For much of 2019, I found myself consumed with reading the novels and other books by Japanese
writer, Haruki Murakami. It is a journey that began, or should have begun, a
decade earlier.
What happened was that back in December 2009 an
American friend sent me a copy of Murakami’s novel, Kafka on the Shore, as a
Christmas present. It’s a risky business buying me books I haven’t asked for.
Or by authors I don’t know. I have so many books I bought for myself that have
gone unread year after year in favour of newer acquisitions. Several shelves
worth all told. So an unsolicited book is bound to get lost in the wash. I
added it to a pile and read something else. And then something else. And then
something else.
Fast forward to January 2019, more than a thousand
books later. I was flying by then. Reading all the books given to me as
Christmas presents before the new year had barely begun. In a fit of optimism,
I decided to make a list of all the books that had languished on my shelves for
far too many years. Aristotle’s Politics. Machiavelli’s Discourses. Conrad’s
Nostromo. The Decameron. War and Peace. Oliver Twist. Life on the Mississippi. Kafka on the Shore. Over
the course of the year I would read them all, along with one hundred other
books, new or more recently bought. Of those new books, fourteen would be other
works by Haruki Murakami.
I read Conrad’s Nostromo first from the list. I found
it so-so. Nowhere near as good as The Secret Agent, or Under Western Eyes. Over
January I also read books by Agatha Christie, Arthur C. Clarke, Gerald Durrell,
and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as well as Gordon Bowker’s biography of George
Orwell, the Collected Stories of Collette, The Beastie Boys Book, volumes six
and seven of Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen, the graphic novel adaptation of
Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the regular novel of The Parable of the Sower, W.E.B.
Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, and a
handful of other books besides. It was a good month. Unmatched for the rest of
the year.
Yet of all the books I read that month, Kafka on the
Shore was the highlight in terms of sheer revelation. Did you ever finally do
something and then realise you’d wasted so much time not doing it sooner? That’s
how it felt in finally reading Murakami. That I could have been reading his
books for the last ten years. Or earlier. The man’s been writing since the late
70s after all.
In many ways, Kafka on the Shore is the ideal book
with which to start reading Murakami. It contains many of the tropes and themes
that recur across his body of work. There are the twin narratives, with
alternate chapters concentrating on Kafka Tamura, a fifteen year old boy who
runs away from home, and Satoru Nakata, a mentally disabled elderly man who
supplements his government stipend by looking for lost cats. The characters
come from the same district of Tokyo, but are unknown to one another. For
different reasons and through different routes, they leave the city on separate
journeys that cross in certain places but never actually touch.
The twin, dueling narratives device is reused by
Murakami in what is perhaps his masterpiece, the three volume 1Q84, with the
narratives of Aomame and Tengo Kawana this time playing off against one
another. Parallel, alternating stories are also found in the earlier work, Hard
Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Although here the stories take
place not simultaneously, but at different points in time.
Much of Murakami fiction writing is characterised by
that much maligned phrase, magical realism. All of his books, with
the exception of Norwegian Wood, feature elements of the supernatural,
spiritual, or the profane. Kafka on the Shore contains more than most, with scenes
of UFOs, ghosts of Japanese World War Two soldiers, ghosts of the living seen as
they appeared in the past, abstract concepts that take on physical human form
with Western sounding names like Johnny Walker and Colonel Sanders, alternate
realities, and desolate villages that lie behind the living world and act like
waiting rooms or purgatory for the ever after. Satoru Nakata not only finds
missing cats, but has two way conversations with cats. He summons downpours of
fish and frogs at points on his journey away from Tokyo, seemingly without any
understanding of how this is achieved.
As well as the supernatural, there are all the customary
references to the mythical and the theatrical in Kafka on the Shore. Murakami
infuses the narrative with references to Japanese, Middle Eastern, and Southern
European legend. Kafka Tamura runs away from home to escape his father’s
taunting prophecy that he is cursed to become like Oedipus and kill his father
and sleep with his mother. Whether, or to what extent, the reader believes this
prophecy is fulfilled depends on a individualistic reading of the book’s
ambiguous conclusion.
