Murakami
January 30, 2025
When I find myself bringing up Haruki Murakami in conversation, I often feel a little embarrassed.
For example, I was at a friend of my girlfriend's for dinner. We were all packed into her 23rd floor apartment with thick black shag carpets on the shiny white floor tiles. After we were done eating my girlfriend whispered in my ear "You should help do the dishes."
In other people's houses, I never volunteer to do anything. I'm scared I'll break a rule and get kicked out. Maybe I’ll put the dishes to dry in the wrong spot, or I’ll start using a special that corrodes away the coating of the lacquerware. This is why my girlfriend has gradually taken on the role of my conscience when we leave the house — a kind of external artificial conscience, not unlike the iron lung that allows polio patients to breathe.
So, at her insistence, I stood up without a word, and took a stack of bowls and plates into the kitchen while everyone else was still lost in the midst of dialogue. Just as I was holding a plate above me, observing it as it glittered in the setting sun, trying to decide what dish washing method would be least likely to incite controversy, the friend whose house we were at suddenly walked into the kitchen.
"What!" she exclaimed, startling me. "You're actually doing the dishes? My boyfriend never does dishes."
It's only then that I calmed down and remembered that no one cares how I wash dishes.
"Isn't your boyfriend a guitarist?" I said, after I was finished. "You know, Haruki Murakami wrote a novel about a guy who loves to wash dishes, but his wife leaves him for a guitarist who can't do dishes. The guitarist says he's too scared he'll mess his fingers up before a performance."
These are the kinds of Murakami anecdotes I'm constantly thinking of when I'm around other people. I wonder if I'd feel embarrassed in the same way if I were coming up with Raymond Carver anecdotes all the time? I've never been able to get into Raymond Carver though.
I started thinking last Spring about the problem of why I'm so embarrassed about having read all of Haruki Murakami’s novels in English (other than Killing Commendatore). I figured this was one of those topics I could save for one of those days when I start getting nervous that it's been too long since I've posted an essay on here. All I’d have to do is sit down, close my eyes, and let the words spill out. When I actually tried to do this though, what I found was, rather than writing about Murakami, I'd write about eras in my life when I'd been reading a lot of Murakami. I'd write long passages about busses I've ridden and sofas I've sat on — all of which seemed intimately connected in my mind to Murakami — but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't make the man himself take stage — not in a natural way at least.
As such, it's been nearly a year, and I still haven't written this essay that I thought would be so easy.
The time has come to change that. Maybe it's because I've been cat-sitting these past few days. Cats are a favorite theme of his after all. I wake up every morning at 5am in a stranger's bed to the sound of this cat's meows, looking out the window at the black leaves rustling in the wind, wondering if today's the day it'll finally rain. The cat is standing in the middle of the grey living room, staring at me, just barely illuminated by the street lamps outside.
To put it simply, Murakami is embarrassing because he writes about sex in all sorts of situations when it seems like he shouldn't. His male characters are emotionally stunted, lost in the midst of isolation, and the object of that isolation is often a woman. Lots of people are familiar with Murakami, more than any other author I like, but when they talk about him, they're always bringing up the same five things — never the aspects of Murakami that really affected me. So when I talk about him to someone who isn't sympathetic, I worry that it's easy to miss the point of whatever I'm trying to express, bringing him up.
One of the beautiful things about Murakami's writing is that, if nothing else, he's honest. It's not the confessional honesty one finds in, say, Naoya Shiga or Osamu Dazai. It's a quiet kind of honesty. While it's true that the submerged psyche turns to dust on contact with air, Murakami is still willing to sprinkle that dust on the ground to feed the birds. He rubs lots of people the wrong way because of this — he even weirds me out sometimes — but that's just the price of honesty. This is also why I find it difficult to write about him. His honesty demands my own honesty.
"Why can't I just be honest?" I think to myself.
If someone asked me to define honesty, I'd have no idea what to say. I often think I'm being honest when I'm writing, only the crawl into bed at night and realize it's all just been lies. As such, I'm probably not the most reliable person when it comes to determining whether or not a work of literature is honest. Maybe art is all just deception in various shades. Yet I figure if I'm going to be able to make any progress towards the stated purpose of this essay of mine, I should probably start out by examining this sensation I call "honesty".
Raymond Carver has a collection of stories: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Murakami took this name for one of his own books and changed it to What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. From this we can infer two things:
Instead of love, he writes about sex and unsatisfactory human connections. Like many authors, he has one story that he's been telling over and over in various forms, never quite getting it out.
