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1Q84 & Murakami's Early Writings
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Introductory Novels: After the Quake, Sputnik Sweetheart, A Wild Sheep Chase, & other introductory reading about Japan
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I was recently made aware that 1Q84 has two translators--Jay Rubin of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle translated 1Q84's Books 1 & 2 and Philip Gabriel Book 3. That I discovered (& checked against that novel's introductory pages) from a 12 min. interview with translator Jay Rubin, who mentioned HM's story-within-a-story technique, evident in a part of 1Q84--Town of Cats--published in The New Yorker.
I'm finally getting to read HM's short stories "After the Quake", set just after the Kobe earthquake Jan-Mar 1995, having finished the first "UFO in Kushiro". Komura's wife having left him after being entranced for five days by the tv's images of it, he brings a square box, "a chunk of air", to freezing Hokkaido as a favor while rejuvenating there... The themes might be 'can you ever get away from yourself'
No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself. It's like your shadow. It follows you everywhere.and 'you need to enjoy life a little more'
You need to lighten up and learn to enjoy life a little more. I mean, think about it: tomorrow there could be an earthquake; you could be kidnapped by aliens; you could be eaten by a bear. Nobody knows what's going to happen.True enough but surreal since daily life can seem somewhat the same from day to day.
A trio of people in which one of them goes elsewhere, as in the first story, happens in the second "Landscape with Flatiron", the title of Mr Miyake's painting in the short stories "After the Quake". Laying flat the wrinkles, as the painting's title suggests, is reflected here on a windless, chilly, seaside night beside a silent sea which has cast up a lot of driftwood--a night Miyake makes a bonfire as usual from it and brings him and the younger Junko and Keisuke together. Junko, a female runaway, ordinarily feels little (the flatiron) except tonight when looking at the gently flaming fire.
"All God's Children Can Dance" is the next story in After the Quake. I find Murakami's ironic humor pleasant even while the circumstances of his characters are surreal/odd. In this third story, Yoshiya follows a man without a right earlobe whom he thinks is his biological father for miles into darkness and desolation to lose him but to find his spiritual father.
"Thailand" in the collection "After the Quake" brings in some early jazz songs-- I Can't Get Started; I'll Remember April; Concert by the Sea; as well as the Benny Goodman Sextet. There is a thyroid specialist, a Thai tour guide, and a spiritual healer. Favorite quote What you need now more than anything is dicipline. Cast off mere words. Words turn into stone.advises that it's time to turn words into action
"Super-Frog Saves Tokyo", in the story collection After the Quake doesn't mention music, rather western writers (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Hemingway) are part of this fairytale-like fable of a six-foot, super frog intent on saving 150,000 lives. The tie-in with preceding "Thailand" is that both stories emphasize the importance of acting in conjunction with intentions and words. To avert an earthquake, though, must be acted out in the imagination against a giant underground Worm who lives at the epicenter:
...in the area of imagination...we experience our victories and our defeats...all of us eventually go down to defeat.Frog and Worm are an ongoing struggle between light and darkness in the imagination of Katagari, whose hallucination extends to Frog's eventual meltdown after the quake is averted.
I saw in "Honey Pie" (After the Quake) a practical model to build friendships based upon equality, shown by two enterprising bears, who like to catch salmon and gather honey to sell, and applied to the longstanding friendship of two humans. A child's dream of The Earthquake Man strengthens writer Junpei's and translator Sayoko's connection. Reading paired with Schubert's 'Trout'.
After finishing the short story collection "After the Quake", it's on to the novella Sputnik Sweetheart, its title referring to the character Miu--the older girlfriend of 22-yr-old budding novelist/protagonist Sumire. In chapters 1-3 so far nothing much surreal nor extraordinary happens, but a hint suggests itself. Kerouac-reading, college-dropout Sumire acts too passively opposite the bold, even overbearing, Miu, reticent about her life while probing Sumire's life. And, there's something ominous about Miu's business dealings abroad. (Just a suspicion that could come to nothing or something.) In "After the Quake", that darkness was present in the distant Kobe earthquake, its psychological shocks extending outwards from the city to the psychological lives of the short stories' characters. Something new, not noted in "After...", is the Japanese love of beauty, which is attributed to Sumire's physically attractive and music-loving father. There is also the male narrator/character who teaches elementary school teacher and is Sumire's confidente.
