers weretaken with this approachone said of the book, Its not bad, but its sort of ordinary anddoesnt amount to muchbut I thought the straightforward writing allowed What I TalkAboutto feel notably honest. Running is a simple pursuit and Murakami presents himselfas an unadorned man and it made sense to me that the style of the book would reflectthose facts.

There is one particular piece from What I Talk Aboutthat has stayed with me in the tenmonths since I finished reading the book. It is Murakami talking about the initial stagesof training for a marathon:

To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The problem is getting theflywheel to spin at a set speedand to get to that point takes as much concentration andeffort as you can manage.
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In the same way that people pace a marathon by thinking about how fast they want to runeach mile, I think Murakami paces his life by thinking about what actions, in whatquantity, and in what order he wants to be part of his daily routine.

Its a seductive idea once you think about itand Id say Ive thought about it almost

every day since reading What I Talk About. [G]etting the flywheel to spin at a setspeed applies to running, of course, and to writing, but also to endeavors like being niceor raising a child that are less amenable to being broken down into unit measurements.Its definitely not an approach for everyone. In the same way that a lot of people finddistance running to be tedious, the routine and austerity of Murakamis days might seemto lack an essential zest. But for anyone who has a hard time seeing how today fits withthe rest of his life, I think this way of looking at things makes a lot of sense.

3.

After reading Murakamis memoir, I was eager to try his fictionI wanted to see whattypes of stories grew out of the mind of the deliberate, self-aware runner Id been

introduced to in What I Talk About. In February I went to the branch of the PhiladelphiaFree Library near my apartment and scanned the shelves until I found Murakamis name.The only book the library had in at that time wasKafka on the Shore.

It does not take much imagination to figure that Kafka and What I Talk Aboutwerewritten by the same person. The protagonists in the two books are both best picturedalone, on a journey to a place they have not yet identified. Music features prominently inboth stories, and while What I Talk Aboutis hardly sensual, I thought that the wayMurakami described the bounce of a coeds ponytail as she ran past him along theCharles River foreshadowed the sexuality inKafka. Both books are also distinguishedfor the way that they engage primary emotions that other writers might consider too

clich to confront head on.

Just as with What I Talk About, there is a single passage fromKafka that has stayed withsince I finished the book. It is Kafka speaking to a woman named Miss Saeki who he isin love with, and it was here that the connection between Murakami the memoirist andMurakami the novelist was most clear to me. Kafka says:

The strength Im looking for isnt the kind where you win or lose. Im not after a wallthatll repel power coming from outside. What I want is the kind of strength to be able toabsorb that outside power, to stand up to it. The strength to quietly endure thingsunfairness, misfortune, sadness, mistakes, misunderstandings.

Here I think Kafka is giving voice to the reasons why Murakami runs and tries to be sopurposeful about his days. It is easy, in the face of the hard moments that feature in anylife, to come unmoored from the ways of thinking, feeling and acting wed otherwisewant for ourselves. But there are also ways to fight back, and I think this is whatMurakamiand anyone elsestands to gain from careful attention to the shape of theday. As he put it in hisNew Yorkeressay, [L]ife is basically unfair. But, even in asituation thats unfair, I think its possible to seek out a kind of fairness.
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Takes: General Petraeus

August 29, 2011

Murakami and Individualism

Posted byJon Michaud
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This week, The New Yorkerpublishes Town of Cats, an excerpt from the new novel,IQ84, by Haruki Murakami. Murakamis fiction has appeared regularly in magazinesince 1990, when his first short story, TV People, was published. Town of Cats isabout the relationship between Tengo, a man in his thirties, and his father, who issuffering from dementia and is a patient at a sanatorium. In aQ. & A. with Deborah

Treisman, Murakami says of his new book:

Just as the events of the novel are strongly influenced by things that happened before itstarted, Tengo is strongly influenced by several aspects of his history that happenedbefore he was born. Like DNA, memory is both individual and collective. One of thenovels themes is the deliberate blurring of the boundary line between the individual andthe collective, the conscious and the unconscious.

The nature of the boundary line between the individual and the collective has been arecurring concern for Murakami, almost from the outset of his career. In a Profile of thenovelist published in our pages in 1996, Ian Buruma discussed the young Murakamis

attraction to Western popular culture:

Murakamis fascination with the West, with American metaphors and references, startedearly. He grew up as the only child of a high-school teacher in an unremarkable modernsuburb near Kobe. There was nothing traditional about his childhood except theconformism of Japanese society, which he hated: the school uniforms, the petty rules, thegroup-mindedness, the submission of individual desires to collective familial duties. Hisescape from this social claustrophobia was to dream of America. In his words, he triedto create a foreign country in my heart.

And, indeed, Murakami left Japan for a time and lived in Europe and the United States.