On the Stone Pillow is fairly representative. The narrator of the story reminisces about a tiny self-published book of poetry that a lady working with him sent him in the mail a few weeks after quitting her job. On her last day they'd thrown a party for her, and since they lived in the same direction they took the train home together. By the time they got to his stop however, she didn't feel like going any farther. She got off with him, they had a few more beers at his house, then she took her clothes off and had sex with him. The only stipulation attached to the sex however was that he had to let her scream another man's name — the name of her already-married boyfriend — at the top of her lungs. Since the walls were thin and the neighbors might hear, she suggested he get a towel ready so she could bite down on it when the urge to scream began. The next morning she left, but not before mentioning she was a tanka poet. The narrator asked what kind of tanka she wrote. She promised to send him her collection.
Here is one of her poems:
When I press my ear
against the stone pillow
The sound of blood flowing
is absent, absent.
The story reminded me a bit of Murakami's first novel Hear the Wind Sing: a story framed as a long-essay about the imaginary science fiction author Derek Hartfeld, a kind of Kurt Vonnegut that never grew old. The "wind" in the title comes from one of Hartfeld's stories. It's the wind of Mars, which speaks to the young protagonist of the story after he emerges from the system of tunnels beneath the surface of planet. Apparently he'd been wandering in there for a billion and a half years. When he comes out, the wind tells him the sun only has 100,000 years left until it dies. He asks the Martian wind what it’s learned over the course of all these billions of years, but the wind only laughs. He then pulls out a revolver from his pocket and shoots himself.
In my mind, Derek Hartfeld and the Tanka writer in On the Stone Pillow are the same sort of character. One's an American author who jumped off the Empire State Building at the height of the Great Depression, and the other is a twenty something lady living in Japan during the second half of the 20th century — the kind of person who has to switch jobs every few months, spending her nights pining over an already-married middle-aged man who will never love her.
If we wanted to simplify things, if we wanted to make Murakami "comprehensible", we could say these two characters represent his two "unreachable obsessions", the two things he has spent his life thinking about without ever attaining something that could be called understanding: Women and America.
However I think it's precisely my propensity for simplifications like these which introduces dishonesty into my understanding of Murakami. He never resorts to such shortcuts towards "relatability". He doesn't edit logic into his books. I don't mean this in the sense that he writes "magical realism", a phrase which I have always found kind of dumb. The most mysterious and haunting elements of his books aren't the supernatural events (my favorite books by him are the ones that are firmly "realism") — instead it's in the hearts of those closest to his protagonists that darkness lies. Often these characters are women, but sometimes, as in Norwegian Wood or Dance Dance Dance, these are men.
Toru Watanabe, the protagonist of Norwegian Wood has a friend named Nagasawa living in the same college dorm as him who taught him how to sleep with girls. Nagasawa takes him to bars and without fail he finds Watanabe a girl to spend the night with. Over the first half of the book this happens several times. He meets all sorts of girls. Girls who disappear in the morning, girls who complain about how much their heads hurt from all the alcohol they'd drank, and girls who start asking him personal questions, like whether or not he's ever eaten frogs before, then invite him out for breakfast and ask when they'll see him again. This goes on for over a year, then one night something goes wrong. No matter how many bars they visit, Nagasawa can't find any girls who are interested. They end up splitting apart and since it's past the curfew at his dorm, Watanabe sees a movie: the Graduate. He wonders the streets at that early hour before the trains have started running, finds a cafe and sits down to read The Magic Mountain. Two women sit down with him and, after some awkward small talk, he learns that one got cheated on by her boyfriend, so the other had delayed her travel plans for the night before (she had a wedding to attend) to this morning in order to console her. He gets talking with them. They end up at a bar — the kind of bar open at 6am — and he listens to these two women's stories. When the time comes, they send the second girl off to the train station together. The first girl, the one who got cheated on, suggests they go to a hotel. They share a bath and have sex. He falls asleep and when he wakes up past noon, she's gone.
So it turns out Watanabe can get girls without Nagasawa — he has a style all his own. Yet, the whole time he's doing all this, he's wondering how Nagasawa feels. Picking up girls himself without Nagasawa's help hasn't gotten him any closer to understanding him — the life of a man who's slept with over 80 women before turning 22.
The pivotal event of the novel, around which everything else turns, is a dinner Watanabe has with Nagasawa and Hatsumi, Nagasawa's steady girlfriend, despite the countless other girls he sleeps with. Nagasawa tells Hatsumi that Watanabe is no different from him, but Hatsumi doesn't believe her. So Nagasawa has Watanabe tell her about the time they "swapped", when they brought two girls to a hotel and checked into two rooms right next to each other. After a few hours, Nagasawa got worried that the one Watanabe had gone in with was too ugly, so he knocked on their door and asked if they wanted to switch. Watanabe liked the ugly girl, but he asked her what she wanted to do. She said she was ok with it. So they swapped.
