. Spinning .

Overall, this book probably demanded more concentrated reading than I was able to give it. While I did not lose the trail of the stories, I obviously was not so enamored of them that I let some other things go by undone.

It was a fantastic concept of a futuristic world–yet set in a completely contemporary setting of Japan, 1980s. At least one section was, plus a few underground worlds and some weird groups both above ground and below. The ongoing other world is completely different; safe–if one stays within its walls–due to the sacrifices made. Yet despite the idea that without the sense of self and memories there is no great happiness nor any great despair, there was for me much sadness. The self represented by an intelligent, articulate shadow that must be shed, is treated rather cruelly. The beasts outside of the walls are also there for the purpose of cleaning up after others by absorbing their minds and then in turn die and are destroyed. There are people in the Woods we never get to meet yet we know their lives are miserable. The Caretaker, one who lives on the edge of the Woods but not allowed into the city, is not a happy camper. If the narrator himself has created this world, I’m sure I don’t know why.

Murakami has skillfully created a very detailed weave of narrative, yet he hasn’t taken his characters into full bloom, not even allowing them names. There is a sense of danger in both worlds, from the inklings and the semiotics in one, though we only meet that danger once when the narrator is beaten and his apartment trashed by two men. The inklings, though we read of their powers, are only a whispered rumble close by. In the other world, the Woods are the threat. We really don’t go into them deep enough to face any danger.

After I finished this book, I read again the back cover blurb which claims the story is “hilariously funny.” I’m afraid I didn’t get that part either. Perhaps some of it is due to the fact that I’m reading this book our of its era. It just didn’t appeal, but then, I’m not a huge sci fi fan, which this book can possibly qualify as, and perhaps it is my own fault for not reading and getting into it more expeditiously.

Not nuts about this, after over 350 pages and into the home stretch, that Murakami appears to explain all the goings on that up until this time, we are guessing and forming our own opinions about.

Starting with Chapter 25, (the odd numbers are within the past, I believe) and going through 27, and 28, the narrator finds out a great deal from the Professor who has embedded something in his brain specifically to test out a theory. The professor explains just about everything from his own beginnings with the System, through the narrator’s own purpose and into his future. It did clarify much to me, and yet, I’m not sure I was ever given a chance to reason it out had I wanted to.

Now, in Chapter 32, the narrator’s shadow explains what that world is all about and how it works. It’s just a little too pat and I’m surprised that Murakami didn’t unravel his wondrous tale a little at a time. Unless I missed it and these revelations that are obviously needed to understand where this story is going in the coming together of the two worlds of time are a gentle hand-up to those like me.

While I hesitate to come out and call it an infodump, in have the Professor in one story line and the shadow in the other explain everything to the narrator in a dialogue form, it is in effect explaining everything to the reader as well. It may be because I never got a chance to just read the whole thing through quickly (it took me months because of other obligations) though I did remember what was going on and didn’t have to back-read to refresh my mind (well, maybe once, when I got confused between the two librarians, one in each “world”).

Should be wrapping this up by tomorrow I hope.

Finally, I’ve reached a concept in the book that really struck me. This dialog between the narrator and his shadow, the shadow slowly dying, still planning its escape, yet anxious to relay what he’s learned since separated from the narrator:

“Just now you spoke of the Town’s perfection. Sure, the people here–the Gatekeeper aside–don’t hurt anyone. No one hurts each other, no one has wants. All are contented and at peace. Why is that? It’s because they have no mind.”

“That much I know too well,” I say.

“It is by relinquishing their mind that the Townfolk lose time; their awareness becomes a clean slate of eternity. As I said, no one grows old or dies. All that’s required is that you strip away the shadow that is the grounding of the self and watch it die. Once your shadow dies, you haven’t a problem in the world. You need only to skim off the discharges of mind that rise each day.”

“Skim off?”

I’ll come back to that later. First, about the mind. You tell me there is no fighting or hatred or desire in the Town. That is a beautiful dream, and I do want your happiness. But the absence of fighting or hatred or desire also means the opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.” (p. 334)

After all the oddness the two worlds have revealed as Murakami has drawn them (I at first thought they were parallel, now feel they are more past and future, as indicated by the tense structure as well), it is this lesson or possibility that he has brought us to: losing one’s self into the will of the community and secondly, one extreme demands its opposite, or otherwise normalcy involves a type of apathy.

