Murakami, unexplained
If you’ve only heard of one Japanese novelist, chances are it’s Haruki Murakami.
Titles such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, IQ84 and Norwegian Wood are ubiquitous in bookshops across the writer’s home country and abroad. While Western readers may see Murakami as the quintessentially ‘weird and wonderful’ (Penguin’s words) Japanese storyteller, for many Japanese readers he is the voice of a globalised Japan navigating its identity.
Regardless, Murakami has unwillingly become an ambassador for Japan’s culture — somebody with the power to draw international attention to his younger contempories, such as Mieko Kawakami, but also to inadvertedly mislead some Western readers about what it means to be Japanese. As far as I know, cats do not actually talk or stroll into alternate dimensions.
Murakami is the kind of writer to inspire both cultlike fanaticism and fervent criticism (two things never far apart). This poses a challenge for serious critique, but it also makes it necessary. There are many characteristic traits of the author, but I want to look at a less explored element: the structure.
Recently picking up his short story collection Blind Woman, Sleeping Willow, I was stoppped in my tracks by New York Mining Disaster, an early example of the writer’s shortform prose. It seemed like the most notorious example of a stylistic feature that has cropped up many times in his fiction.
Murakami’s stories are notable for featuring an indistinct male protagonist who undergoes an existential, and often pyschosexual, journey of self-understanding. Along the way curious things happen, often not fully explained. His prose style, as usually translated by Phillip Gabriel or Jay Rubin into English, is sleek and straightfoward, much like Raymond Carver. This bluntness diffentiates his brand of Magical Realism.
Let’s look at it this way. When Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes something inexplicable we simply accept it as an expression of personal, historical and political themes he is trying to convey. Yet when Murakami writes about a monkey who steals people’s names, he is plainly inviting us to enter a magical world. While on some level, his stories flirt with philosophy and the nature of reality, they also serve as a form of escapism, a space where readers are free to project their own interpretations.
The writer has practically admitted as much. In Novelist as Vocation, Murakami talks about how his lack of ambitions to be a writer free him from the burdensome expectations that usually come with such a title. The spontaneity of his writing leads his stories to unexpected places — such as the bottom of a well in The Wind up Bird Chronicle — and has the kind of broad appeal usually limited to fantasy books.
In reality, no writer is completely liberated from rules — at most, they can style the rules in their own image. Problems can emerge when this style undermines the structure — but sometimes those problems are innovations.
Miner issue
Which brings us to New York Mining Disaster, which, despite being appropriately concise, tests the limits of the short story format — and the reader’s patience.
The setup is somewhat similar to Yūko Tsushima’s Flames, a chapter (and arguably self-contained story) from her novel Territory of Light: a young protagonist encounters a series of coinciding funerals from different causes. Flames, like the rest of Tsushima’s novel, is a vignette which combines a mother’s experience with her young daughter with flashes of dreamlike symbolism. The deaths may be an indication of the old part of her dying, as her husband surprisingly agrees to divorce.
Murakami is far more esoteric with his symbolism, and maybe that’s putting it mildly. His narrator’s friend enjoys going to zoos at strange times, such as during typhoons, and has a series of girlfriends who all look exactly the same (critics of the author’s portrayal of women may find this very apt). He engages with the narrator in a series of aimless, yet oddly-tinted conversations, that ends the morbid remark that not all deaths end in funerals. In the next scene, the narrator is at a New Year’s party, when a woman claims he looks like a friend of hers who died. At last, the story ends with a group of miners in a collapsed tunnel underground. The synergy of these images is not immediately obvious, but motifs emerge on successive reads. Murakami seems to be commenting on how death is always very near to us, yet unnervingly abstract — like a TV news story about some foreign disaster that can simply be switched off. For the miners waiting in darkness, it is life that lies just outside of the frame — an image that, following on from the blasé oddity of what came before it, seems practically melodramatic.
I’m not particularly confident in my analysis, and I suppose you could say that’s the point. Some online hearsay has suggested the woman could be kind of shinigami — death spirit in Japanese mythology — but this only raises more questions. It seems that the unknowable is not only a common theme for Murakami, but a key feature of his story structure. While this is now a trademark of his, that doesn’t mean it should be excused for its laziness. New York Mining Disaster doesn’t rub me the wrong way, because I feel it does genuinely manage to baffle. The same style that can feel fresh early in a writer’s career can feel unbearably stale later on, no matter how novel it is.
The other way of looking at it is that Murakami has stayed consistent. I think his fans are drawn to the reliable strangeness of his writing in a world of extremely volatile strangness. Nonetheless, there is another example that shows him exploring a similar structure with more finesse.
