Traveller’s Comments (group member since Jan 14, 2015)

Traveller’s comments from the On Paths Unknown group.

I found "Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey" quite charming, and obviously a bit philosophical.
He seems to be touching on anthropology and sociology there, as well as musings on identity and the meaning of love, but I think I'll wait for others to comment before I say more.

BJ wrote: "I wonder what it would be like to read Murakami if someone swapped out all the names and gender pronouns, so that the men were women and the women were men? How would they read? ..."

Now that would be an interesting experiment.

In this story they both seem a bit dehumanized, yet they share a secret thing: her tanka.
I hate how he suspects she might have killed herself and just sort of leaves that in the air, and yet, I know we sometimes do have interactions with people that we still think about years later, yet in the moment, we didn't really know how to handle the situation.

Yeah, my own take on the ending was also a bit of: "Wow, something this bad happened to someone I was that close with, and I never kept contact with them, and probably never really knew them", and maybe, just maybe, a slight touch of guilt because she had always loved the narrator most but he cast her aside casually for his 'true' love.

..but then I am prone to feeling guilt easily :P

Oh, and while I feel VERY happy that "With The Beetles" made me aware of Ryünosuke Akutagawa's story "Spinning Gears", I don't so much see how that fit into the story either, although of course there is the question of Akutagawa's suicide. That might fit in, with the girlfriend, and in a way, Akutagawa's mental illness might fit in with her brother's 'condition', but what does Akutagawa have to do with the Beatles?

Linda Abhors the New GR Design wrote: "I agree with Cordelia.
Hear me out on this....
Probably the stories that I felt were more "accomplished" were the Shinagawa Monkey and Charlie Parker, even though that feels very much like a liter..."

After your suggestion of 12 Pilgrims, I looked for it, because it's the one work out of all of GGM's works that I happen to NOT own, but couldn't get hold of it fast enough to have met our schedule. But we can certainly have a look at it later if we all manage to get hold of a copy.

Back to Murakami, what you are saying there actually segues for me right into the next story for this thread, 'With The Beatles'. Now, I really do like this story, the part of the story that is about the girlfriend and her brother, but I haven't had enough time to get enough perspective to figure out where the heck the opening part about the idealistic image of the girl with the Beatles album in her hand fit in, or how the Beatle's music or that album of theirs fit in with the story, beyond that he mentions, as if with a tube of paper glue in his hand, Murakami mentions a completely coincidental playing of a Beetles song, when he's not mentioning "Mantovani and his Orchestra" (The kind of stuff that I used to call "Sunday -afternoon-music" when I was a little kid) .

Talk about pastiche, this story really feels like bits of rags stitched together, but perhaps I'm simply too tired to see the connection between the Beatles, a glimpse of an ethereal schoolgirl and two siblings with unexpected fates.

Cordelia wrote: "None of these need or have a connection with the others..."

Indeed, or that's what it feels like, in any case. ...or is there? ;)

I think this is part of what BJ was saying, except in my case, I can't help wondering if there isn't a point somewhere that I'm missing. And that could be part of the games that Murakami plays with his readers.

Looks (sounds? feels?) nice!

Oh yes! Has anybody made any sense of the Christian message he heard being played? Why was -that- in the story? Is he perhaps implying that Christianity can lead you up a false path?

Keeping in mind that Christianity is not the main religion in Japan, though there had been a missionary presence there for a very long time, and so Christianity is nothing new to the Japanese.

Cordelia wrote: "Cream:

What a strange story. I dont even pretend to know what this is all about. Again we have multiple stories - this time two. I couldn't see any connection between the two stories. Both stories..."

Indeed, the part where he gets the false invitation doesn't seem to make sense or fit in with the second part, does it? You kind of wonder if it's worth puzzling over it to try and make them fit together. It would certainly be nice if someone did see a connection and shared it with us! :)

Maybe him following up on a false invitation simply symbolizes the fact that he's going up the wrong/an aimless path with his life?

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "All that said, am I being obtuse for just imagining a spiral when he talks about a circle with many centers and no circumference? Because I think a spiral fits fine and I didn't think it was that hard. So the center of the story doesn't quite hold, at least for me. ..."

I'd wanted to remark earlier that that is a brilliant solution, Amy! As you say, it fit the description perfectly, though if you think about where the 'center' of a spiral is, I suppose it's an endless succession of discrete points, so in a way many centers, I suppose enough to hold up for purposes of the story. ...and that makes you think of the spiral of life and I can't help thinking of DNA...

I feel like Murakami is doing a bit of an Umberto Eco on us here. :) If you were a gamer, you'd say he likes planting Easter Eggs (little hidden surprises) and likes playing games with the reader.

BJ wrote: " I feel like there is no actual wisdom here: ... And then, at the end of the story, the "wisdom" that thinking about difficult concepts is where the real meaning in life comes from, just doesn't feel that insightful."

Hmm, I really like your thinking on this one. (You were quoting me there, btw, but no worries). That entire sentence of yours:" the "wisdom" that thinking about difficult concepts is where the real meaning in life comes from, just doesn't feel that insightful." sort of encapsulates the 'circle' part of the story for me - the 'feel' of it and the gist of it. But observing that in itself is insightful, so we already have circles or spirals right there, in that comment. Magic!

