And by “Haruki Murakami” I use the name metonymically to mean “the body of writing produced by Haruki Murakami”; I’m sure that the man, Haruki Murakami, is a fine person and all, entirely worthy of my respect and admiration. I just don’t like his writing. I wouldn’t bother to mention Murakami’s writing if it weren’t for a dream I had. I think the dream was prompted by the fact that, just before I dozed off, I’d been reading an article about how bookmakers in London are laying odds that Murakami will be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. “Hmm, that’s interesting,” I thought to myself and then I fell asleep.
In my dream, I was visited by a Japanese woman barely out of her teens. She had perfect skin and perfect hair and she gave me a blow job. When I woke up, I realized I’d had a wet dream. “Oh great,” I said to myself. “Now I have to do the laundry.”
“That was no dream,” said the woman sitting in the chair across from me.
“Whoa!” I said. “What are you doing here?”
The woman said her name was Creta Kano. The blow job was not a dream, but was as real as, say, the chair you’re sitting on. She had a supernatural ability to get inside other people’s minds and give them mental blow jobs.
“Wait a sec’,” I said. “Aren’t you that character from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle?”
“That’s right,” she said. “Haruki Murakami created me.”
“But why did you do this? And why to me?”
“Let me explain,” she said. And she proceeded to explain in as long-winded and as tedious a fashion as she knew how. “You see,” she explained redundantly, “I’ve been sent into your brain to punish you.”
“But a blow job? How’s that punishment?”
“Well,” she said, “as Murakami’s writing demonstrates, all good things can be made to suck if one really works at it. But back to my explanation. You see, a while back, you wrote a piece about Murakami’s novel, 1Q84, in which you described it as quote a complete waste of brain cells unquote. We feel your description was unfair. That’s why we have entered your brain in the form of a character from another of his novels. We will sow the seeds of doubt into your occipital lobe where they will fester, driving you to desperate acts, like bashing in someone’s head with a baseball bat while lost in a labyrinthine hotel in an alternate universe.”
“I admit, I’m prone to hyperbole,” I said, but when I looked up, the young Japanese woman with perfect skin and perfect hair was gone.
The woman’s words haunted me like a ghost in an empty cursed house. I ate a plate of spaghetti while listening to Rossini, then slipping into the back alley, I snuck into the yard of a neighbouring house and climbed down a dry well (which really is a mysterious portal) and in the darkness there I thought about what she had said to me. Really, 1Q84 isn’t a complete waste of brain cells; I only said that because it was a catchy title for a blog post and would attract attention–which it did. What I discovered from that attention is that opinion about the merits of Murakami’s work is polarized. He has fiercely loyal fans. And he has other would-be readers who lose patience and discard his books without finishing them. I suspect that my hyperbole comes from the fact that, even a year and a half ago, when I wrote my piece on 1Q84, Murakami was being touted as a heavy-weight contender for the Nobel Prize in literature. Murakami is a good writer. He is particularly strong when it comes to spinning out engaging plots and when it comes to controlling the pace at which they unfold. He delivers it all in a clean, highly stylized prose that critics have variously described as hip or cyber-punk or magic realism or a blend of all three. The problem is that when critics tout him as a Nobel contender, then I expect more than simply a “good writer”. When a global arbiter of taste and legitimator of literary quality is poised to hoist Murakami onto a pedestal with the likes of William Faulkner, Albert Camus, and Yasunari Kawabata, then ordinary readers like you and me are allowed to take a closer look at the writing. Those are the rules.