This last thought reminds me instantly of the need for evil to know good, for sadness to have happiness, etc. that is a topic of importance in The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. It is based on the theory that if we have not experienced sadness, for example, then we could not comprehend its opposite of happiness because there would be no way to gauge the contrast. I find as I grow older I am more convinced of this personally. Traumatic events of the past hold their own in my mind until something worse might happen; same thing with events or people who delight me. Age hones the senses rather than dulling them, I think. And to shut oneself off from the world in order to protect oneself, to attempt to live in peace and harmony, tends instead, to numb one to all feelings, good or bad, frightening or comforting.

I’m getting towards the last 50 pages here, and I’m anxious now to see how Murakami fuses his two worlds. He has already made the narrator aware in the past that he will die and move onto another world, but as we see the present, the shadow here is speaking of escape before it itself dies, and is begging the narrator to leave with it.

And this is neat; within the expected action and resolution crops up another conflict: his feelings towards the Librarian.

First of all, let me say that I’ve been reading this book like forever, or at least it seems that way. To be fair, my mind had been retrained to seek the immediate resolution of flash fiction and thus a novel-length book was suddenly overwhelming unless it was quick-paced action that required little involvement from the reader. Murakami demands more.

I’m not totally convinced that the story itself and even the writing wasn’t falling a bit short of my expectations. Surely McCarthy or Faulkner would not have let me put them down for weeks at a time. And this story of Murakami’s is not one that is easily followed unless you keep in mind that there are two stories here: likely the same narrator, a futuristic analyst with a brain implant who is caught up in a weird world of a scientist and his granddaughter in one; and in the other, a dream reader who must give up his shadow and live within the confines of a town walled in and watched over by a Gatekeeper. The former is written in the past tense, the latter in the present.

The thing with Murakami is that he manages to create unusual environments, lay them out, people them with characters with whom for some reason, have depth but do not truly elicit empathy, juggle pace and plots so that sometimes reading two pages is a chore and sometimes reading twenty flies by in a snap, include dull details interspersed with danger and action, and toss action and danger amid dull details.

There is no real lovely language here; it is stark and perfectly suited to the dreary starkness of both worlds. Even in the simplicity of words the settings emerge real enough in the reader’s mind–even if it’s not what Murakami himself imagined. Therefore, there wasn’t anything I read that sent me dashing off to the laptop to blog about and share, until this:

No, these holes could go on forever. And I would never get to read that morning edition. The fresh ink coming off on your fingers. Thick with all the advertising inserts. The Prime Minister’s wake-up time, stock market reports, whole family suicides, chawan-mushi recipes, the length of skirts, record album reviews, real estate, . . . (pg. 235)

This is the narrator’s thoughts as he’s following the scientist’s granddaughter through a slick black plateau of holes from which leeches emerge in this underground world. The thought is odd because as the story is evidently the future, the looking back to a more normal present for this character goes further back to a time not of DVDs or CDs but of “record album” reviews. And newspapers–which have already become a rarity for morning reading.

Even as I feel these two stories are of the same character and are separated by time, there is at last a reference in one of the other:

Back to the newsreel, arcs of water shooting across the screen, spillway emptying into the big bowl below. Dozens of camera angles: up, down, head on, this side, that side, long, medium, zoom in close-up on the tumbling waters. An enormous shadow of the arching water is cast against the concrete expanse. I star, and the shadow gradually becomes my shadow. (pg. 238)

This, in the dark underground world, as he is following the granddaughter to some sort of safety. This, while in the parallel narrative, he has given up his shadow to the Gatekeeper.

And, a hint at what is perhaps being drawn out as a theme; the loss of self? No names are given to the narrator nor any of the main characters. They are the Professor, the Colonel, the chubby granddaughter, the Librarian, etc. This would also tie in with the rather flat characters who we never-the-less endow with a sense of reality. And just at this point in the story, the narrator also begins to realize that when he gave up his shadow, he gave up his memory, his own sense of who and what he is.

