Reading Murakami (or What I Think About When I Read Haruki Murakami)

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[1]. 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[2]. 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[3]. 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[4] and the short story, Kino, from The Elephant Vanishes collection.

Haruki Murakami pictured with some of his records

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[5], 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.

So after taking ten years to get around to Kafka on the Shore, I read it in two days. It is certainly in the top tier of Haruki Murakami’s fourteen published novels (sixteen if you count the three volumes of 1Q84 as separate books[6]). However, being an American translation, the version I read has some curious elements to it. The front cover proclaims the books a ‘National Bestseller’, which tells you all you need to know about America’s place in the world. Any other country would hail the book an ‘International Best Seller’. Ironic, considering the world’s first international bestseller was Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book which Abraham Lincoln famously (although apocryphally) described as the book that started the American Civil War.

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.

'National' bestseller, Kafka on the Shore

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[7], 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[8].

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.

Automat, Edward Hopper, 1927

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[9]. 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[10]. 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)

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[1] NB. There aren’t many books by women or people of colour on my unread shelves, because I tend to read these straight away. So much of the cannon of world literature is written by white men that it’s nice to cleanse one’s palate wherever possible. One of these days I’m going to have a year where I read no books by white men at all. One of these days.

[2] My friend, Ehrinn, who sent me Kafka on the Shore, refers to Murakami as existentialist surrealism. Better.

[3] Tamura also reads the works of Natsume Soseki, cited by Murakami as his favourite author. Increased interest in Soseki’s work in the English speaking world is said to have been sparked by Murakami’s endorsement.

[4] Named after the 1939 song, South of the Border, written by Jimmy Kennedy and Michael Carr and recorded by everyone from Bing Crosby to Willie Nelson.

[5] The Japanese word for 9 is ku, hence the Q in the title to suggest a different version of 1984, the year in which the book is set.

[6] 18 if you count The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as 3 books.

[7] At the time I didn’t realise there was a third volume, published separately.

[8] To date, I’ve read all of Murakami’s works published in English, including Underground, his series of interviews with the victims and perpetrators of the 1995 Tokyo underground gas attacks.

[9] Made up of Murakami’s first three novels, Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball 1973, and A Wild Sheep Chase. The sequel, Dance, Dance, Dance is told by the same narrator but not part of the trilogy.

[10] As has often been noted, women have shit to do.

Somewhere in Venice

If you had the time to lose, 

An open mind and time to choose, 

Would you care to take a look, 

Or can you read me like a book?

October 2004

Nighttime. Sea salt and engine oil. Low light above me. Soft chatter and revving gears. Wake waves lapping gently to our port. Maiden. Late. Time is always on my side.

I have no idea where I am. Not exactly. Somewhere in the Venice lagoon. That much is certain. Beyond that I can’t say and I lack the language to ask.

I boarded this waterbus from the airport with some vague idea it would take me to the main island. This is not, I begin to suspect, a direct route. We seem to be going around the houses. Or rather, around the islands. I have a hostel bed booked somewhere in the city, but it’s exact location is also a mystery at present. One problem at a time.

My only anchor in this sea of uncertainty is the music playing from a yellow tape deck hanging from a yellow handle on a rusty nail in the pilot’s small, plastic sheeted cabin. It took me a moment to recognise it. Iron Maiden. Somewhere in Time.

Haven’t heard this album in years. One of the few 80s Maiden albums I don’t seem to own on CD. I wonder why. It’s one of their best. I own most of the others from that decade. Killers. Piece of Mind. Seventh Son. Why not this one?

The only album I don’t like from this era is Number of the Beast, but that’s more about the production than the actual songs. Actually, it’s probably because I heard most of those songs first on Live After Death (also the first Maiden album I heard) and the album versions sound too slow by comparison. It’s like Bring the Noise. It’s impossible to listen to the original once you’ve heard the beefed up version Public Enemy recorded with Anthrax. Yeah boy.

I caught the tail end of the opening track, Caught Somewhere in Time, as I boarded the boat with everyone else. The size of a small bus with the amenities of a third class Victorian railway carriage. Hard wooden benches arranged in rows. Sat perched on the inner edge, rucksack wedged between my knees, one foot spilling out into the aisle. The music penetrated my consciousness, but I felt too disorientated and tired from travelling all day to register it right away. By the time the opening lick of Wasted Years kicked in, I knew where we were.