In Sputnik Sweetheart, Miu does have a secret from her past. When M mentioned it, "...the light dyed her eyes the crimson of the wine...The person here now isn't the real me. Fourteen years ago I became half the person I used to be. I wish I could have met you when I was whole..." Murakami doesn't divulge it yet.Murakami themes: actual experience by taking people out of themselves to see the rest of the world; communication/dialogue; inborn abilities (??); in this story Generation X and the "Lost Sputnik" "drifting in space" (Sumire's going along with M to Europe).
K's character: opposite that his "ambitiously competitive", "sloppy" sister in the capitalist pyramid; reads novels for pure enjoyment; plays soccer, finds a talent for teaching.
About midway into Sputnik Sweetheart, K goes to an island off Rhodes, Greece, by Miu's request, and the story becomes better--*the allure of the Aegean island,
...our life here was just a momentary illusion, and someday reality would yank us back to the world we came from. But until that time came I wanted to enjoy each day to the fullest, without worrying about anything.*the mysterious occurrence of Sumire's disappearance in the middle of the night and what had preceded it,
*K's narrating Miu's story which also contains the nun's and Sumire's stories, and
*the individualized characters--K, e.g. "think[s] deeply about things, no matter what the subject", Miu a concert pianist with a secret past that made her hair turn white overnight, and Sumire a novelist with a physical passion for the older woman Miu. What characters plan to do is unknown how it will go but s/he decides to go ahead. Relationship is impermanent like passing objects in outer space
...we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in abolute solitude. Until we burned up and become nothing.
In Sputnik Sweetheart, the characters acknowledge there is a world they don't know or understand. K reads Sumire's two documents in which Sumire writes,"...everything we think we absolutely have pegged lurks an equal amount of the unknown.She is artfully writing what is generally abbreviated as 'being able to live with ambiguity'. Afterward, K reads her retelling of own dream about her vanishing mother and of Miu's telling her about the illogical adventure on the ferris wheel that happened fourteen years ago and split herself into two. Sumire regards thinking and dreams as opening doors into the incomprehensible.
Understanding is but the sum of our misunderstandings."
"That's gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way."
I really loved Sputnik Sweetheart and the themes of loneliness, identity, and unrequited love. I think what draws me in every time is not so much the characters or the plot, since I have had different opinions based on which Murakami novel I read, but it is more how he tells the story: how the layers relate, how he pulls multiple pieces together, and how he can offer multiple perspectives.
Jenny, your post about the importance of "how he tells the story...how he pulls multiple pieces together..." is similar to how Murakami describes his writing in "The Paris Review" Interview, Summer 2004:"Narratives are very important nowadays in writing books. I don’t care about theories. I don’t care about vocabulary. What is important is whether the narrative is good or not."
"I get some images and I connect one piece to another. That’s the story line. Then I explain the story line to the reader. "
He also says that 'Hard-boiled...", "Dance...", "Wind-up Bird...", and "Sputnik..." share a theme of obsession, a man being drawn out of his world to regain his object of desire. "Kafka...", one of his favorites, differs a bit with alternating story lines and a protagonist for each.
In the last chapter of Sputnik Sweetheart, Murakami sums up nicely through K's narration how individual "threads" of memory link the present and past. Miu's father's statue is a metaphor for Miu's "immeasurable emptiness" on the inside though life goes along as always on the outside.So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us--that's snatched right out of our hands...we continue to play our lives out this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behing a feeling of immeasurable emptiness.Those memories provide K a simulacrum of flesh-and-blood feeling.
...And as we live out lives we discover--drawing toward us the thin threads attached to each--what has been lost. I closed my eyes and tried to bring to mind as many beautiful lost things as I could. Drawing them closer, holding on to them. Knowing all the while that their lives were fleeting.
