Profiles in Literature: Haruki Murakami

Greetings, literature-loving Dharmenians!  Last week we let ourselves be absorbed into the beautiful incomprehensibility of Job, and nearly every commenter had a different take on that crotchety Old Testament god.  This week we’ll zip ahead thousands of years to a writer who’s still churning out novels today – how’s that for a flash forward?

Here’s a situation to consider: it’s the middle of the night in an abandoned temple in the middle of metropolitan Japan, and Colonel Sanders (yes, that Colonel Sanders) is telling you that the fate of the world relies on your flipping over a rock.  There’s nothing underneath the rock, and nothing seems to happen when you move it, but the man from the chicken bucket seems awfully insistent.  What do you do?

Welcome to the wonderful, weird, and occasionally horrifying world of Japan’s most (internationally) popular novelist.

Western critics searching for parallels have variously likened him to Raymond Carver, Raymond Chandler, Arthur C. Clarke, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Pynchon — a roster so ill assorted as to suggest that Murakami may in fact be an original.

— Jaimie James, New York Times book review

Haruki Murakami grew up in Kobe just a few years after the end of World War II, a war so catastrophic for the Japanese that it echoes through his works as the source of a deep, metaphysical rift.  Though raised in a fractured post-war environment, in his fiction Murakami is the modern citizen of the world, equally comfortable with British rock, American baseball, and Czech Jewish short story writers.  He writes fiction and nonfiction, science fiction and fantasy, with touches of history, philosophy, and art all coming together in an elaborate “three-dimensional puzzle” (see below). 

On the surface, this sounds like the stuff of ironic postmodernism, but as Laura Miller of the New York Times wrote, it nonetheless feels genuine: “Murakami is like a magician who explains what he’s doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers.”

What kind of trick does he perform, exactly?  Typically Murakami is labeled a surrealist or a magic realist, but I’m not sure either definition fits.  Surrealism is about the suspension of expected associations and the dominance of dream-logic, but it operates within a self-contained system (that is, Magritte’s raining men in bowlers operates just fine within the context of the painting).  At its best, surrealism causes a deep tremble of horror at the truly unfamiliar.  Magic realism, meanwhile, folds unexpected phenomena into everyday reality, in fact creating an new everyday reality that includes wonders like Garcia Marquez’ old man with enormous wings. 

What Murakami typically does is simpler on the surface, but rich in its consequences: in all the novels I’ll be discussing, he writes about two separate realities – the one we live in and expect, and another whose rules are beyond our comprehension – and the surreal/magic effects result when these two worlds unexpectedly cross. 

For example, a walking whiskey ad with a penchant for killing kittens doesn’t belong in this reality, and his appearance in a Murakami novel signals one such intersection of realities.  Problem is, a lot of damage can occur when we’re forced to interact with a reality beyond our comprehension.  The dangers in Murakami’s world are doubled by their inscrutable nature: how can we possibly fight something we can’t even understand?  What good is a gun in a Kafka novel?

On Being Japanese, and Pop Music

Murakami certainly has his critics, especially among his compatriots.  His books are noticeably absent much reference to Japanese culture, either of the past or contemporary, while overflowing with references to Western authors, musicians, and films (even his language sounds distinctly non-Japanese literary style).  His detractors see this as a defect, writing for foreign readers while failing to explore his own world.

In a way, this criticism isn’t surprising.  Though international pop culture has become legitimized for ‘serious’ literature thanks to postmodernism, ‘serious’ writers tend to use pop culture for the purposes of parody, or to show what’s wrong with the modern world.  Home and tradition tend to be valued more highly – popular culture is the opium of weak minds. 

Refreshingly, Murakami lets his characters enjoy their pop music, their junk food, and their Hollywood movies without fear of retaliation.  This has led to a fierce debate over whether he’s ‘Japanese enough‘, but the book-buying public in Japan seems to have embraced him without reservation.

There are implications, though: what does it mean for the international community to have adopted Japan’s “least Japanese” writer as the nation’s literary representative?  We’ll discuss this more fully down the road when I do a segment on the Canon and the consequences of having a canonical literature, but for right now we’ll let the question percolate while we get to the meaty of the essay: Murakami’s novels.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

You are caught between all that was and all that must be.  You feel lost.  Mark my words: as soon as the bones mend, you will forget about the fracture.

1985’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland was among Murakami’s first successes, and remains my favorite of his novels despite a somewhat rambling middle (Besides that, it has the greatest title ever, and chapter headings like “Whiskey, Torture, Turgenev” – a great band name if it isn’t taken already.)

The structure of the novel takes some getting used to, at least at first.  Murakami develops a parallel narrative, two stories that seem to have nothing whatsoever in common.  The first takes place in Japan of the near future, a thriller about government secrets and corporate conspiracies, all centering on a hapless narrator who doesn’t understand why he’s so valuable to both.  His fight for survival will take him through the sewers of Tokyo, pit him against violent hatchet-men, and hook him up with the unlikeliest of allies.

Then chapter two begins, and we’re in a medieval-feeling village filled with quiet shadows and dying unicorns.  How’s that for narrative whiplash?  The narrator of part two is just as lost as we are, an amnesiac who can’t figure out how he’s arrived or what role he’s supposed to play.  But one thing is for sure: he doesn’t have much time.