 

The sad thing is, I know how long these songs run, so I know how long we’ve been chugging along at walking pace through the waters at the tip of the Adriatic. Heaven Can Wait is nearly over, which lasts seven minutes on its own. The two before that are five minutes each. Add that to the end of the opening track and we’ve been moving for at least twenty minutes.

I should have been at the hostel hours ago. But my plane from Gatwick was delayed and then we landed late due to storm weather. Frequent cracks of lightning seen through the cabin portholes. The captain apologised over the Tannoy, declaring it the worst storm he’d seen in years. So we circled Venice Airport for three quarters of an hour; the cloud cover too thick to even catch a sight of the Venetian lights blinking below us.

There must have been a quicker way to get where I need to go. But it’s late and my Italian is limited to ciao and grazie and so I followed the crowd and boarded this waterbus with everyone else. And now I’m stuck here. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner plays with mocking irony. I really don’t want to be still sat here by the time Alexander the Great begins. And yet I kind of do. I’m late anyway. May as well be late to a good soundtrack.

This is the end of a whistle stop tour of three cities. Three days in Dublin, following the trail of James Joyce. Then a couple of days in London with trips to the Tate and an all female production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Globe. Now four days in Venice. I’ve spent too much money in the capital cities and it’s the end of the working month. Venice is going to be a frugal experience.

If I ever get there. The last whistle-stop tour earlier this year was more successful. Flew into Paris for a couple of days, rolling around the Metro system reading Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden and seeing the sights. Then a long train ride to Zurich on the first day of February. Reading from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at the side of Joyce’s grave on the occasion of our joint birthday. Frustrated by all the museums being closed on a Monday. Tuesday bored in Geneva. Half six flight to Amsterdam on Wednesday morning. Sat in a coffee shop by nine. Finding the American Book Exchange. Spending too much money on second hand books.

I reach into the inner pocket of my green Parker jacket. Nestling there is a Penguin Classics copy of Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground and The Double. Black cover. For a moment I wonder if it’s one of the refugees rescued from Amsterdam. But all of the books I bought there are American press. And second hand. Left there by American backpackers. The Dostoyevsky is new. Must be from Waterstones. Manchester. Deansgate branch. Swapped it out for the Raymond Chandler, Philip Marlowe anthology I’ve been reading since John Lennon airport. Silver cover. Also Penguin. Also purchased on Deansgate. At least now I can listen to the BBC radio productions of The High Window and The Little Sister that I’ve been saving until I read the novels.

Another stop. People board. People alight.

The album moves on to Stranger in a Strange Land. I remember the video being one of the worst examples of lip synching I’ve ever seen. Not Bruce’s fault probably. Screwed up in post production with the audio track being out of phase with the images. Not by a lot but enough to be noticeable. But then it doesn’t help that it’s a live performance overdubbed with the studio version of the song. Looks instantly fake. Ironic given the lack of live recordings from that tour. Three live albums released from the Fear of the Dark tour (a particularly weak album), but nothing from Somewhere on Tour, which is meant to have been one of the best. A live album from that period would rival Live after Death.

And yet Stranger in a Strange Land is one of the album highlights. Steve’s chugging bass intro. The Smith penned lyrics that contain many of the same themes as Wasted Years (his other main lyrical contribution to this album). Also the notes of Adrian’s soulful guitar solo stretching out like the decades elapsed since the eponymous stranger perished in the Arctic and was preserved in ice (apparently based on a true story and not, as some think, named after the Robert Heinlein novel of the same name – it’s not a Steve Harris song after all). Having sat here for more than half an hour, slowly losing the feeling in my legs as each minute passes like an hour, I know what the slow passage of time feels like. It’s the uncertainty that does for me. If I knew where I was going I could sit back and enjoy the ride.

God I love this album. Next pay day I’m going down to HMV at lunchtime and buy a copy. Slip the naked CD into the CD folder I carry for playing music on my Sony CD Walkman. A far cry from when I first went travelling on my own. An extra bag in addition to my rucksack just to carry around all of the tapes I wanted to listen to. The millennium. Four years since, but seems an age ago.