I’m not sure whether the story’s getting better at this point or I’m just coming down from a flash-fiction high and learning to concentrate for longer than two minutes, but I know I’m enjoying the story more and want to read, rather than pushing myself out of guilt.

(Still, I must admit that reading the jacket blurb describing the book as  “hilariously funny” isn’t something I remember feeling at all.)

My general gut feeling remains the same on this.  I feel that the story is wonderful, but would have liked to see better handling of that story. 

Now I’m sure that Murakami fans think I’m off the wall on this, but I just feel a bit disappointed by the ending that was presented almost as the end of a fantasy fic novel, leaving some of the more intriguing questions raised either answered by a preachy-form of character (Oshima) opinion:

"Every one of us is losing something precious to us," he says after the phone stops ringing.  "Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again.  That’s part of what it means o be alive.  But inside our heads–at least that’s where I imagine it–there’s a little room where we store those memories."  (p. 463)

Sort of anticlimactic, I thought.  And this wisdom is from a twenty-one year-old who admittedly is quite together despite some complex gender association.  But it’s nothing particularly deep, and the boy Kafka has been through so much and yet merely makes up his mind to go back home and finish school.

But there was enough here for me to explore Murakami’s work further and I will indeed soon order The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle to see what else Murakami has to offer.

Just finished this and my first comment would be that I’m surprised it didn’t take me long to read through 465 pages.

My second comment might be that my immediate response is a bit of a letdown.  It seems that the weirdness continues, but in a way that reminds me more of horror stories or fantasy fiction rather than a more metaphorical discovery.  This, despite the repeated statements by Oshima that "the world is a metaphor."  Maybe I’ve just come to rely too much on Murakami to tell me what was going on, since it was pretty well hidden and he seemed to have all the answers ready to give.

And yet, I don’t feel the novel is complete.  There’s a happy ending which frankly, I wouldn’t have expected and so maybe that’s where the twist comes in.  The writing was good–obviously, if I read it so quickly–yet for the first 200 pages the story was rather normal, then it got me all excited when Murakami went weird on me, and then I just read along. seemingly watching for the telltale signs of clues as the two characters’ lives began to touch.

As far as the main characters, while I fell in love with the old man, Nakata, the boy Kafka was basically your rich kid who runs away to escape a dysfuntional family and perhaps seek his mother and sister.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t impressed with the kid–oh, he’s very nice and all that–because everything just plopped right in his lap.  I doubt that he had to touch the three grand he stole from his father to buy anything for himself.  There was always somebody ready and willing to help him.  These became the heroes for me.

I have to think some more on the whole labyrinth, netherworld idea, and the possibility that in dreams there is a way of having out of body experiences that Murakami seems to want us to consider as a possiblity.  There’s just too much neatly tied up as the threads unravel, and yet no real answer that I felt appear as an impetus to delve deeper.

More later.

As I’m coming towards the end of this story (should be finished tomorrow) little things are starting to bother me.  What’s the good of surrealism if it seems contrived?

As the characters progress on their journeys–which by the way, they seem to take for granted–too much is tied in to try to make it appear to make sense.  For me, the magic of magical realism is that it needn’t make any sense at all.

There’s also an overload of philosophical discussion about life, how to behave within it, how dreams and reality are intertwined, how we are part of the whole and the whole is a part of us, but not left simply to metaphor.  One or the other of the characters has to present it as a piece of advice to another character, or we’re inside somebody’s head as he ponders it to himself.

Murakami throws out some great theories, and then proceeds to expound upon them.  I feel it is presented more in lecture form than a question offered up to the reader.

Nor do we need to know every meal the characters eat.