“You know, Toru," she said, "I have no idea what makes your situation so "complicated', but I do think that the kind of thing you just told me about is not right for you. You're not that kind of person. What do you think?" She placed her hands on the table and looked me in the eye.
"Well," I said, "I've felt that way myself sometimes.”
Long after the events of the novel, Nagasawa would go to Europe to work in the foreign service, and Hatsumi would kill herself. This is the only jump-forward in the entire book. It's quite jarring, to suddenly be reminded that the narrator is writing about events from 20 years earlier.
I suppose those Tanka from On the Stone Pillow could just have well been written by Hatsumi. The truth of the matter though is that they written by Murakami — all these characters that Murakami can't understand, they're just parts of himself.
Murakami's father wrote poetry too. In his essay Abandoning a Cat, Murakami writes about his father going off to war, and mailing his haiku back home from the war front to get published in the newspapers:
A soldier, yet a priest
clasping my hands in prayer
toward the moon
Growing up after the war was over, Murakami would hear his father wake up early every morning to recite sutras while everyone else was still in bed. He asked his father only once what all this was for.
“I’m praying for the Japanese soldiers that died in the war and the Chinese that they killed.”
I've realized over the years that this is precisely what I'm reacting to when I read Murakami's books. These aren't stories. These are prayers for all the people Murakami is incapable of understanding, the wells of darkness that he walks past everyday, that he can never approach now no matter hard he pushes his flesh against theirs. These books are records of failed prayers. Maybe compared to victims of a massive war, it's less dramatic to pray for the living, the people whose only suffering is that they're lonely — but still, someone needs to pray for them.
At the beginning of Pinball 1973, before the story proper begins, the narrator finds himself in an occupied school building during the protests of 1969 — he had an appointment to meet with a man from Saturn that wanted to tell him what Saturn was like. Despite the cold and the horrible gravity, he planned to go back after he graduated and help modernize the place. The occupants had commandeered records from the school's music library which they played non-stop. The narrator could hear the faint echo of Hadyn's Piano Sonata in G Minor while he conducted the interview. By the time the riot police broke through the barricade, everyone had learned to love classical music for life.
Is it true that they were blissing out to Vivaldi’s “Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione” at full blast when the riot police’s third division came crashing into Building Nine that perfect cloudless November day? Whether fact or fiction, it endures as one of the more heartwarming legends revolving around the year that was 1969.
I remember being surprised when I read somewhere that Murakami was a favorite of the June 4th generation in China. It turns out Norwegian Wood was translated into Chinese in 1989. After I thought about it for a moment, about the rising sun, Japan's national flag, lurking in the background of the novel, raised aloft with ceremony each morning and hovering over the protagonist, outside his window, about the students who walked in on the narrator's class on Euripides because they had more important things to talk about (the professor replied "I can't think of anything that could be more important than Euripides, but very well, go ahead”), and about the escape to a world in the forest where a middle aged woman confined for life plays Beatles songs on the guitar (one might compare this to the lyrics of Snail's Home, another favorite of the protestors) — in a word, when I thought about the profound and suffocating ambivalence that runs through the book, I could understand why it might be relatable. Yet his protagonists aren't the people who did anything in these protests and occupations. They're the people in the background, doing nothing but having sex and reading early 20th century American literature.
"But still, someone needs to pray for them."
I wrote a few poems of my own, as a response to Murakami — not to any of his books in particular, but a response nonetheless.
This flesh that is
not you feels so warm
inside me —
even now I taste
traces of its tears.
and
I was waiting
for you here, facing
the bus stop —
blood mixes with rain
on the black asphalt.
A few weeks ago I was helping my girlfriend cat-sit for her friend Core Duke Jazz Philosophy (Core for short). I came over around three in the afternoon to sit around in Core's sixth floor apartment with her cat Tabu. My plan was stay there and watch the sunset. Tabu was desperately lonely. As I walked up the staircase, I could hear him on the other side of the door meowing. The key to the apartment seemed to have been worn down after years of usage, so it took several moments of fiddling before I could get in, the whole time Tabu's whimpers sounded so sad and pathetic. When I did get the door open, Tabu head butted me. I fed him, but he didn't care. He kept rubbing his head against my leg, no matter where I went. I sat down at a little chair (the apartment was too small for a real desk) to get to work thinking about whatever it is I think about. Tabu crawled on top of me and gnawed on my nose. We sat like this together for several hours, sitting beneath Core's copy of Tsukasa in Wonderland. I kept wondering if I should tell Core about the strange history I have with this album — it was a favorite of a guy on the internet whom I used to like too much — but I wasn't even sure how I would bring it up. Why did she have to have this album prominently displayed, of all the 80s girly idol singer albums she could be displaying?