Elephant outside the room
Whether you think he’s better at novels or short stories, Murakami deserves credit for at least a few examples where he really makes the most of the shortform format. Some of the best and most successful short story writers, from Anton Chekhov, to Alice Munro, to George Saunders, have understood that the advantage of the form is its sheer liberty. As a small commitment for both writer and reader, short stories can be vehicles for leftfield concepts; stuff that the long and formal process of constructing a novel may iron out. An Elephant Vanishes, a short story which also gives its title to one of Murakami’s earlier collections, shows the writer making the most out of the medium.
From the first lines the writer establishes intrigue:
When the elephant disappeared from our town’s elephant house, I read about it in the newspaper. My alarm clock woke me that day, as always, at six-thirteen. I went to the kitchen, made coffee and toast, turned on the radio, spread the paper out on the kitchen table, and proceeded to munch and read. I’m one of those people who read the paper from beginning to end, in order, so it took me a while to get to the article about the vanishing elephant. The front page was filled with stories on S.D.I. and the trade friction with America, after which I plowed through the national news, international politics, economics, letters to the editor, book reviews, real-estate ads, sports reports, and finally the regional news.
The elephant article was the lead story in the regional section. The unusually large headline caught my eye: “ELEPHANT MISSING IN TOKYO SUBURB,” and, beneath that, in type one size smaller, “Citizens’ Fears Mount. Some Call for Probe.” There was a photo of policemen inspecting the empty elephant house. Without the elephant, something about the place seemed wrong. It looked bigger than it needed to be, blank and empty like some huge, dehydrated beast from which the innards had been plucked.
We soon learn that the narrator has a personal interest in the elephant case, keeping tabs on every development since the animal was adopted by the town as a concession for the zoo closing. This character fits the Murakami archetype of a male in his thirties who percieves or experiences strange phenomena, so nudged towards questioning the very structure of existence.
I hope I am not spoiling the story for you in revealing that the elephant has, it seems, vanished into thin air, along with his keeper. Only the narrator, who enjoyed watching the inside of the elephant’s lodgings through an air vent, has any clue of how this happened. Of course the eccentricities of this character make him more, rather than less, believable. Who wouldn’t secretly go to great lengths to look at an elephant?
If anybody had asked me why I bothered doing such a thing, I wouldn’t have had a decent answer. I simply enjoyed watching the elephant during its private time.
Rather than leading us towards a revelation, Murakami instead deepens the mystery. The narrator has seen the size of the elephant and the keeper change, as he recounts to a woman at a work event in the second half of the story. While it might seem that the woman will be able to shed a light on things, she is instead drawn into this whirlpool of perlexity. Despite their chemistry, he doesn’t ask her out after the night they meet, feeling that ‘It just didn’t seem to matter, one way or another’. He feels that ‘some kind of balance has broken in me since the elephant affair’. It seems that the reader has also been slowly disorientated.
The ending reminds us that life is full of mysteries that are neither wonderful or terrible, but sometimes frustrating, able to tip the invisible balance that underscores our lives. Indeed, the answers to the questions the story poses — where did the elephant and its keeper go? And why?– could never be as meaningful as the void in answer, the hanging question marks.
Murakami has suggested that for his novels he often comes up wih the title before writing the story. Perhaps he took a similar approach with his short stories: the title of The Elephant Vanishes feels like the starting point, rather than the natural denomination of a wholly preconcieved and planned, batshit crazy idea.
If so, it would be fair to say that Murakami’s approach is refreshing, but also limited. Lewis Caroll is one of the most famous children’s authors in the English Language, but the appeal of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel seem almost circumstantial; the British author was unable to recreate their success beyond a few instances of ‘nonsense poetry’ that are closely associated with the books in question.
Murakami has not stuck entirely to nonsense himself, but he has certainly carved a niche for himself (cue this Murakami bingo card). This doesn’t mean he’s a one trick pony: if anything, his longevity has depended adapting to shifting publishing markets, and what he describes in the introduction of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman as the natural propulsion gained from alternating between writing novels and short stories. Regarding the latter, it seems that this technique enables him to approach both forms with fresh eyes.
It also means that things that are acceptable in short stories sometimes get tediously drawn out into novels, and ideas that are better suited to developing over the course of a novel appear underbaked in short story form. I’m not sure where I’d place The Elephant Vanishes, but one thing’s for certain: large mammals can only disappear once before arousing suspicion.
Dazed and confused
Telling is this Guardian interview in which Murakami explains that his novels have often been very successful in times and places of great confusion, such as when the Berlin Wall fell down, or in 1990s Russia. I have heard the advice several times that a writer should always know the answers, even if they choose not to reveal all to the reader. I suspect Murakami more often than not flouts this rule, simply letting his stories go where they please, not pressuring them for answers. If there is a reassurance in his fiction, it is not because it provides answers, but precisely because it avoids them: a confirmation of how confused we all are.