Déjà Vu is starting. Probably the weakest song on the album, but it does always remind me of the Monty Python sketch. At this point Alexander the Great can no longer be avoided. My only hope is that once it starts I don’t end up at my destination before the song ends. At about nine minutes, that is a distinct possibility. Mind you, I could still be sitting here by the time the next album finishes. And knowing my luck it will something by Oasis or Coldplay or something equally hateful.

My son, ask for thyself another kingdom,

For that which I leave is too small for thee.

I mouth along to the speech that opens the song, wind howling in the background. I wonder who the actor that performs this is. The voice is vaguely familiar but I can’t place it. Wonder if it’s the same guy who did the reading from Revelation on Number of the Beast. Bet it’s some famous Shakespearian who didn’t want to tarnish his reputation with being openly associated with Iron Maiden but secretly a massive fan.

This is one of Steve’s book report songs. Like Rime of the Ancient Mariner or To Tame a Land, here Harris does the life of Alexander of Great in Cliff Notes form. I mock, but the aforementioned are some of my favourite Iron Maiden songs. The overlong words and complicated cadences with which Steve likes to torture Bruce. Bruce virtually rapping during the final section of this one. Another great Adrian Smith solo in the middle there. Eastern European mode . 7/8 time signature in places. Immensely silly in places, but metal is silly. That’s why we love it.
 

The song barrels along even as the boat ambles at the same frustratingly glacial pace. It’s over far too soon. See? This is of what I was afraid. The tape ends and the pilot eventually replaces it with a fresh one. Poison. Look What the Cat Dragged In. I have to get the hell off this boat. This now constitutes abuse.

I’m about to stand up and attempt the British equivalent of causing a fuss when I notice something in the near distance. An arrow tipped square tower piercing the sky that I recognise from Canaletto’s paintings of Venice. The must be St Marc’s Square. To quote the Cat from Red Dwarf: Hey, hey, hey, we’re moving in the right direction now. 

 

I mount the gangway with my rucksack slung over my shoulders. Humming snatches of Maiden songs, I walk the short distance to the entrance into Piazza San Marco. It’s late and low lit. Water from the lagoon seeps up through grills in the floor. The outdoor seating of the expansive cafes are virtually deserted at this time of night and this late in the season. In my left hand are clutched several sheets of A4 paper, on which are printed my hostel reservation details. I hope that even with a lack of Italian, I can point at the address and ask for directions. I hope it isn’t far. I hope it isn’t too late. Time is always on my side, I hum without much conviction.

For the next quarter of an hour I flounder from one café bar to the next in a kind of alcohol-free pub crawl. At each stop some friendly Venetian points me in the right direction, but I understand too little to get much further than the next square and have to start the process all over again. At this time of night the cafes are about the only places still open and the language barrier coupled with the inebriated state of my Good Samaritans make for slow progress. Lots of shouting between the groups of men that huddle around the printed sheets in my hand. No doubt laced with anti-English slurs and graphic insults against tourists. I only hope one of them isn’t sending me down a blind alley.

Which is exactly where I find myself. On a street which is apparently the one I’m looking for but I can’t see any sign of a hostel. I wander along the length of the narrow passage of cobble stones that end at the edge of the nearest canal.

A shadowy figure emerges from a doorway. I screw my courage to the sticking place and approach him. “Scusi.” The old Venetian points me halfway back down the street. With a little bit of effort I find the place I’m looking for. I ring the bell and answer the soft Italian voice emanating from the intercom. A buzz releases the red painted door to reveal a passage and a staircase.

It’s long since midnight as I’m greeted at the top of the stairs by a tall blonde man in his late twenties who instantly makes me feel overweight and underdressed. Marco takes my passport and books me in and before long he is leading me down a short corridor to a dorm room maybe forty feet long by twenty five feet wide. The only light comes from flashes of lighting issuing from the sky. I have made it just in time. Rows of single beds line the room. Everyone else is in bed and asleep. I store my luggage under the bed and quickly undress. Claps of thunder explode in what feels like right above the building. My head rests on the pillow. My eyelids are heavy.

A Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation CD plays in one ear, the CD player whirling gently beneath the pillow. Someone snores somewhere below. White light illuminates the back of my eyelids. Tired. Late. My son, ask for thyself another ferry boat. For that which I leave is too glam for thee. I have this terrible feeling of déjà vu. Much ado about nothing really. Time is always on my side. 

 

 

Abstract

Hi. Not posted anything for a while. Wrote the following in an hour as an experiment in loose associations and thought it would be nice to stick it up here (if you'll pardon the expresson). If it means anything to you, then that's what it means.

Regards. Rob 

Blazoned across a purple and golden sky, the finest arrangement of celestial notifiers announce the limits of human endeavour, from east to west, right ascending and declining, to admit minds less incongruous than they.

The finished effect clings to creation like a limpid to a sea mine, raising the possibility of no reordering this side of black. We hope, but ultimately we yield to what we must accept in a crimson dawn of irrelevance. All myths are self important and inept visions of where we lie, never at the centre, always at the edge; reacting to reactors, returning to dust and new light.

Livermorium in memoriam. Tennessine in tension and terror. Lithium for lethargy. Arsenic for old lace. Carbon cannot cancel the concerns of its own insistence on being the most abundant, the centre of all things, despite its rarity and its irrationalisation. Sands of time as sand in the dessert, unique and yet everywhere, rendering the very fact of sand redundant. Out of empty quarter is abundance when factored against the availability of dust.

We give it form. We offer it life. Primrose patterns against a winter sky. Staring into the void for ever and ever. Amyth. Minotaurs and unicorns like infinity and world weary infants. Potentiality is not existence. Nothing goes on forever. Nothing ever really stops. Life lived is life dreamt, a waking dream, sleepwalking through ages and eons, the passage of past and present in geometric expansion into the ever changing future. Even stones are not set in stone. Speak actively in the negative, or passively in the affirmative. Yes. No. Jein.

Inexactitude is the way. Skirting the shore of our ignorance. Dipping a toe in here or there. Languishing in obscurity between the devil and the big yellow ball in the sky, zoning out all endeavour modern, ancient, and to come.

God says you are important. The Universe says you are not.

Misogyny says you are mono. Flags say you think only for yourself.

I promise you disappointments say your social media pronouncements.

I’ll never satisfy another say your blather and your bluster.

My children will resent me say your twisty tweeting obloquy.

Will you please engage, say your anger and your rage.

I do not know, says everything that you show.

Mummy didn’t pay enough attention. Or daddy paid too much.

Indifference. Indifference. Thrice indifference. Dotting an invisible i on an invisible i. Departing soon, but yet to arrive. Farthings to your forebears and for your progeny, pence. Around, around the circle of life, the circle of death. Into a frothing ocean and back to the start. Circular yet sinusoidal. Consanguineously in the differentiated wheelhouse of turning fortune. Be as the base unit. Digitally divide in bits of torrents. Sing the song that is sung of soon. Paint the pic that punts to pain. Live the life that lights its loins. Grasp the goal that ghosts the gust. Enjoy the endeavour that enters extraneously, ex post facto et homo ex machina. Believe the boast that boots bravado to blazes. Winnow the window that wields the winch. Arrest all attempts at advocating amazement. Inevitably I inculcate innocence in ineptitude. I will still remain immortal. And dark.

Becalmed Again

“I swim in a redundant pool of crimson despair, mind awash to the bold, barren wasteland of hypodermic nausea, to cut a swathe through the razor blade precision of isolation and cooled to the numbing certainty of a yawning chasm, a spiritless void, my curse; my folly; my existence.”

                            Becalmed

I wrote the above words in the mid-1990s. More than 20 years later and little seems to have changed. Yet even before I wrote Becalmed, I had been suffering from one form of undiagnosed mental illness or another for most of my life.

On Monday of this week, I rang in sick and ran away to Scotland to end my life. It’s been a rough year. 4am found me lying on the floor of a shower unit in a Glasgow hotel room (on Hope Street, for the comic irony), shirt off, the sharp end of a pair of scissors wedged between my chest and the tiling. I had written a note. I had left next of kin details. I even had the presence of mind to buy some blue tack to leave a note on the bathroom door, alerting the cleaning staff not to come in. Just because I’m suicidal, I thought, doesn’t mean I’m a barbarian.

