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1. Haruki Murakami (1949-), The Art of the Novel in 'The Wind-Up Chronicle'
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View Post #1 (Link) 1. Haruki Murakami (1949-), The Art of the Novel in 'The Wind-Up Chronicle' |
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![]() 1. Haruki Murakami, The Art of the Magical Surrealism in 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' After being inspired by both Isis’s and Spacepirate’s fantastic work regarding the poetry and short story ‘Art of-’ series, I have decided to try my hand at doing an ‘Art of-’ piece for those among us more inclined towards novels. This does not come without its difficulties, of course, but I do hope you will bear with me throughout. We open this discussion with Haruki Murakami. Some of you may ask, why Murakami? Why not David Foster Wallace, or Zadie Smith, or Don Delillo, or even George R.R. Martin? The simple answer is that Murakami is not only the perfect opener for this discussion, (as he is a superstar among the world of literature) but is also my personal area of literary expertise. Haruki Murakami’s novels deal with everything from love, death, sheep, anonymous telephone calls, pinball machines, shadows, ear sex, and wind-up birds. He is both one of the Japan’s most celebrated and criticised writers. He is Japanese, yet he rejects Japanese influences and his novels are steeped in Western Pop Culture. He writes some of the most absurd and fantastic novels of our generation, yet lives an average, routine life. He is, all in all, a thorough contradiction. Murakami first became known to the literary world of Japan after the publication of his first novel, Hear The Wind Sing, which won the Gunzo Award for new writers. According to Murakami however, this novel is so unpolished that he prevents it from being published outside of Japan. He became a bestseller after he wrote Norweigan Wood in 1986, the only ‘realistic’ novel of his to date. Due to the unprecedented reception of the book, he moved to America, where he wrote The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, considered by many to be his greatest work so-far. In total, he has written 13 novels, three collections of short stories, and a non-fiction piece on the aftermath of the 1995 Sarin Gas attack on the Tokyo Underground, as well as a memoir on running. To understand Murakami and his immense body of work, you have to look at what does and does not influence his writing. He quotes writers such as Kafka, Carver, Tolstoy and Joyce as inspiration, as well as American Pop Culture and jazz musicians. On the other hand, he notes that Japanese authors such as Kenzaburo Oe and Yasunari Kawabata do nothing for him, and he takes little from other aspects of Japanese culture, such as the genius animator Hayao Miyazaki or traditional Japanese ceremonies. It is this rejection of the traditional idea of what it means to be Japanese in a mono-cultural country that has gained him his audience, as well as garnered his critics. Upon The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle In the novel, and throughout Murakami’s work, we can note the recurring theme of loneliness and isolation, a common feeling in today’s impersonal, technology driven world. The main character of The Wind-Up Bird, Toru Okada, has been left by his cat, and subsequently his wife. This leads him into a shadow filled, surrealist alter-universe of Tokyo, occupied by fascinating and diverse characters such as the mute Cinnamon, a fashion designer who works with his mother, Nutmeg, or May Kasahara, a young girl who philosophises on the meaning of life and does part time work for a wig manufacturer. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles is a novel that marks a shift in Murakami’s attitude towards writing. Whereas previously he had shunned any political undercurrents in his stories, due to his generally apathetic attitude towards politics that had developed in the 1969 Student Riots in Tokyo, here Murakami takes a step towards looking at the deeper historical currents of modern day Japan. He interweaves the modern day tale of a man looking for his wife (and cat) at the bottom of a well with two different yet interlinked stories about the Russo-Japanese War and the final days of World War 2. The common denominator? The titular Wind-Up Bird. It would be shockingly easy for this novel to fall into the pits of pseudo-surreal-intellectualist babble in the hands of a less capable novelist, but Murakami not only manages to tell this masterful and complex story, but to pull it off beautifully. Of course, it is difficult to get a sense of the entire picture that Murakami paints for us without actually having read the book. I provide a chapter that I hope will give a sense of that inlaid absurdity and darkness that pervades the novel, and will help provoke discussion. To give it context, Toru has descended to the bottom of a well , and has a flashback about his marriage. Now as I mentioned earlier, there are pitfalls to trying to discuss a novel that not everyone has read. It is nearly impossible to focus upon specific plot points or themes that run through the novel, so I have tried to write up some questions that focus upon the larger sphere of writing novels that can be viewed from the context of The Wind-Up Bird. If anyone has any specific points they would like to discuss, they are more than welcome to bring them up. Spoiler:
For Discussion 1. In an interview with the Paris Review, Murakami talked of his characters being caught between the worlds, the ‘real world’ and the ‘spiritual world’, with women acting as the medium between these worlds. This can be seen in the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in the characters of May Kasahara and Toru Okada‘s wife. The ‘real’ May provides a source of joy and friendship for the main character, whereas his ‘spiritual’ wife disappears and thus pushes Toru to go in search of her, (despite her repeated insistence not to do so.). The ’real’ provides physical and emotional stability, but the ’spiritual’ is an unreal part of Toru, one he is haunted by. This duality is an essential part of all human minds, according to Murakami, and we must learn to navigate between them. How well does Murakami achieve this in his novels, and is this a reoccurring theme throughout literature? 2. In the same interview, Murakami said that the underlying shadow in the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was his way of describing the sensation of living in America. He felt that something was always following him, a feeling of unease, and that it would have been a different story if it had been written in Japan. Do you think that authors consciously write their feelings into novels about the environment they are in, or that their feelings are unconsciously projected onto their writing? 3. The Wind Up Bird opens with the line, ‘When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potrul of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.’, marking major themes in Murakami’s work (an average scene with references to non-Japanese culture about to be punctured by a mysterious caller). It is arguably a rather bland sentence, one that catches your intention with it’s description of the ordinary in an ordinary manner. Murakami himself says that he writes his stories in a simple manner, to be able to hold the complex plot contained within the novel. This style defines Murakami’s work, and is what makes it so accessible to new readers. This has to lead to some saying that Murakami’s work is best viewed as a whole, and that he isn’t the greatest of sentence writers. Which do you think is more important in a novel - the crafting of the sentence, or the overall sense of the novel? 4. Now, Murakami’s work is often called magical realism, yet in almost all of his novels, the characters draw attention to the surreal and fantastic events that occur around them. This seems to counter that argument that his work is magical realism, as in most works of that genre, the surreal events are simply accepted as part of that world. Would Murakami be better described as a surrealist or fantastic work, as it would not be illogical to refer to the world that his characters inhabit as an alter-universe where such things can occur. Are his novels ‘genre fiction’, or ‘literary works’? Links Paris Review Interview
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Ah man, my least favorite Murakami novel. lol If only you'd picked Sputnik Sweetheart of Kafka on the Shore, I'd be quivering with glee.
Some of these questions I'll happily answer. I'm also writing about Murakami for one part of my senior project (Sputnik Sweetheart is one of two novels I'm looking at for it) so I'll be happy to chatter on about him for a while. I have to catch a bus at the moment, though, so I'll get back to this later. |
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So Murakami, eh. He is such a conflicted author in my mind. I glanced through the chapter you posted but I have a few thoughts about him on the whole. I started to first read IQ84 when people thought he was going to win the Nobel last year - on reflection I guess a combination of high expectations and the novel being an odd first introduction to Murakami both led me to be a little disappointed with it. It wasn't a bad novel at all, gripping, interesting, surreal, long, but it still wasn't what I had expected from such a canonical figure. Anyway, after that I decided to read Blind Willow, a collection of short stories, which I must admit I thought was pretty good at the time but now I could not tell you one story that stuck with me - usually a hallmark of good collections.