From time to time this ‘reassurance’ can feel cashed-in, but the author artfully evades criticism by hiding behind the wall of his established style. U.F.O in Kushiro possibly represents the point in Murakami’s career when the gung-ho experimentalism of early stories such as New York Mining Disaster had been refined into a science. Although it is meant to reflect the sense of disorientation and reconfiguration of the 1995 Kobe earthquake (this is the first entry in Murakami’s collection After the Quake), the story unfortunately suffers from some familiar trappings.
The protagonist is Komura, a handsome audio equipment salesman with about as much depth as a pot noodle. When his wife leaves him he is given little more explanation than ‘living with you is like living with a chunk of air’. It seems that the earthquake has affected Komura’s wife, but Komura can’t quite figure out how or why.
When Komura expresses to his younger colleague that he is taking a break, he suggests to Komura that he goes to Hokkaido, and asks if he will deliver a package to his sister. Komura, the sort of man who sees no reason why not, agrees, and is greeted by two young women – Keiko Sasaki, the sister, and her friend, Shimao – after he debarks from his plane.
This should be where the main plot element occurs, but instead we get a series of curious exchanges as they get airport coffee, eat at a ramen restaurant and check Komura in at a love hotel (for some reason). With nothing left to achieve, Keiko’s character swiftly disappears, leaving Komura and Shimao in the hotel room, — you can guess where this is going. This appears like an open acknowledgement from the author that he really didn’t have anything else planned for the women, and it comes as a slap in the face. It does, however, allow for a discussion about the nature of the box that Komura delivered to Keiko.
There is an undertone of unprocessed loss in the story, the sense of people and places disappearing with absurd rapidity. This is as true for the fallout of earthquakes as it is relationships. Keiko Saseki assumes Komura’s wife has died, because her brother said Komura had lost her; Komura assures her that she only left him, but determines that ‘either way, she’s gone’. The ambiguity of language reflects, much like New York Mining Disaster, our lack of vocabularly to effectively address loss.
The story also uses the trademark Murakami detachment to strong effect, as in this sequence where Komura reads about the earthquake on his flight to Hokkaido:
The morning paper was full of earthquake reports. He read it from beginning to end on the plane. The number of dead was rising. Many areas were still without water and electricity, and countless people had lost their homes. Each article contained some new tragedy, but to Komura those tragedies registered as oddly lacking in depth. The aftermath of the earthquake was like a distant monotonous echo to him. The only thing he could give any serious thought to was his wife’s drawing ever further away.
Komura’s lack of connection to the events stand in stark contrast to his wife’s obsession. In his piece A Walk to Kobe, Murakami describes returning to his hometown two years after the destruction of the earthquake. However he is unable to recognise much of it.
How much of this was due to the normal changes over time, and how much was because of the physical devastation brought on by the earthquake, I really couldn’t say.
U.F.O. in Kushiro explores both kinds of changes: the natural (effects of time and progress) and the unnatural (sudden disasters or inexplicable events). Komura’s wife retreats to the past — escaping, it seems, to Yamagata, where her parents run a successful inn. Meanwhile, Komura must push uncomfortably ahead with the future, as symbolised in the flight from Tokyo to Hokkaido which leaves him disoriented, and by the mysterious delivery he must make.
As the story progresses, Komura finds himself increasingly drawn into the images of the earthquake, much like his wife. Even as he seems to regain confidence, the disaster hangs over him; it has permeated the collective consciousness.
Murakami has said he is inspired by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and moral themes can certainly be found in the Japanese author’s work. However, Dostoevsky was revolutionary, in part, because of his invention of literary ‘polyphony’ — what Mikhail Bahtin describes as ‘a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses.’ This element is sometimes lacking in Murakami’s fiction, as he seems to put a greater emphasis on Jungian development of self, as well as structuring his stories according to the traditional hero’s journey. U.F.O in Kushiro arguably suffers from this: the story suggests different perspectives, but fails to develop them. Komura’s wife, Keiko and Shimao do not seem to exist on their own terms; they are gears to rotate the mystery around Komura, and the reader. The story is close to being meaningful — the description of the destruction, and the character’s strange relationship with the earthquake is captivating — but it fails to convince.
Closing notes
Can a writer be judged on three short stories he wrote at different points in his career? Since that writer is more renowned for his novels, you might say not. Although some would say these two mediums represent different sides of Murakami, I’m less and less sure that’s the case. Although some writers may feel the short story form allows them to express things they can’t do effectively in novels, for Murakami there is a lot of overlap. He’s switching gears, but staying in the same lane.
The writer is at his best when nudging us towards a different perspective of the world — seeing its bizarre unconscious. Sometimes he is too visible in his writing, in the way he artificially creates problems and resolutions. But more often than not, he manages to push the envelope, forging ahead with little regard to whether he tarnishes his legacy or cements it.