Later, in the private library in which Kafka takes
refuge, Tamura reads Richard Burton’s translation of 1001 Tales of the Arabian
Nights. One thinks of the
criticisms of Burton’s translation, in part for being over sexualised, and how
influential those stories have been in the west during the last three hundred
years; maybe as early as the time of Chaucer and Boccaccio, although opinion is
divided on this point. The names of Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba, and Aladdin
have become as famous to us as Hercules, Odysseus, and Perseus, even if their
tales were added later to the Arabic texts by western translators. Tamura’s own
narrative wouldn’t seem out of place being told by Scheherazade to Shahryar over
one or many of those thousand and one nights: It conforms to many of the same
themes.
Kafka is not Tamura’s real first name. We are never
told what it is. At the beginning of the novel, and at various points
throughout, Kafka maintains an imaginary conversation with someone called ‘The
Boy Named Crow’. Kafka is homophone to a Czech work, kavka, meaning jackdaw,
which is part of the corvid, or crow family of birds. Franz Kafka, after whom
Tamura takes his name, was himself born in Prague, the capital of the modern
day Czech Republic. Kafka and The Boy Named Crow are therefore two sides of
Tamura’s personality, each as illusory as the other.
Kafka is another recurrent theme within the books of
Haruki Murakami. His works can often be seen as Kafkaesque, in that it is not
always clear what is going on, or for what purpose. Murakami won the Franz
Kafka Prize for fiction in 2006. Kafka is referenced most prominently in the
short story, Samsa in Love, in which Gregor Samsa, the man who woke to find
himself transformed into a giant insect in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, instead wakes
to find himself transformed back into Gregor Samsa, but without any memory of
being an insect. While evidence of what has taken place is evident to the reader,
it remains unexplained to, or realised by Samsa. A textbook case of Kafkaesque
storytelling.
The element that one finds in all of Murakami’s books
is reference to music. Characters are at all times listening to and discussing
classical or contemporary music. Murakami has a seemingly encyclopedic
knowledge of all kinds of music and maintains a large collection of vinyl
records. He owned and ran a jazz bar in the 1970s and jazz bars appear in a
number of novels and short stories, including his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing
and its sequels, as well as 1992’s South of the Border, West of the Sun and the short story, Kino,
from The Elephant Vanishes collection.
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Haruki Murakami pictured with some of his records
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The titles of many of Murakami’s novels and short
stories make direct reference to music. Norwegian Wood, the book that made him famous
when it was released in Japan in the 80s, prompting a period of self-exile to
the United States, is taken from the Beatles song from the album, Rubber Soul.
Short stories like Honey Pie, Yesterday, and Drive My Car also take their names
from Beatles songs. In February 2020, Murakami published a new piece in the New
Yorker entitled, With the Beatles, after the album of the same name.
The title of Murakami’s most recent published novel,
Killing Commendatore, refers to a scene from the Mozart opera, Don Giovanni.
The unnamed narrator finds a painting in the attic of the house he is renting, which
depicts a scene from the beginning of the opera. Don Giovanni fights a duel and
kills Commendatore after Commendatore catches Don Giovanni trying to rape his
daughter. In true Murakami form, the two foot high image of Commendatore takes
physical form and holds court over the narrator in his living room.
Murakami’s previous novel, Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki
and His Years of Pilgrimage from 2013, also makes reference to classical music
in the title. His Years of Pilgrimage, or Années de pèlerinage, is collection
of three suites composed by Franz Liszt in the 1830s. The novel makes
particular reference to a piece from First Year: Swiss (Première année:
Suisse): Le mal du pays, or Homesickness. An apt choice, given the novel’s
eponymous protagonist, Tsukuru Tazaki, who has been frozen out and ostracized
by a group of childhood friends sixteen years earlier and sets out on a journey
to discover the reasons for his unexplained exile.