In general my difficulty with Murakami is his literary heritage. Not only simplicity of prose, but of his fame in the West. It's no secret that Murakami's success came from heavy patronage from the New Yorker, who were desperate for an 'exotic' literary writer: he was touted as the 'Japanese' writer, the next big thing. The problem then is people in the West think of him as 'Japanese', which itself has fifty shades of Edward Said's Orientalism all over it, whilst in Japan his work is seen as too Americanised, pandering to Western tastes. Amongst the contemporary literary circles in Japan, I think there's a lot of criticism over the 'value' of Murakami, and how much of it is conflated by his popularity. Regardless there's no doubt Murakami is a Japanese writer, but because he monopolises the field, it obscures other writers like Banana Yoshimoto, Yoko Ogawa, Yoko Tawada, Kawakami, Kirno, Mizumura, Kanehara, the other Murakami, Shusaku Endo and Kenzaburo Oe and Kenji Nakagami amongst others. And because now an appetite for Murakami exists, Japanese literature can't escape the boundaries created by Murakami - for writers to be successful in the West, they need to be 'Murkami'-endorsed, in style and genre. The end result is a very packaged form of Japanese literature, one filled with additives and colours to be consumed by us. You mention that he rejects Japanese traditional culture and I would agree to an extent, but then, with relation to IQ84, he still perpetuates this 'mystical' idea of the Orient, of the black-tie blue-collar working drones of Japan, the emotional deadness of Tokyo - and worst of all - the sexist ideals of women. If of anything, I find most objectionable to his depictions of women and children: the image of the nubile, precocious child is one that is tiring and does nothing to reject the idea of 'Japanese culture'. None of the 'West/East contradiction' is Murakami's fault per se - as with most literary problems it's down to advertising, publicity and the 'business'. However and this goes back to my experiences of reading Murakami, I feel like his writing has become a parody of himself. IQ84 to me felt like a concoction of everything he had written before and sort of became lost within itself, whilst his story collection reinforced that idea of Murakami drawing always from the same sources to create fiction. Always the same jazz, literature, cooking, surreal motifs that by now just look like pastiches of what I imagine his old novels managed to do with freshness. It's not the motifs that's the issue, because Garcia Marquez is equally as rote, but with Murakami I think he relies sometimes too much on just those motifs to carry through - the literature is almost pop-artish, easy to be devoured (which is also why I think he has such a following: hipster, but not too difficult) but lacking in substance. Fine to read but only rarely do you need to read finely. Of course, I am totally willing to recallibrate my thoughts through reading some of his more admired works.
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[Much Read. So Lit. Проза лучше, чем поэзии.]Art of Poetry (1) - Amy Gerstler, 'For My Niece Sidney, Age Six' Art of Poetry (2) - Aimee Nezhukumatathil, 'Red Ghazal' Art of Novel (1) - Haruki Murakami, 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' Art of Short Story (1) - Alice Munro, 'Passion' Art of Short Story (2) - Lydia Davis, 'Varieties of Disturbance' |
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Okay, so I'm back after an endless commute back home.
My thoughts on Murakami in general: So, okay, I love this author. Kafka on the Shore and Sputnik Sweetheart are two of my favorite novels. I dig the surrealism, the transgression of the souls, the way he's able to shrink away from the political world he's so generally apathetic towards with his surrealism. I like seeing what it's like to experience human nature in what seems to be more of a vacuum. This strange, cold place where sex isn't just sex; it's becoming enveloped in another person, becoming a part of them. I love his attention to the mundane, how the characters enjoy the small things, because that's what fills the void. Just enjoying a bowl of pasta, or the fact that David Bowie or John Coltrane is playing on the radio. That speaks to me. The sense of incompletion the characters feel so much of the time is something I understand, and wanting desperately to fill or transform that void I think is a key aspect of human nature. I understand why some people are turned off by the redundancy of his aesthetic. To be fair I haven't read all of his books, just five or six, but they've really stuck with me, save The Wind-up Bird. I felt like he was doing an imitation of himself in that novel (which SpacePirate noted seems to be the case in 1Q84, which I didn't get far into before my school work made it so that a novel of that size would be kind of impossible to read). He's far from perfect. Julian has noted that he could use a better editor, but I'm generally quite satisfied with his works. I really love the simplicity of his prose, how easily digestible it is. I hate maximalism, with very few exceptions. I believe the best prose is that which erodes the distance between the emotional content and the reader. Fiction, to me, is experiential, and through simplifying the prose I feel like I'm better able to connect with the content. That said, there are certainly parts of Murakami's work that I think read a bit too simply, places