Being in another person's apartment, attending to their cat, I started thinking of a Haruki Murakami story I'd remembered reading about a man who takes care of a cat for a woman who's left the country, going to her apartment everyday and feeding the cat, but never actually seeing it. Had I actually read a story like this? When I got home I opened up The Elephant Vanishes to look for it. It was Barn Burning, right? I read through the opening of the story, just to check, and before I knew it I'd read through the whole thing. No cats. I read through a few other stories in the collection, yet I couldn't find what I was looking for. Was this idea implanted in my head the Lee Chang-dong movie adaption of Barn Burning? I'd gone into that movie have no idea it was based on a Murakami story. Yet I remember what tipped me off was the plot about the cat — not the barns — so it must have been something from another story, right?
Thinking of Core's apartment as the setting for a Murakami story instantly endowed it with a kind of preemptive nostalgia — I knew that as soon as I gave her back her key, I'd start missing this place I could no longer freely enter. It was the same sort of six floor building me and my girlfriend live in — the same kind of building you see everywhere in Shanghai. They're all six floors because anything taller than that is required to have an elevator.
I'm in yet another one of these apartment buildings now as I write this, cat-sitting yet another person's cat. It’s as though I’m living a mass produced life, moving from one six floor building to another, listening to the same Beatles albums I'd been listening back when I was in high school, reading Murakami for the first time.
When I first started reading Murakami in high school, no one else I knew had read anything by him. Not my parents, not my classmates and certainly not my brother. Years later, when I was already in my last year of college, my brother would bring up that his girlfriend had started reading "this one Japanese author". She was halfway through Norwegian Wood, but when I tried talking to her about it she didn't have much to say. I don't think she liked him. I doubt my brother would like him either. He'd be too easy to read for my brother. He only likes books that take at least six months to read.
Before Murakami, I'd never yet found anything my brother didn't know about. There were certainly things I liked that he didn't. I liked Final Fantasy, whereas he liked Dragon Quest. I liked the Beatles, whereas he thought any music made before the year 1991, the year of his birth, was obsolete. ("Music is technology, not art — its lifespan is on the same order of magnitude as generations of game consoles.") Still, all the things I liked were ultimately introduced into my life by him. My interest in Murakami coincided with a time of my life when I was rapidly discovering all sorts of things he'd never heard of. I was spending a lot of time on the internet, reading articles about video games. One of my favorite authors of video game articles self-published a novel about failure and disappointment. While looking at its Amazon store page, I saw 1Q84 in the little recommendation sidebar.
"1Q84 by Haruki Murakami is about two people living in Tokyo, 1984."
As silly as this advertising copy might read, it caused a little lightbulb to turn on in my head.
"Maybe I should read this book and learn what it's like to be a person (two people) living in Tokyo, 1984."
I think what struck me most about the book was the way all the characters inexplicably had such intimate knowledge of Bach. They'd refer to his pieces not by their names, but by the BWV numbers.
Later I'd learn that Haruki Murakami has a reputation for being overly-Western (or "deracinated", as I read one person write). I didn't really think about this when I first read his books. Somehow, the West, remade in the eyes of a man who'd spent his formative years along the coast of Japan, ended up feeling more foreign to me the "authentic Japan" I'd read about in, say, Kawabata's novels. Though it’s not like Kawabata's novels don't have the West all over them too. I've ultimately come to the conclusion that chasing some kind of authentic version of another country through literature, especially 20th century literature, is a fool's errand. Even when I read Du Fu's poetry in the original language, it's still entering my "Western mind", being incorporated into the massive network of "Western knowledge" I've accumulated over the course of this life of mine. There's something nice about Murakami writing about Bach and writing about the Beatles in a way far more personal way than I ever could, despite certain arbitrary criteria designating Bach, the Beatles and me all as "Western." (I should note that Murakami does in fact write about Japanese things all the time — for instance Ayumi Ishida or Natsume Sōseki — but such references slid past my eyes when I first started reading Murakami back in high school.)
So all these years later, the me who is in this other person's apartment, chasing this cat around trying to take a picture of her with my Minolta SR-7, still carries around that imagination I'd gained from Murakami of what it was like to be living in Tokyo in 1969, 1970, 1973, 1978, 1983, 1984 and so on. I can't imagine any of these pictures will turn out well, I'm sad to say. The lighting isn't very good inside and I can't seem to get her to go to the window. The point of taking pictures isn't the pictures themselves, but the opportunity to stick my eye into the world behind the viewfinder and gaze at that tiny bright rectangle floating in darkness.
I’ll end this with a poem I wrote the night I finished rereading Hear the Wind Sing, about Murakami’s home town, Kobe. It’s also about Murakami’s favorite philosopher, Immanuel Kant.
You’ve seen waves and you’ve
smelt the salty mist —
but you’ll never
know what it’s really
like, by the sea.