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.
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| Haruki Murakami pictured with some of his records |
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.
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 |
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 |
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)
[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.
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