where some nuance would liven things up. I'll also note that I think he's a crap short story writer. I've read maybe one or two of his short stories that really stuck with me. His most recent one published in the New Yorker was garbage, too. Now onto the discussion parts: 1. It depends on the novel. He handles this brilliantly, I think, in Sputnik Sweetheart, interviewing the idea of sex, sexuality, and sexual desire as this method of transgressing the physical limitation to reach achiragawa, or the other side. (SOME SPOILERS AHEAD) You have Sumire and K, who have been friends for a while, and are soul mates. Yet, because Sumire is a lesbian, the two of them cannot be in a relationship, even though K loves Sumire. Sumire desires Miu, and through Sumire's insistence on being in a relationship with Miu, loses her own identity and, finally, becomes so close to Miu that she is absorbed by her, disappearing from reality altogether. So there's this beautiful notion of transgressing one's physical limitations, and yet Sumire is not really able to be with Miu, since Miu has no sexual desire at all and, like Toru's wife, is the spiritual person. This odd, quiet individual, somewhat cold, hard to fully understand, and yet not terribly complex. So there's this dark side to the transgression, to becoming one with another person. And, of course, because sex is the tool of transgression in this book, Sumire cannot meld with K, with whom she has a more real, nuanced, and passionate relationship. There's soooo much more I could say about this, but it would take forever to write it all out. The way I'm leaving it is, I think, a bit unsatisfying--it feels a bit black and white, to me, and the novel gives it such a more complex feeling. That said, I don't want to state the ending because it's so key to understanding all of this and I think it's important to feel the impact of it for oneself. So, yes, I'd say Murakami has the capacity to handle this subject beautifully. In terms of other literature, I've seen similar themes--the struggle between pragmatism and idealism. Lots of coming of age novels deal with those concepts (Murakami himself deals with this a bit more explicitly in Norwegian Wood, another one of my favorites). Romeo and Juliet has this aspect to it, although I think a lot of people misinterpret where Shakespeare stood in regards to the two lovers and their families (I think it's somewhere between, both mocking and lamenting the main characters' deaths). The Sorrows of Young Werther is another good example. I think you can see it in a less black-and-white form in Anna Karenina and The Brother's Karamazov, obviously very different than the young-adult-focused books I just listed. 2. Oh yes, the unconscious is always projected. To me, that shapes the story more than the conscious decisions, and I feel that, when drafting a piece, it's important to keep some of the unconscious decision just so. Too many conscious choices and you might end up with something stiff. 3. This is a very difficult question. For me, personally, I think it's a bit of both, naturally, but I lean more towards the broader goals when writing a novel, and I prefer investing myself in the broader goals than the minute ones. Of course, small instances build up into larger ones, and little details act as the single threads with which a tapestry is woven. But, when I look at a tapestry, I want to see the tapestry, and maybe I'll break it down into sections here and there, but I doubt I'll ever scrutinize the threads. 4. I view Murakami as a surrealist than a magical realist. Both, I think, are sub-genres beneath the larger umbrella of fantasy, so perhaps if you looked hard enough you could find little points where the two relate to each other, but by and large I see Murakami in a different light than, say, Garcia-Marquez or Rushdie. I think Murakami's work has evolved from genre fiction into literary fiction. Despite aesthetic consistencies, his earlier work is notably pulp-fiction-y/hardboiled. In books like Dance, Dance, Dance you have more notably angsty characters specifically looking for existential fulfillment, whereas in his later works characters take a more passive stand-point and are whisked into the existential issues or, like Kafka from Kafka on the Shore, have more practical goals, and the existential aspect eventually comes to match and surpass the more practical ambitions. |
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View Post #5 (Link) Haven't read this book but whatever posting anyway | |||
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The only Murakami novel I've read is After Dark and that was ... six, seven years ago? I don't have a super great grasp of the plot, but what I do have is brief images and feelings, all muddled together. I'm not sure if that's because of the surrealistic writing, the structure of the story (it bounces around between different characters and points of view, but takes place over the course of one night) or just the fact that I read it so long ago. I liked the way it was written, but something about it definitely struck me as odd. I think it has to do with both of these statements:
Anyway, from the excerpt you posted, I get the sense of women being ... not plot devices exactly, but foils or mirrors or forces in the story rather than fleshed out characters. Perhaps this is just because it's an early section from the book though, and a short one, so there's not enough space for them to become fleshed out and human. I find the college girlfriend's description of her abortion as really interesting in contrast with the narrator's take on the experience. It sounds to me like she is really playing down the experience. Her matter-of-fact, calming way of describing the event is in direct contrast with how the narrator experiences the clinic's waiting room full of pregnant women, a surreal and overpowering and significant experience for him. And even though he realizes this description is meant to comfort him, and even though he feels marked by the experience, I feel like he takes the girlfriend's description at face value. It's a big deal to him because it's to him, not to her. Now, granted, she's a minor character and only shows up for a scene. But I think he reacts similarly to Kumiko's abortion. It's like his true reaction and the true story is through the scene in the bar with the guy burning his hand, or not burning his hand. A surreal moment like the pregnant women judging him. It's like Kumiko's game quietness is a device to prompt him into this other level of experience. I noticed this because I don't think we can take the college girlfriend's description or Kumiko's lack of description at face value: both depictions are in line with what we'd expect from women, but not in line with women's lived experience (at least, I don't think so). I do think it's interesting that the narrator uses being stuck in the well to think about harsh reality (his marriage, his girlfriend and wife getting pregnant) but keeps ending up thinking about sort of surreal or mystical experiences. Is that something you were trying to highlight by picking this passage for us to look at? |
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(I think Murakami is just asking for some gender theory to be thrown upon it. I did a quick academic search for articles and could not find anything but a book entitled Postmodern, Feminist and Postcolonial Currents in Contemporary Japanese Culture which I was not able to access.) I just think on the whole he is not quite there yet. Like IQ84 was supposed to be his magnum opus, but it faltered and became a pastiche, odd for oddity's sake; I'm worried his next book might be the same. A phrase that resonated with me from the article you linked to is 'highly exportable' - other readers might not give much care towards geo-cultural identities, but I think it's something to keep in mind when you read Murakami.
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[Much Read. So Lit. Проза лучше, чем поэзии.]Art of Poetry (1) - Amy Gerstler, 'For My Niece Sidney, Age Six' Art of Poetry (2) - Aimee Nezhukumatathil, 'Red Ghazal' Art of Novel (1) - Haruki Murakami, 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' Art of Short Story (1) - Alice Munro, 'Passion' Art of Short Story (2) - Lydia Davis, 'Varieties of Disturbance' |
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Apologies for not replying yet, I have difficulty getting on a computer where I can write lengthy posts.
I definetely agree Murakami should be subjected to Gender Theory, it would be a fascinating read. I know Rubin did an analysis of Murakami's work, but I've had difficulty finding a copy.
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Okay, I finally have time to post.
First, let me tackle the patische issue. Certainly, Murakami fleshes out his ideas again and again in his novels, perhaps each time looking for a different answer. He uses the same motifs because he is effectively using the same dice which he rolls and rolls, each time looking for a different answer. The character very rarely finds this answer, or is else left unsatisfied by it. It seems to me in each novel that the main character tends to accept his fate at the end and go with the flow - as Toru does in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. Sometimes when he writes these novels, it works really well (Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore) and in some, it doesn't (1Q84). Obviously, 1Q84 was published because he was Murakami. If he wasn't Murakami, I doubt it would have been published, or it would have been a complete flop. Onto women. In my mind, Murakami has a tendency to create characters that are not complete, or only react to a scene. They are less characters than, as Spacepirate put it, plot devices. I would also argue that the reason people pick up on women being like this is because the main character is always nearly male. To me, it isn't just women that are incomplete, but also the men. Murakami shows the world through the eyes of an alienated and/or isolated man, and as such, this is what we see. The singer in the extract is as incomplete as Toru's girlfriend. I don't think it's sexism as much as perspective. Spacepirate brings up an interesting point regarding Japanese ideals of women and the girl in 1Q84 being docile. This, for me, was more a mocking look at how Japanese society views women. To counter balance against this docile girl, we have Aoyame, a hit woman. SPOILERS AHEAD. Aoyame and the girl merge to create a woman, in equal parts agency and femininity. We can question whether this is sexism or if it is challenging the Japanese perception of women and how they do view them as docile. We can see equal challenges to the perception in Norwegian Wood in Midori. In all honesty, that's all I have to say. You guys pretty much covered everything else.
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