Those were some of the thoughts I had while sitting at the bottom of the dry well, tracing a finger through the dirt. I was getting thirsty and didn’t know what time it was. I remembered what the girl, Creta Kano, had said to me about how she was going to sow seeds of doubt in my brain. She didn’t say anything about more blow jobs; just doubt. Shit, I thought to myself, I could end up being known as the guy who called a Nobel laureate’s biggest work a complete waste of brain cells. Was there something I had missed? Some of the comments on that post suggested that maybe I didn’t understand modern Japanese culture, that I didn’t get the sensibility Murakami captures in his work. I remembered how, once, I woke up in the middle of the night and rolled over to face my wife, Tamiko, and asked what she thought. She reminded me that I love the novels of Yukio Mishima, one of Murakami’s countrymen and also a Nobel contender. True enough, but liking Mishima isn’t exactly the same thing as being in tune with contemporary Japanese culture. One of the reasons Mishima committed seppuku in 1970 was that he was a cultural conservative and believed that Japan had abandoned her traditional values. He would have been appalled at the ascendancy of Murakami’s star, what with his love of Western pop culture references, his insistence that his characters all wear Parisian couture, and his abandonment of that quintessentially Japanese literary measure: delicacy.
When I woke up in the morning, I found that Tamiko, whose name sounds a bit like Kumiko (the wife in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), had vanished. You see, her brother is this alpha male type named Noboru Wataya, who aggressively seeks financial and political power and regards me as weak and directionless. He has confronted me and says that if I want to figure out if Murakami is Nobel-worthy, I have to stop asking my wife what she thinks and figure things out for myself. He’s made her disappear while I sort out my problems. In her absence, a smattering of characters offer hints to help me solve the mystery. First there’s the teenaged girl, May Kasahara, who’s dropped out of high school so she can spend all her time tanning herself and working for a wig manufacturer. Next there’s the Lieutenant Miyama, a veteran of Japan’s occupation of Outer Mongolia, who tells a harrowing tale of wartime survival that sees him leaping at gunpoint into a well. Wells are important. Miyama is doubly interesting for the fact that he’s a better story-teller than his own author. (How is that even possible?) Finally, there’s the woman who goes by the name of Nutmeg (her son is Cinnamon) who shares another harrowing wartime tale: her father was a veterinarian in Manchuria who was ordered by the Japanese army to kill all the dangerous animals in the local zoo. He bore a mark on his cheek that resembles the mark on my cheek and it gives me special healing powers. Holy shit this is getting complicated. Nevertheless, here are some things that these characters reveal to me in my quest to solve the mystery:
Sex
In the 1600 pages of Murakami that I’ve read so far (1Q84 + The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), I have read nothing of sex (and there is a lot of it) that qualifies as anything other than adolescent masturbation fantasy sex. Don’t believe me? See for yourself. After having a wet dream fantasy involving a woman named Creta Kano, Toru Okada discovers that the real Creta Kano knows about the dream, and so we end up with this exchange:
“You had relations with me?”
“Yes,” she said. “The first time I only used my mouth, but the second time we had relations. In the same room both times. You remember, of course? We had so little time on the first occasion, we had to hurry. There was more time to spare on the second occasion.” It was impossible for me to reply to her.
…
“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.”
“What’s the point of doing something like that?”
“To know,” she said. “To know more-and more deeply.” I released a sigh. This was crazy. But she had been describing the scene of my dream with incredible accuracy. Running my finger around my mouth, I stared at the two bracelets on her left wrist.
“Maybe I’m not very smart,” I said, my voice dry, “but I really can’t claim to have understood everything you’ve been telling me.”
…
“You should have no sense of guilt about having had relations with me,” said Creta Kano. “You see, Mr. Okada, I am a prostitute. I used to be a prostitute of the flesh, but now I am a prostitute of the mind. Things pass through me.”
Is it worth pointing out that books can function in the same way if you let them?