The Greek derived word, nostalgia, has come to mean
the pain and longing we feel for the past, but in its original sense it
referred to a form of homesickness (nostos – returning home + algos – pain). What
we feel when we feel nostalgic isn’t really a longing for home or for an
idealised past that never really existed. Nostalgia is really just a longing
for our youth. Tsukuru Tazaki spends years in pain and isolation after being
rejected by his friends. His girlfriend makes him find out what happened so
they might have a future together. Le mal de pays, which combines the sense of
homesickness and nostalgia, is perfectly chosen to reflect Tazaki’s journey. In
order to look to the future we must first make peace with our past.
We also find classical and operatic references in The
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, published as three books in Japan from 1994 to 1995 and
printed in one volume in an abridged English translation in 1997. Each book
takes its name from references to birds in classical music and opera. The Book
of the Thieving Magpie is named after the Rossini opera. The Book of the
Prophesying Bird is named after a piece of piano music by Schumann. The Book of
the Bird-Catcher Man is named after Papageno, a character in Mozart’s The Magic
Flute.
Kafka on the Shore is itself named after a fictional
pop song that appears in the novel. Yet the title combines elements and
coincidences that coalesce across time. The song in question is itself named
after a painting showing a boy facing away on the shore of a lake: A future
echo of Killing Commendatore, once again combining music and art into one
title. The painting might or might not depict Kafka Tamura, who was not born
until years after the picture was painted. Then things like cause and effect have
little agency in the world of Kafka on the Shore. Or in the fiction of Haruki Murakami
in general.
Kafka on the Shore also features real world music.
Tamura listens to Prince, Radiohead, and John Coltrane on his walkman while
exercising at the gym or hiding out in a cabin in the mountains. The histories
of Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, and Schumann are discussed at various points by
various people to varying levels of detail. If the book has a real world theme,
it is Beethoven’s Archduke Trio. The secondary character, Hoshino, hears the
piece for the first time in a bar (where else?) while waiting for one of Satoru
Nakata’s long, comatosed sleeps to come to an end. It sets him on a journey of
cultural awakening that will continue long after the novel ends.
Wherever we go in Murakami’s world, music is there in
one form or another. Whether it’s Leos Janacek’s Sinfonietta, that serves as a
leitmotif for Aomame’s crossing into an alternative reality in 1Q84, to Bob Dylan’s A Hard
Rains Gonna Fall, which soundtracks the denouement of Hard Boiled Wonderland
and the End of the World, to Tetsuya Takahashi, the trombonist who recognises
Mari Asai in Denny’s at the beginning of After Dark, setting her course for the
rest of the night, music is all things to all characters in the work of Haruki
Murakami. Someone (someone else) should compile a list of all the music
referenced in his body of work.
Murakami also appears in music. The same year he won the
Franz Kafka Prize, the composer Max Richter released Songs From Before, which
features Robert Wyatt reading passages from Murakami’s novels. This hits me
where I live and, like the title of a Murakami novel, combines three things in
one: the novels of Haruki Murakami, the music of Max Richter, and the Soft
Machine’s Robert Wyatt. The only thing that matches this is Gillian Anderson
reading Virginia Woolf’s suicide note on Max Richter’s 2017 album, Three
Worlds: Music From Woolf’s Works. Although for obvious reasons, the latter is
not something one can listen to very often.
What can you do? This is the country whose sports
teams declare themselves world champions in sports in which no other countries are
invited to compete. What’s national is rendered interchangeable with what’s
international because all other countries are simply removed from the equation.
Which probably explains why all non-American quantities like the Japanese yen
are translated into American equivalents like the dollar. Stars forbid that an
American reader should be asked to consider anything outside of their comfort
zone or outside of their personal frame of reference. Which kind of destroys
the whole point of reading. It’s not the fault of Americans. It’s the fault of
cultural gatekeepers like the publishing industry.
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'National' bestseller, Kafka on the Shore
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That being said, the book was a big hit. Albeit a
decade late. A couple of weeks later I spent a weekend with relatives. The trip
included an afternoon in Oxford in the snow. In the local Waterstones I bought
Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and the first two volumes of
1Q84 published in one volume, as well as Kintu by
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi. Within twelve months of finally reading Kafka on
the Shore, I would read all of Murakami’s novels, three of his four published
short story collections, and the partial autobiography, What I Talk About When
I Talk About Running.