BJ wrote: " In general, I feel like the thing that I like most about Murakami is how what should be weaknesses in his writing become strengths. This is sort of how I feel about how he writes women characters, too. Yes, women are blank canvases onto which his male protagonists project. And in just about any other writer, that would drive me up the wall (or make me put down the book). But in Cream or On a Stone Pillow it doesn't bother me that much, because, whether Murakami himself sees the world this way or not, his male narrators' lack of emotional intelligence is sort of the point. And also because, how I read him, there's usually no *there* there, no larger meaning, just emptiness. So the stakes of erasing a character's identity are not so high."

I like your thinking there as well. Sounds apt. I'd been trying to get into Murakami's longer fiction, Like Wind-Up-Bird, Kafka On The Shore, etc. for a long time, but I would read for a while and just could never seem to get into it, and would move on to something else somewhere about a quarter into the book.

I have decided to look at more of his short stories, though, so I will definitely have your comments there to mull over as I explore the author further.

BJ wrote: "Hi everyone, just wanted to stop by here and introduce myself, since I'm really enjoying the conversations on First Person Singular, and I'm new to the group (and to Goodreads, at least in the sens..."

Hello BJ, welcome! Since we explore literature in translation from all over the world, and have been neglecting German fiction, it might be an idea to have a look at some German authors. If I may ask, which have you been reading?

We also do speculative science fiction, so I hope you'll join in when we do - in fact it would be lovely to see you on all our discussions! :)

If it were not that I'm reading this anthology for a group, I think I would have DNF'd "With the Beatles". However, I pushed through to the discussion of Ryünosuke Akutagawa's story "Spinning Gears", and looked it up. OMG. We should have taken "Spinning Gears" as our Halloween story!
Being posthumously published, I think it's only available in the collection Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories, not to be confused with the shorter collection (which I already had) Rashomon and Others Stories. I mean Rashomon itself would be a brilliant story to discuss. Akutagawa is a bit of a genius. Now I'm glad I was forced to read this story, or I would not have become aware of Spinning Gears.

Just a heads-up, comments re "With the Beatles" here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Please let me know if this jumping around between threads doesn't work for you people. I'm experimenting on how best to handle threads for such very short stories.

Unless I make a separate thread for each story, we're going to have to mix them up a bit. Please tell me if this works or doesn't work for you guys. Since some of these stories are ultra short, and there are quite a lot of them, it feels like a waste to make a thread for each one.
We don't have to stop commenting on Cream, of course, but if you people don't mind, we can perhaps start commenting on 'With the Beatles' in this thread as well.

To be quite honest, I'm not sure what to make of this story. (Besides realizing that this must be the one Linda was referring to on the 'Cream' thread. He doesn't remember her name or her face, just the teethmarks on the towel. And the death-infested poetry... )

At the end a terrible sense of desolation and the unflinching certainty of our mortality seemed to envelop me. A feeling that time is fleeting and from dust to dust sort of thing.

...and yes, what's up with the focus on just her erotic bits. That did seem to dehumanize her as well as the narrator. He just remembers her sexy bits and she shouts another man's name.

Who knows, perhaps how he treats her in the story is his revenge for her shouting another man's name...

Interesting observation, Amy! We can certainly revisit that at the end of our discussion.

Please feel free to continue commenting on Cream, I just want to put it out there that the next story is "On a Stone Pillow", and that we can start commenting on that here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

...and now I'm starting to wonder if the circle with many centers in Cream, isn't perhaps a bit of a "cheat". After all, the old man and the narrator seem to indicate that it's more about a feeling, about belief, esoteric blah-blah-blah than an actual thing.

Maybe the whole story is reminiscent of the blind alleys that a young person can wander into when they're in that aimless no-mans land that people sometimes find themselves in in their journey from childhood towards adulthood, when they have no fixed aim or goal, and life is still about possibilities.

...or maybe, it's a kind of an open-ended "I'm throwing something out there, see what you can make of it " kind of thing that authors sometimes do while letting readers do the footwork of adding their own interpretations to the scenario.

Linda Abhors the New GR Design wrote: "Amy, I suspect you're right. This is the second work of his that I've read (Kafka on the Shore being the first). I mean, he's centering a story around this girl from his past, but he can't remember..."

In Cream? (EDIT: Oh, Linda is referring to "Stone Pillow").

After I read your comment, I re-read the story, and couldn't find an instance of him mentioning that he'd forgotten her name. He doesn't mention anybody's names, including that of his friend whose gender is unknown. I received the impression that it's more about the whole circle concept, on which I'll say more once I've thought about it.

Just as a side note, while he was walking up the deserted hill and environs, I felt eerily like I felt, many years ago, after having discovered the game Myst where you land on a deserted island with buildings of unknown origin; that same desolate "what now?' feeling.

My OCD is forcing me to add a quick note: a ronin (in feudal Japan) was a wandering samurai who had no lord or master. Murakami, writing for a Japanese audience, of course assumes that they'd all be familiar with ronins. Western people need to know that samurai lived by a code of honor and it's a society with strong codes of honor and belonging, so a ronin was a bit of a sad thing to be, because it didn't have a master and belonged nowhere.

In modern Japanese usage, usually the term is used to describe a person who is unemployed or a secondary school graduate who has not yet been admitted to university, which is of course the context in which Murakami mentions it.