Money
To the extent that Murakami writes in the style of magical realism, perhaps the most magical feature of his writing is the way in which money appears to those who need it and wish hard enough for it. Rich benefactresses lurk in the background waiting for excuses to drop cash into the pockets of hapless (but otherwise deserving) characters. It reminds me (and not in a good way) of a piece on Cornel West that Chris Hedges wrote the other day in Truthdig where he tears a strip off Obama for (mis)appropriating the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. Obama’s “message to the black underclass in the midst of the corporate rape of the nation is drawn verbatim from the Booker T. Washington playbook. He tells them to work harder—as if anyone works harder than the working poor in this country—and obey the law.” In Murakami’s moral universe, the big lie isn’t work, but hope. If only you hope hard enough, then you’ll get what you want. The puzzle here is: who perpetrates the big lie? Murakami? Or his characters? For the time being, I reserve judgment, but I can’t defer my judgment indefinitely because hanging on it is the bigger question of whether Murakami’s novels exhibit/advocate/demand anything resembling a moral centre.
Knowledge
Consciously or not, every writer subscribes to an epistemology. This must be the case because writing, by its very nature, is an act of revelation. Writers reveal not only what they know, but also how they know, and deeper still, the very conditions on which anything can be known. At the heart of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a mystery: what happened to Kumiko? We accompany Toru Okada on his quest for an answer. In this respect, Murakami makes explicit the fact that his novel is engaged with epistemological concerns. But in case you had any doubts, he offers little tidbits like this:
That night, in our darkened bedroom, I lay beside Kumiko, staring at the ceiling and asking myself just how much I really knew about this woman.
And this:
These people are, finally, separate human beings, with whom I have no connection. They were something other, something of which he had no true knowledge, something that existed in a place far away …
But Murakami takes explicitness a step further, exhibiting hostility towards obfuscation and subtlety:
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.”
Although this thought comes from a character, it is of a piece with the rest of the novel which is littered with explanatory passages.
This “elements of the body” business was obviously a consistent theme of hers.
Water was her main motif.
[T]hese cars sparkled with almost painful intensity, like some kind of symbols.
Although in form and shape the thing before her could have been nothing but a submarine, it looked instead like some kind of symbolic sign-or an incomprehensible metaphor.
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.
Even the novel’s principal symbol, the wind-up bird, comes with an explanation:
The cry of this bird was audible only to certain special people, who were guided by it toward inescapable ruin.
Sometimes the quest for explicitness leads to funny results:
She had a point there. “You’ve got a point there,” I said.
This was so sudden, I didn’t know what to do, which is exactly what I said to her: “This is so sudden. I don’t know what to do.
He looked at me with eyes narrowed as if to apologize for being unable to speak because of the nervous black panther sleeping by his side. Which is not to say that there was a black panther sleeping by his side: he just looked as if there were.
Maybe Murakami is being funny or cute, or maybe it’s a translation issue, or an editing slip-up. Who’s to say? But then there’s the James Bond factor …
James Bond
It’s a convention of the spy thriller genre that at the climax there must be a confrontation between the hero James Bond-type figure and his evil nemesis. If it were you or me as the evil Dr. No or Goldfinger or Scaramanga or whoever, we wouldn’t yak half so much and, instead, we’d shoot Bond in the head. That would have the following consequences: 1) there would be no clever escape scene because Bond would be lying dead in the dirt, 2) the novel would be a whole lot shorter, and 3) there would be no sequels. But more importantly, a shot in the head from the evil nemesis would undermine Ian Fleming’s epistemological framework. The nemesis would have no chance (and no reason) to give a long-winded explanation of his motives, his reasoning, his methods, his moral orientation in the world, his philosophy of life. We would be denied access to his way of knowing.
Murakami’s writing abounds with such confrontations where characters feel compelled to justify themselves in the self-serving mode of the spy thriller explanation. They tell their rakish tales and it bumps the plot along. Although critics call his later novels weird and difficult to understand, my view is that, like the sex, Murakami makes everything explicit. Whatever we don’t get, sooner or later Mirakami explains for us, even if he has to hop between parallel realities in the process.
Personally I get bored of it because little is left to the imagination. You and I, the readers, aren’t allowed to do any of the heavy lifting.
I can’t help but nod in agreement as Toru Okada wonders:
I felt as if I had become part of a badly written novel, that someone was taking me to task for being utterly unreal. And perhaps it was true.
Bingo.