Yes I loved that passage!
Asmah wrote: "A trio of people in which one of them goes elsewhere, as in the first story, happens in the second "Landscape with Flatiron", the title of Mr Miyake's painting in the short stories "After the Quake..."In this story Miyake said "there's such a thing as a way of living that's guided by the way a person's going to die."
I can't quite catch the meaning of this, I can only think it the other way round. It seems to imply people's deaths are premeditated in some way.
Motheaten wrote: "In this story Miyake said "there's such a thing as a way of living that's guided by the way a person's going to die." I can't quite catch the meaning of this..."
Maybe either way is similar--people's living and dying connected.
If Miyake is afraid of slowly dying in a locked refrigerator, according to his dreams, he won't have a refrigerator. His living is guided by the premonition of dying that way even though his premonition might be inexact. One instance of living and dying is the story's example of the Jack London character who thought he'd die drowning but actually died through drinking too much alcohol and taking morphine; he died because of the way he lived, and also lived his life on land because he feared drowning at sea. Junko mentions the story of another London character, who knows he's going to freeze outdoors so tries to light fires; also, he freezes because he in these extraordinary circumstances can't make a fire to keep alive.
A second instance of living and dying is the bonfire of driftwood Miyake builds like a sculpture. He knows by the sea's sound when the driftwood is coming in and knows by learning and talent how the pieces should be arranged and monitored for gently warming, free flames. The perfectly made bonfire warms Junko, Keisuke, and Miyake, physically and emotionally (Junko's feelings of functional family), on the beach during the February night before it dies and it is cold. The stages of the bonfire starting, growing, and flaming are planned and sustained by Miyake as long as possible, a fire neither too slow or too fast.
All he had to do was look at the way the pieces of wood were combined to begin having mental images of the subtlest movement of the rising flames, the way a sculptor can imagine the pose of a figure hidden in a lump of stone."Premeditated in some way" is true because it acknowledges freedom to get their hands and thoughts around it.
Junko's character is different. In her "emptiness" in living, she isn't thinking how she's going to live or die. It is Miyake who makes the statement you mention,
Miyake gave a nod. "I know what you mean," he said. "But there's such a thing as a way of living that's guided by the way a person's going to die."Miyake tentatively regards his statement as absolutely true. From those words, Junko thinks how she might live or die in the world with Miyake
"Is that how you're living?" she asked.
"I'm not sure. It seems that way sometimes.
Miyake's arm across her shoulders was rather small for that of a grown man, and strangely bony. I could never live with this man, she thought. I could never get inside his heart. But I might be able to die with him.Both of them are pleased to share the moment with someone else, yet both have their own thoughts and as Miyake had said, their "separate paths". Dying is a solitary event; their talk of sharing dying, and maybe how they will die, makes them guides of it.
Dying is solitary indeed. Thanks for the explanation Asmah.
The novel A Wild Sheep Chase and "A Sputnik Sweetheart" share the same genre but a different genre than the short stories in "After the Quake". Of all three, "A Wild Sheep..." is very amusing so far. In spare moments, like traveling, I'm reading one of Donald Keene's early overviews about Japanese aesthetics, poetry, drama--The Pleasures of Japanese Literature. The characteristics of irregularity and suggestiveness in that critique is visible in "The Wild Sheep..." images, e.g. the odd number of sheep. their indistinct scattering across a plain under a sky with white clouds, etc.
The protagonist is about thirty years old, recently divorced and going out with a psychic girlfriend, a former ear model. Without giving away the title and plot, it must be said that the story at this point, 23%, is quite suspenseful because the reader as well as the protagonist want to know why a photograph tossed into an office desk drawer brings him to the attention of the conservative kingpin of the political, stock-market, and advertising worlds.