Back in the apartment, a soothing fragance filled the place.  Nakata was bustling around the kitchen preparing some steamed daikon and deep-fried flat tofu. (p. 356)

At six Nakata made dinner–grilled salmon and a salad, plus a number of little side dishes he’d concocted. (p. 358)

They breakfasted on rise, miso soup with eggplant, dried mackerel, and pickles. Hoshino had a second helping of rice.  (p. 359)

At noon they stopped by a diner and had curry. (p. 361)

At three they went into a coffee shop, where Hoshino had a cup of coffee.  Nakata puzzled over his order, finally going with the iced milk. (p. 362)

At noon they stopped by a restaurant specializing in eel and ordered the lunch special, a bowl of rice topped with eel.  At three they went to a coffee shop, where Hoshino had coffee, Nakata kelp tea. (p. 364)

Notice the page numbers. Now Nakata and Hoshino are on a mission and they’re driving around for a couple days in search of something, but Murakami even throws in when these guys go to the bathroom.  Oddly enough, that’s always been one of the things folks began to notice in novels and tv shows and movies:  Nobody goes to the bathroom.

Me, I’ve always been bugged by the family sitting down to dinner and crowding around only one side of the table so that no one’s back is to the camera.

I’m a firm believer in knowing the rules inside-out before you attempt to break them.  I’m also a believer that most of the best literary classics are based on broken rules.

But I’m having a bit of a hard time accepting Murakami’s highly detailed descriptions of the mundane, whereas I would have taken an editorial red pencil to a lot of extraneous writing:

He’s wearing a pair of Armani-type sunglasses, and a striped linen shirt over a white V-neck T-shirt, white jeans, and navy blue, low-cut Converse All-Stars.  Casual day-off clothes. (p. 331)

Now I don’t have a problem with the way these words are strung together, nor with Kafka’s describing what Oshima is wearing this day.  The problem is that we get a similar rundown on both Oshima’s togs and Miss Saeki’s every day. 

This book is 461 pages long.  Between the explanations Murakami gives through the characters for what’s going on, the descriptions such as above (even to the point of washing out underwear), there’s a  lot that could have been more concisely edited I would think.

On Murakami’s purpose, I might think that the mundane routine might be a sense of grounding that more easily contrasts with the surreal he introduces into the stories and thus provides more impact.  He also, I would add, provides easy sentence structure and phraseology that is quick-paced and enjoyable enough though not particularly linguistically outstanding or poetic. 

I wonder too if the fact that this is of course a translation has much to do with it.  I know no Japanese so I do not know how it translates–with ease or with difficulty–into English.  When you’re reading for writing style, I’m finding that you cannot be as opinionated with your consideration of the author’s style when you’re reading it in a language other than its original written version.

Maybe I’m just slow at catching drifts, or maybe I’m just the caboose on a train going on the wrong track, but I’m being pounded with a sense of duality in this novel.

Obviously, the two stories, the two characters, the half shadows, the double natures of lives and time, the each of us half seeking our other half, Oshima’s complex gender, Miss Saeki’s youth and middle-age, dreams and wakefulness, all that; this is a novel about the two sides of everything.  But what tipped me off to the importance of this is the repeated description of Nakata’s salt and pepper hair.

Now Nakata is wondering about himself, and what sort of Nakata he would have been had the occurrence on that hill as a young student on a field trip not changed him.

Paths, discussing metaphor, seeking something unknown, feeling a need to move towards something while leaving behind something or even running from it; there’s something to all this and I’m seeing it as the larger riddle of ourselves as we attempt to separate our minds from our bodies to understand the difference between the two that are still inextricably one.

Like I said; maybe I’m just taking one of those trips to no answerland that I tend to enjoy.

All right, so everything’s not as it appears to be, or maybe it is and suspension of disbelief is all it takes to appreciate this novel.  But Kentucky Fried Pimp?

Now I’ve never had a problem with believing what I read; that is, taking as the truth the story and events as the author has presented them.  With Paz’s My Life With the Wave, I never doubted that the man brought home a loving wash of seawater.  What bothers me in fiction (and of course, supposed non-fiction) is the little details that don’t ring true.  But that’s the way I am in life as well; I handle crisis with a calm and effective way.  The little things that pester like mosquitos will turn me manic in a matter of time.