I couldn’t go through with it (in case that wasn’t immediately apparent). Instead I wandered around Glasgow for the day. My father was a submariner in the Royal Navy and we spent many years of my childhood living in nearby Helensborough, where I had visited the day before. I was born not far away. I guess in my disturbed state I wanted things to come full circle.

Then I headed to Sunderland, from where I write these words, to stay with my brother and sister-in-law. I collapsed in tears as soon as I was through the door. After days of feeling numb, raw emotion had returned with avengeance. I had been holding on to it all for the entire day and couldn’t hold it any longer.

The worst part about depression is not the depression itself. The worst part about depression is the shame, humiliation, and embarrassment that come from having to admit to anyone that one is depressed. Which is ridiculous. Does a runner feel shame at pulling their hamstring? Or a singer feel humiliated when they get a throat infection?

Mental illness is, by its very definition, irrational. Unlike a hamstring injury, or throat infection, the very thing that is injured is also the thing that is assessing its reaction to the damage done. Mental illness is circular, and it is cumulative. One finds oneself trapped in a spiralling loop of bad thoughts and unhelpful images. Hating oneself for being weak and for negatively impacting on one’s friends and relatives. It is exhausting, and it is draining.

I would like to say at this point that I am fine, and you don’t need to worry about me, but that would be a lie. It’s the same denials that I have allowed myself to believe for far too many years. I’ve always lived too much in my head, avoiding talking about my issues, living a life of perceived independence, but being unable to take care of myself properly. I’ve not been to a doctor regarding anything, let alone my mental state, in nearly fifteen years. I’m drowning in debt. I’ve been single for a decade to avoid inflicting me on anyone else.

Clearly things can’t go on as they are. The centre cannot hold. I am now in the process of registering with a doctor to see about getting a proper diagnosis. I’ve started looking at consolidating the debt. I am even toying with the idea of actually leaving the house and doing this thing I’ve heard about called, socialising.

I can also see the funny side of it all, which is often the case in the immediate aftermath of an ‘episode’. As the fictional Alan Partridge once had a breakdown and drove to Scotland without any shoes, I ran away to Scotland on the train without enough socks. I should have fled to Dundee, not Glasgow, and gorged myself on Toblerone.

As a person who has lived and worked in Great Britain my entire life, I have been brought up to believe that it is vulgar to talk about oneself. Which it is. However, today is World Mental Health Day (if nothing else, my timing for once is impeccable), and I wanted to write about what’s going on with me, partly because writing helps soothe the savage beast, but also as a beacon of hope for anyone else that suffers from the same malfunctioning psyche.

These things can be difficult to talk about, because depression usually doesn’t leave any visible, physical symptoms like a torn hamstring, or vocal cord. The fear is that one will be accused of faking it or being a malingerer. I am extremely blessed to have family who are supportive and loving. I will always have somewhere I can go. I will never be forced into homelessness, or destitution. I don’t drink alcohol. Not everyone is so fortunate. You just have to trust that there are people who will understand what you are going through, whether they be family, friends, or organisations such as the Samaritans.

Mental illness is like carbon monoxide; poisoning silently when left undetected. No one should suffer and die in silence. Get the help you need. It’s taken me long enough to come to this realisation. Be well.

See Also

Je Dirai Enfin Par Votre Bouche

Perceptions

An English Sloop Becalmed near the Shore - Francis Swaine 

 Becalmed (full version)

I swim in a redundant pool of crimson despair, mind awash to the bold, barren wasteland of hypodermic nausea, to cut a swathe through the razor blade precision of isolation and cooled to the numbing certainty of a yawning chasm, a spiritless void, my curse; my folly; my existence.

These are my fears, daydreams of grandeur that exist in but the mind eye, passionate kingdoms where none are to be found, not even I, and what's left to do when faultless clarity is all that I have and ears bleed from the silence.

None else swim here and none will, for I am a creature of habit, a habit of addictive self-destruction, deprived of even the energy to engage this agony and all that's left to do is sink, drown in the becalmed mistress of singular euphoric demise. And none being in attendance, none will grieve, none will care, not even I, for this is the way of things. To achieve but one terminal ambition, as all others are lost to the black.