Having read all of Murakami’s novels, it’s worth
noting that Kafka on the Shore is also unlike his other books in a number of
ways. His novels had for years been characteristic by being told by first
person narrators. Yet Kafka on the Shore began a run of novels written in the
third person. Or rather, Kafka on the Shore is written in alternating voices.
Kafka Tamura tells his own story. The third person narrator tells the story of
Satoru Nakata. After Dark, 1Q84, and Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of
Pilgrimage are all told entirely in the third person, the narrator focusing on
one or more point of view characters. Only with Killing Commendatore does
Murakami return to a purely first person novel, eighteen years after Sputnik
Sweetheart in 1999, which last used the technique in its totality.
Some have been critical of those Murakami novels not
written in the first person, but then the same people damned Dylan for going
electric. Some people expect creative artists to stay on the same note forever.
To never grow. Constantly recycling the same old hits. Yet the Beatles wrote
songs in different narrative voices and from different points of view (cf. She
Loves You). Murakami’s first person narratives are always told by male
narrators. By writing in the third person, he could introduce female point of
view characters, like Mari Asai and Aomame, where perhaps he felt uncomfortable
writing directly through a female voice. Perhaps that’s why critics are really
upset. Mr Murakami let girls into the clubhouse.
Murakami’s characters are usually isolated people,
filled with existential angst or entering a period of change. Lonely students,
unrequited lovers, husbands trapped in loveless marriages, or recently
separated and going through divorce proceedings. Tsukuru Tazaki, the man
rejected by his friends a decade and a half earlier, is perhaps the most
isolated of all. The sadness that Murakami instills in him is almost too much
to bear at times. Yet Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
might be my favourite of all his novels. Even more so than Norwegian Wood, it
is his most human novel. Stripped of almost everything supernatural or other
worldly, but with all the moments of Kafkaesque ambiguity and unresolved
mystery. One is never sure whether to hug Tazaki or shake and scream at him.
Murakami’s novels often feel like Edward Hopper
paintings brought to literary life. They have the same sense of emptiness and
silence hanging on the air. Lonely figures staring into space. Couples and
groups of people disengaged from one another. Rarely looking at one another.
Rarer yet looking at the viewer.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the beginning of
After Dark, where we find Mari Asai sitting alone in a Denny’s close to
midnight. She is reading, but we are never permitted to know what. The scene
plays out like Hopper’s 1927 painting, Automat, reimagined by Katsushika
Hokusai in a modern Tokyo setting. The third person narrator watches Asai like
the viewer in Automat, who seemingly sits at another table watching the young
woman in the green fur-lined coat and beige cloche hat staring into her coffee
cup. There it is also after dark, as expressed by the rows of lights reflected
in the window behind her. Other than the lights, the only thing the window
reflects is darkness. Hopper’s subject is frozen in time. Mari Asai, however,
will be nudged out of Denny’s and out of her isolation by events set in motion
by the trombonist, Tetsuya Takahashi, recognising her because of her sister.
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Automat, Edward Hopper, 1927
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Kafka on the Shore somewhat bucks this trend of
isolated characters making their lonely way in the world. Each is isolated in
their own way, but one finds a greater depth of comradeship and community in
Kafka on the Shore than in most other Murakami novels. Satoru Nakata is helped
on his journey by Hoshino. Kafka Tamura is taken in by Oshima, the young
assistant at the library, and hides him from the police in the family cabin in
the mountains. Tamura is estranged from his father. His mother and sister left
years before. Yet he has The Boy Named Crow for company. Nakata is isolated due
to the nature of his disability, but vocalises his thoughts out loud. He is
unable to read or drive, but manages to get where he wants to go through the
kindness of strangers.