So okay, it’s Colonel Sanders.  And from him we get some learning:

"You still don’t get it, do you?  We’re talking about a revelation here," Colonel Sanders said, clicking his tongue.  "A revelation leaps over the borders of the everyday.  A life without revelation is no life at all.  What you need to do is move from reason that observes to reason that acts.  That’s what’s critical.  Do you have any idea what I’m talking about, you gold-plated whale of a dunce?"  (p. 275)

Up until now, Kafka’s new friend at the library, Oshima, has been the wise and thoughtful one, giving the youth as well as the reader some thoughts to ponder.  But these tidbits are maybe just favorites of Murakami, his thoughts on life that he infuses his writings with to get them out and into other people’s heads.  It’s not a preachy thing, and yet it’s given placement that, coming from characters like Johnnie Walker and Colonel Sanders, one seems to want to give some import.

Then Murakami subtley disappoints:

As Miss Saeki went around interviewing people for her book, maybe she met my father.  It’s entirely possible.  There can’t be that many people around who’ve been struck by lightning and lived, can there?

I breathe very quietly, waiting for the dawn.  A cloud parts, and moonlight shines down on the trees in the garden.  There are just too many coincidences.  Everything seems to be speeding up, rushing toward one destination.  (p. 253)

There are a few passages such as the above, where Murkami appears to have the narrator do the thinking that ordinarily is left to the reader.  Murakami, I’m thinking, even while throwing in some danged wonderfully enticing thought-provokers such as the intrigueing  characters and events, likes to maintain control.  In several cases he has spent a couple pages on backstory.  This, halfway through the book when we’ve come up with what we felt were rather good ideas of our own.

It’s almost like telling the reader he’s wrong; no, this is what happened, not what you’re thinking.

Murakami is a master storyteller, laying out threads macramed into a pattern.  But the design is almost too elaborately deliberate. As our young Kafka says, "There are just too many coincidences."

As I said, up to these last few chapters life was rather tranquil for both Kafka and Nakata.  Then McCarthy stepped in with blood and guts and now, Marquez.  Raining fish and leaches.  Two of my favorite authors though, so for me, the novel has taken a hold of my heart.

There is the thread of relationships here, and the understanding and acceptance of people as they are regardless of what they appear to be. So that the characters themselves may be the metaphors. 

A connection between these two characters’ stories has been made, though not in a simple straightforward meeting.

The man who Nakata believes he has killed may in fact be Kafka’s father, though Kafka wonders if he himself didn’t manage it since it was the night he woke from unconsciousness, his shirt covered in blood.

I’m finding great new things to like about Murakami.  Who else would suddenly open the sky and rain down sardines with the occasional mackeral?  Marquez used yellow flowers.

One of the things I hate the most is being laughed at for being dumb, but I can’t help but laugh along with those of you who’ve read Murakami and have noted my comments so far about his unmetaphorical writing style.

Johnnie Walker killing cats and saving their heads in a freezer?

No, I haven’t come to any real conclusions about it yet, but I’m beginning to see the depth in Murakami’s novel that I pleasantly passed over until now.  There’s wonderful story here, but there’s more, much more.

Hoo-boy.  Murakami has just presented us with McCarthy’s Judge (Blood Meridian) in the form of a man who dresses like and calls himself Johnnie Walker and who claims he must kill cats.  A philosopher, a man who forces one to look at himself–in this case, Nakata–and pushes one to go beyond one’s worst imaginable capabilities just to prove the evil residing within us all.

"…But listen to me–there are times in life when those kinds of excuses don’t cut it anymore.  Situations when nobody cares whether you’re suited for the task at hand or not.  I need you to understand that.  For instance, it happens in war.  Do you know what war is?" 

"Yes, I do.  There was a big war going on when Nakata was born.  I heard about it."

"When a war starts people are forced to become soldiers.  They carry guns and go to the front lines and have to kill soldiers on the other side.  As many as they possibly can.  Nobody cares whether you like killing people or not.  It’s just something you have to do.  Otherwise you’re the one who gets killed."  Johnnie Walker pointed his index finger at Nakata’s chest.  "Bang!" he said.  "Human history in a nutshell."  (p. 142)

Murakami has eased us into this scenario–a lot stranger and bloodier than what I’ll give away here–that places us in a very uncomfortable position.  I squirm a bit as I read, and even McCarthy didn’t quite make me do that.  I think the fact that even as the action and pace steps up, we were lulled into two still comfortable worlds where we thought we knew some things were hiding beneath the surface, but didn’t expect to open the door into hell with the flip of a page.