Yet, the result of this travel was unexpected: Its strange, but the farther I got away fromJapan, the more I felt tied to it, he told Buruma.

Listening to Jim Morrison in the United States is not the same as listening to him inJapan. The Western metaphors, having lost their mystery, became redundant. I no longerneeded the props. He then decided that, as a Japanese writer, he should be more directlyinvolved with Japaneven, in his words, take political responsibility. This was anextraordinary statement. I asked him what he meant. The most important thing, heanswered, is to face our history, and that means the history of the war.

The wars presence in the individual and collective Japanese DNA has been a recurring

theme in Murakamis fiction ever since and it crops up in Town of Cats. Tengosfather, we are told, had been part of a homesteaders group in Manchuria in the nineteen-thirties, before escaping back to Japan ahead of the Soviet invasion.

The assertion of individualism, so prevalent in Murakamis work, is also evident in theway he has chosen to live his life. As he describes in his 2008 essay, The RunningNovelist, before becoming a writer, he worked not as a salaryman in a large corporation,but for himself, as the owner of a small jazz club in Tokyo. Murakami recalls that most of
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his friends predicted that the club would fail. Well, their predictions were totally off, hewrote. At the age of thirty-three, once more against the advice of friends, he sold the cluband became a novelist. In the essay, he recalls how this decision changed his life:

Once I began my life as a novelist, my wife and I decided from then on wed try to see

only the people we wanted to see, and, as much as possible, get by without seeing thosewe didnt. We felt that, for a time at least, we could allow ourselves this modestindulgence.

In my new, simple, regular life, I got up before 5 A.M. and went to bed before 10 P.M.Different people are at their best at different times of day, but Im definitely a morningperson. Thats when I can focus. Afterward, I work out or do errands that dont takemuch concentration. At the end of the day, I relax, read, or listen to music. Thanks to thispattern, Ive been able to work efficiently now for twenty-seven years. Its a pattern,though, that doesnt allow for much of a night life, and sometimes this makesrelationships with other people problematic. People are offended when you repeatedly

turn down their invitations. But, at that point, I felt that the indispensable relationship Ishould build in my life was not with a specific person but with an unspecified number ofreaders. My readers would welcome whatever lifestyle I chose, as long as I made surethat each new work was an improvement over the last. And shouldnt that be my dutyand my top priorityas a novelist? I dont see my readers faces, so in a sense myrelationship with them is a conceptual one, but Ive consistently considered it the mostimportant thing in my life.

In other words, you cant please everybody.

Representations of Reality in Haruki

Murakami's Fiction

By

Wendy Jones Nakanishi

Professor of English Literature

Shikoku Gakuin University

e-mail the Author
http://www.sg-u.ac.jp/mailto:[email protected]://www.sg-u.ac.jp/mailto:[email protected]


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About the Author

Seats. Michael (2006)Murakami Haruki: TheSimulacrum in Contemporary Japanese Culture,Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books,Hardback, ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-0785-0, xviii and 365

pages.

At the outset of his challenging and provocative study, Michael Seats alludes to the so-called 'Murakami Phenomenon': a rubric attached to the astounding success of theJapanese writer and translator whose prolific and diverse output enjoys great popularitynot only in Japan but also in Europe, America and East Asia, with his recent novel,Kafkaon the Shore, appearing on the best-seller lists in China, Australia, and the United States.The global appeal of Murakami's work is matched by critical acclaim. Murakami, whowas born in Kyoto in 1949, was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2006 and is tipped as alikely contender for the Nobel Prize.

The professed aim of Seats's study is to demonstrate how selected texts of Murakami'soeuvre eutilize the structure of the simulacrum to develop a complex critique ofcontemporary Japanese culture' (p. 1). The works Seats chooses for this analysis areMurakami's two fictional trilogies: the first, consisting ofHear the Wind Sing,Pinball,1973, andA Wild Sheep Chase, known as the 'Trilogy of the Rat' (1979-82) and thesecond, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1992-5). The first trilogy exhibits characteristicsof postmodern fiction with its employment of parody, pastiche, metafiction, and allegorywhile the second trilogy, which deals in part with the difficult topic of war crimes inManchuria, uses the structure of the simulacrum, according to Seats, 'to problematize thedistinction between the discourses of "fiction" and "history" via the aesthetic modalitiesof the sublime' (p. xiii).

Seats is at pains to explain the notion of the simulacrum from a sociological,philosophical, and historical perspective. He draws heavily upon the work of the Frenchcultural theorist and political commentator Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), who advancedthe idea that Western society has undergone a process of evolving ideas of signification,from the era of the original to that of the counterfeit, from the era of the produced,mechanical copy to the current era whereby the copy has replaced the original.