Compared to the quiet stories in "After the Quake", "A Wild Sheep Chase" is just plain fun to read on the surface yet has ideas worth considering: communication and existence; individual cognition in western humanism. This novel has a lot of fantasy; and the writing knows how to prolong a long moment with a character's gesture. The story opens with the regular guy and his life in advertising; about a fifth through, his drifter friend, the Rat, introduces an unstable element, coming out of a long absence to make requests by letter that take the regular guy on one of many trips that become more deeply mysterious before the regular guy straightens out the chaos.
In "A Wild Sheep Chase", the setting in the second half, i.e., during the active hunt for the marked sheep, is on the big, northernmost, mountainous Japanese island, Hokkaido (capital, Sapporo), where a disheveled hotel, formerly Hokkaido Ovine Hall, is a historical repository of leads for the search.
Asmah wrote: "In "A Wild Sheep Chase", the setting in the second half, i.e., during the active hunt for the marked sheep, is on the big, northernmost, mountainous Japanese island, Hokkaido (capital, Sapporo), wh..."I'm not enjoying the book much. The plot meanders and the sheep chase is obscure. There's a lot of symbolism in the book but my interest is not holding enough for me to read more into them. I'm not into the detective elements. To find some clarification I read this review:
http://writeronwriter.wordpress.com/2...
I found reading your posts to be very interesting :) I only read "Sputnik Sweetheart" from this collection and it was a very strange experience , as a novella I liked After Dark more.
Motheaten wrote: "I'm not enjoying the book much. The plot meanders and the sheep chase is obscure. There's a lot of symbolism in the book but my interest is not holding.."I reached the part after the the journey through the remote cliffs to the sheep ranch. The plot is losing its touch with earthiness and explanations, the characters having found the photographed place now wondering what to do in the next week.
I like the wordpress review you mention, as the novel also refers to the irony in hard-working characters toiling to improve their lives and that of next generations only to find the tide of larger forces beyond their ken erasing it out.
From reading Keene's "The Pleasure of Japanese Aesthetics", I'm picking out Murakami's descriptions of the sheep ranch, the cloud formations, and the other things that would be beautiful from that aesthetic perspective but would be cold, wet, appalling to me.
Nile daughter wrote: "I found reading your posts to be very interesting :) I only read "Sputnik Sweetheart" from this collection and it was a very strange experience , as a novella I liked After Dark more."Reading Haruki Murakami is an interesting experience. If some of my enthusiasm about his stories filters through my comments, that's super. I don't have any favorite; maybe after I've read all of them, I'll have a favorite one.
An interesting historical point in "A Wild Sheep Chase" was the many changes Junitaki-cho went through from its founding in 1881 through the Russo-Japanese War in China to its present declining state in 1978 when the protagonist is reading "The Authoritative History of Junitaki-cho" that describes the highlights of the early cold-weather agricultural economy that foundered in repaying interest. With declining population lumber milling was taken up. A study showed that "the townsfolk, when they came home from work, watched an average of four hours of television before going to bed each night." While the town could prosper from ski tourism, e.g., nothing has been done to put that plan in place. Murakami also describes through the Sheep Man how sheep act in a group and how they quarrel and why.
Of all three introductory books to "1Q84", "A Wild Sheep Chase" was more like a linear, plot-driven mystery (figuring out identities, even the one in the sheep costume; what happens next) even though there is a disappearance (Sumire) in "Sputnik Sweetheart", a later work more sophisticated in describing subsconsciousness (Miu). I enjoyed the vastly different environment/settings in each of those. "After the Quake" is a story collection, several of the tales better appreciated upon a second reading. The few non-linear aspects of "A Wild Sheep..." plot was the protagonist's reading to the reader from "The Authoritative History of Junitaki-cho" and the Sheep Professor's relating his younger years.
There are still some questions about the future of a few characters when the two novels end. Let's just say, the endings might not be 100% logical.
The World's Literature in Europe
Books mentioned in this topic
After Dark (other topics)After Dark (other topics)
A Wild Sheep Chase (other topics)
The Pleasures of Japanese Literature (other topics)
Sputnik Sweetheart (other topics)
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After the Quake,
Sputnik Sweetheart,
A Wild Sheep Chase.