Indeed, the characters in Kafka on the Shore are the
least typical of Murakami’s creations. They read less like avatars for Murakami
himself, compared with Toru Watanabe of Norwegian Wood, or Toru Okada of The
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, or the unnamed narrators of Killing Commendatore or the
Trilogy of the Rat.
The characters of Kafka on the Shore are not ordinary men struggling to find
their way in a society increasingly decentralised from purely male concerns,
but are instead school boys and transsexuals and people with disabilities.
Hoshino is the character perhaps closest to the usual Murakami male archetype, but
even he has previously served in the army and is atypical in this sense. Although
former army men appear in a number of Murakami novels. Usually Second World War
veterans.
If there is anything critical to say about Murakami’s
writing, it is in his treatment of female characters. Women are often treated
as little more than sexual objects by the male characters and sometimes it feels
as if their only purpose within the story is as objects for the male gaze.
Either that or they exist so their actions will serve as a catalyst for change within
the life of the male protagonist. Having read all of Philip K Dick 44 novels, I
started playing a game to count how long after a woman is introduced into a narrative
before Dick makes reference to her breasts (rarely very long). On occasion it
feels like Murakami does something similar. That a female character’s physical
attributes are the most singular thing about her. Although this is more a
criticism of Murakami’s earlier books. Still, it is no surprise to realise that
nether Murakami or Philip K Dick pass the Bechtel Test.
Another recurring Murakami theme is sex taking place
telepathically or through dreams. These sexual encounters often happen without
consent, even if they ultimately only take place in the character’s
imagination. Kafka on the Shore contains one such act of psychosexual rape. It
also features the familiar sight of a character hand washing his semen stained
underwear in the sink.
Then again, the women in Murakami’s novels are often
more proactive and well organised than their male counterparts. They take the lead in
romantic or sexual relationships with the insular, awkward men of Murakami’s
world. Tsukuru Tazaki’s girlfriend, Sara, sets him on his journey to find out
what had happened to him all those years ago. It would probably never have
occurred to him without her prompting and questioning (and doing all the ground
work). Aomame in 1Q84 operates as an assassin, targeting men guilty of domestic
violence. She also relieves the stress of her profession by picking up older
men in singles bars.
Midori Kobayashi initiates a friendship with Toru
Watanabe in Norwegian Wood and controls how much information she parcels out to
Watanabe about her family situation and the speed at which their relationship
develops and progresses. Also in Norwegian Wood we see Reiko Ishida go through
a kind of spiritual redemption, set in motion by the tragic events at the end
of the novel, causing her to leave the isolated sanatorium in which she has self-isolated
for many years. Through her guitar playing, the recurring theme of Norwegian
Wood makes many of its recurring appearances.
If there is any recurring criticism of Murakami’s
novels, it is how they end. One often sees criticism of his novels, After Dark
and Killing Commendatore for instance, for concluding ambiguously and ruining
the rest of the book. Yet while some see this as a weakness of Murakami’s
novels, it is in fact one of their greatest strengths. Literature is not TV or
film, where loose ends are all tied up in a nice, neat bow in the final scene.
Murakami empowers his audience by inviting them to draw their own conclusions.
When the English translation of Kafka on the Shore was
released, Murakami gave an interview in which he stated that the book, “contains
several riddles, but there aren't any solutions provided. Instead several of
these riddles combine, and through their interaction the possibility of a
solution takes shape. And the form this solution takes will be different for
each reader.”
This is the power of the written word. Reading (and
indeed writing) is a symbiotic relationship between reader and writer that
creates a unique and unrepeatable experience. Good writers give you just enough
information to picture a scene and let you fill in the gaps from your personal
experience, whether you do so consciously or not.
For instance, if I say to you the set up to that
classic joke, a horse walks into a bar, then you will have a different horse
and a different bar in mind from the one that I or anyone else chooses to think
about. You will also picture a different barman asking the horse, what’s with
the long face. This is the power of narrative storytelling, whether on the page
or in the vagaries of a good joke. Or indeed a bad joke. Like a play, no two
performances are ever the same. We can exist in parallel universes with
diverging sets of experiences and yet feel as if we live in the same world.