Seats argues, however, that Murakami's deployment of the figure of the simulacrumdiffers in important ways from Baudrillard's negative depiction of it as a loss ofauthenticity in the Platonic sense of a 'copy of a copy'. He believes that Murakami

exploits the potentially positive aspect of the simulacrum to celebrate a liberating notionof difference for its own sake that resembles the approach adopted by Nietzsche andDeleuze.

Seats describes Murakami as important as a representative of the world's most'informationalized' and 'mediatized' (p. ix) society: Japan. Murakami's fictionalrepresentation of the real may, Seats believes, offer a more comprehensive survey ofcontemporary phenomena than history or philosophy allow. While Murakami has
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attracted criticism from detractors including even such compatriots as Kenzaburo Oe andKazuo Ishiguro, who complain of shallowness they perceive in his work, Seats believesthat there are good reasons why Murakami has emerged as one of the most significantliterary figures in Japan, whose works have been widely translated and are read in at leastthirty-five countries. In Seats's opinion, Murakami, who has his own home-page on the

internet, who can understand and manipulate modern technology, is a writer whosemodernity is reflected in his 'digital' capabilities (p. 33). Murakami's works and practicesreflect current media and entertainment technologies.

Despite Murakami's global appeal, Seats places the author in a particularly Japanesecontext, an approach taken by Murakami himself, who once remarked that he could neverforget that he was a Japanese writer who wrote in Japanese (p. 65). But Murakami is asubversive Japanese literary figure. A critic named Stephen Snyder, cited in Seats's study,goes so far as to claim that Murakami's intention was both to deconstruct and reinvent themost popular Japanese prosegenre, the 'I' novel. Other critics argue that Murakami'searlier works representfukei or depictions of scene or landscape rather than stories. There

are also disagreements on whether Murakami can be characterized as a modern or apostmodern writer. But the issue of Japanese modernity is itself a vexed question, withSeats approvingly quoting a critic named Ivy who observes that 'the very search to findauthentic survivals of pre-modern, pre-Western Japanese authenticity is inescapably amodern endeavor, essentially enfolded within the historical condition that it would seekto escape' (p. 56).

Seats outlines fundamental differences between Japanese and western novels. Whereasthe latter are driven by recognized conventions by action and plot, by characters,settings and themes Seats characterizes Japanese writings as remarkable for their'orality' (p. 71), for the centrality of a speaking subject in the typical shsetsu. He

comments on the unfairness of Japanese novels being judged by western standards,arguing that they should be regarded as a 'hybrid literary form' (p. 68) deriving fromJapan's ancient tradition of long prose fiction. Japanese postmodernism is the result of theconfrontation of traditional values with western culture, transcending both to achieve aunique synthesis that represents contemporary Japanese culture.

Murakami is seen as interrogating and shaking the foundation of Japanese literature inwriting which invites the reader to become a character in the metafiction of the texts, notonly liberating him from the tyranny of the 'I' novel's conventional narrator andchallenging the subjective notion of the self, but also leading him to question the notionsof truth, meaning and identity which traditionally have been enshrined in literary works.Seats believes that Murakami's works represent an exciting challenge to establishedtenets of Japanese literature and open up new areas of possibility for the representation ofexperience in writing.

Murakami's work is often described as easily accessible but profoundly complex. WhileSeats's study recognizes and expounds upon that complexity, his style hampers easyunderstanding of his observations. Murakami writes in free and fluid prose that oftenborders on the colloquial, but Seats's analysis is densely-argued and heavily-footnoted,


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depending upon familiarity with the philosophical propositions it presents to explainMurakami's achievement. Seats relies heavily on parenthetical asides. He seems unable towrite with simple lucidity. But it is not necessary to employ difficult language to write ofdifficult things. One could be tempted to echo the complaint made by the protagonist ofThe Wind-up Bird Chronicle of his brother-in-law's scholarly text, that it was so difficult,

so full of technical terminology, as to be nearly incomprehensible.

Too, Seats's book has not been edited with the care it deserves. The integrity of this workof distinguished scholarship is undermined by a disturbing number of spelling andgrammatical mistakes and by typographical errors.

It is unfortunate that Seats's ponderous style and the complicated organization of hisstudy can obfuscate arguments that are subtle and complex. In general, Seats isauthoritative and convincing, but sometimes it feels as though even he has lost his way.His difficult style can lend itself to apparent inconsistencies.

Seats quotes Matthew Strecher, author of a critical study of Murakami's novels publishedin 2002, whose professed goal was to produce a work 'sophisticated enough to do justiceto the complexities of Murakami's fictional world' but which would be presented at alevel accessible to the general reader (p. 4). It is unclear whether Seats shared Strecher'sgoals, but his own book manifestly accomplishes the former while failing to achieve thelatter aim.

Documents

I Love Murakami