Part of the novel’s fun is figuring out how the two pieces fit together, and how they lead each other to an ending that’s as beautiful as it is inevitable.  Fortunately the narrator of the first story inadvertently gives us a metaphor for reading the book, hidden in a money-counting game he plays to keep his mind occupied:

What I do is thrust my hands simultaneously into both pockets, the right hand tallying the hundreds and five-hundreds in tandem with the left hand adding up the fifties and tens.
  It’s hard for those who’ve never attempted the procedure to grasp what it is to calculate this way, and admittedly it is tricky at first.  The right brain and the left brain each keep separate tabs,  which are then brought together like two halves of a split watermelon.  No easy task until you get the hang of it.  (p. 3)

The relationship between the two stories doesn’t take long to figure out, but the interest lies not in the what but in the how and why.  Along the way lie subterranean monsters, data shuffling, dream readers, and Bob Dylan. 

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

If something came out of the deal, it couldn’t make things any worse us than they already were, I thought.  But I couldn’t have been more wrong.  Hell has no true bottom.

1992-5’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is widely considered Murakami’s masterpiece, for a number of reasons: it’s his longest work (critics love long books), it’s got all the most important markers of his fiction, and it was his first work to deal extensively with the collective trauma of World War II.  If nothing else, it earned him the grudging respect of his rival and critic, Nobel Prize-winning author Oe Kenzaburo.

I couldn’t possibly distill the rambling, complex plot in any coherent way.  This is the kind of book where characters appear and disappear, history folds back on itself, and we’re saddled with a narrator as lost and confused as we are.  In some ways this is a comfort, especially when the third book disintegrates into David Lynch-style narrative threads – we at least have our trustworthy guide, and we’re rooting for him to come out okay.

The book opens with a mystery of a seemingly minor sort: Toru Okada (the narrator) and his wife Kumiko have lost their cat.  Soon people will go missing as well, and the detective-like mystery extends to a rising bureaucrat with sinister plans,  and an elderly World War II veteran still haunted by the atrocities he witnessed – and failed to stop – two generations before:

Everything was intertwined, with the complexity of a three-dimensional puzzle – a puzzle in which truth was not necessarily fact and fact not necessarily truth. (p. 525)

One area where fact and truth collide most uncomfortably are in the World War II narrative, which involves the kinds of atrocities even documentaries about the war avoid showing too closely.  Just as individual trauma has the capacity to create a split personality in the victim, so a massive world trauma has the capacity to create a rift in reality as we know it. 

Because of this (but don’t look for anything like coherent causality: we’re talking about other realities here!), the people of the present are faced with horrors of their own – some real, some possibly imagined?  There’s an image at the end of Book 2 that is so viscerally terrifying that I’ll not soon get it out of my head.  It is a great book.

Kafka on the Shore

There are a lot of things that aren’t your fault.  Or mine, either.  Not the fault of prophecies, or curses, or DNA, or absurdity.  Not the fault of Structuralism or the Third Industrial Revolution.  We all die and disappear, but that’s because the mechanism of the world itself is built on destruction and loss.  Our lives are just shadows of that guiding principle.

Like many readers, I came to Murakami through the recent popularity of Kafka, one of his latest and most successful novels.  In many ways Kafka is the distillation of everything that made Wind-Up Bird great, this time in a shorter and more efficient novel.

For the second time Murakami uses two seemingly unrelated narratives, although this time the differences between them are less jarring.  In one, a teenage boy runs away from home to find a new future for himself, eventually drawn to a library in the seaside town of Takamatsu.  In the other, a mentally slow old man in Tokyo talks to cats (and understands them back!) and soon finds himself taking a journey of his own.  Interspersed among the early chapters are fragments from a U.S. military investigation into a mysterious event that left a group of children unconscious during a field trip into the local hills. 

Though the two main plots seem innocent enough at first, we know from the very beginning that something terrible is lurking around the corner.  As the teenager’s (imaginary?) friend warns him,

You really will have to make it through [a] violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm.  No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades.  (p. 5)

One of the markers of Murakami’s books is that his mysteries tend to compound rather than resolve.  Often characters or events take the heft of a symbol, but a symbol that is never explained for the reader (or used in a clearly explicable way).  This can be frustrating if you’re the type of reader who likes everything neatly tied by the end, but for those of us who don’t mind losing ourselves in the open-ended nature of his best novels, Murakami has given us a truly unique playground for the imagination.

There are so many directions we can go when discussing Murakami’s common themes – the way he displaces sexuality into decidedly unnatural situations, or the relationship between his strong, colorful heroines and his weak, passive heroes – but I’ll leave things here.  Some authors are better explored and interpreted on one’s own, and there are fewer richer experiences in contemporary literature than a Murakami novel.

Links:

– Exorcising Ghosts, an excellent compendium of Murakami resources online
– www.murakami.ch, an extensive collection of articles and information
– Murakami’s site at Random House (Don’t miss the roundtable discussion with Murakami’s translators!)
– Haruki Murakami at Kirjasto
– Very cool (but kinda pointless) 360 photo of Murakami accepting the Kafka award in Prague
– Interviews with the Author

All excerpts from Murakami’s works are from the Vintage International editions (a division of Random House): Hard-Boiled Wonderland, translated by Alfred Birnbaum, Wind-Up Bird, translated by Jay Rubin, and Kafka, translated by Philip Gabriel.  All images from Wikimedia commons, linked to their original sources.

Thank you for reading!