TV and film are fine mediums in which to tell stories,
but here the viewer is at the mercy of the director’s personal vision. Only
between scenes are the audience permitted to exercise their imagination; to colour
in what happens in the gaps. Visual storytelling has more than a whiff of the
totalitarian about it and those who only ever consume passively through a two
dimensional screen without ever engaging with words on a page will always be at
the mercy of another’s personal vision of the world. Reading is freeing because
the experience of reading is unique for every person that reads a particular
book. It isn’t a solution in itself, but if more people read then the world might
not be in such a mess. Reading stretches those parts of the imagination other mediums
can’t reach.
So then to criticise a writer for not leaving
everything tidied up and explained to a tedious level of detail rings somewhat
hollow. Figure it out for yourself. Perhaps it would be nice to see the man who
beats up the Chinese sex worker and steals her clothes in After Dark get his
comeuppance, but After Dark takes place over the course of one night and real life
is not resolved so quickly. In real life bad people often get away with doing
bad things.
Perhaps it would be nice for Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki
and His Years of Pilgrimage to end two chapters later, or for Murakami to tell
us what happens to Toru Watanabe in the intervening years between the events of
the novel and hearing the orchestral version of Norwegian Wood that sets off
the wave of nostalgia upon which the narrative surfs. Perhaps it would be nice
to know how much, if any, of the Kafka prophecy if fulfilled.
Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps.
Better for the reader to fill in the gaps for themselves
and talk the details through with others. I’ve never been to a book club, but
isn’t that the whole point of their existence? Isn’t that why myths and stories
from the age of oral storytelling have so many different versions? Because each
new teller brings their own perspective to the tale and embellishes it accordingly.
Isn’t that why the New Testament has four different accounts of the life of
Jesus Christ, all of which differ from one other on most of the actual details?
Isn’t that why I read eighteen Haruki Murakami books in the space of twelve
months? Or why I’ve already reread most of them?
I am not a critic, nor would I wish to be. One could
sleep four hours a night and spend the rest of the time immersed in any single
form of media (literature, film, TV, music, or gaming) and still not scratch
the surface over the course of a lifetime. One couldn’t even watch all the new
content added to YouTube in a single month in that lifetime. So then to waste
your time engaging with anything that doesn’t appeal to you seems pointless.
And self-defeating.
Yet a cursory glance through Twitter or YouTube
comments will reveal a plethora of people shouting into the void about the
things they hate and abusing anyone who doesn’t agree with them, rather than
finding something, anything, that makes them feel alive and connected to others.
People who have never created anything of lasting meaning but still feel the
need and the right to critique those who have. Disappointed people wasting even
more of their already wasted lives. In deference to Haruki Murakami, I invoke
the lyrics of The Beatles: Look at all the lonely people.
As such, I can only tell you what I like and why you
might like it too. The books of Haruki Murakami represent all that’s good and worthy
about reading. They aren’t perfect. Nothing is. But they are entertaining and thought
provoking. They take you into different worlds and to a different part of the
world. Like Dickens’s London, or Joyce’s Dublin, they open a window on life in
Tokyo and its environs.
You’ll learn that even in one of the most densely
populated cities on Earth, people still feel isolated and alone. You’ll also
receive an extension course in musical appreciation. In my year of reading
Murakami, I added Leos Janacek, Albert Ayler, and Curtis Fuller to my already fairly
eclectic tastes. I could write an essay on the music I have discovered through
reading. And the books I have discovered through music.
All of which is a long winded way of saying that
reading Murakami is an immensely rewarding experience. Time spent reading
Murakami is never time wasted. If anything here has piqued your interest, why
not give Haruki Murakami a try? Just don’t waste ten years getting around to him.
Haruki Murakami: Where to Start
Kafka on the Shore
Norwegian Wood
Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
After Dark
The Elephant Vanishes (short story collection)
Diving Deeper
1Q84 (three volumes)
The Trilogy of the Rat/Dance. Dance, Dance
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Killing Commendatore
Men Without Women (short story collection)
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (non-fiction)
