First Lines of Murakami's "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage"

"From July of his sophomore year in college until the following January, all Tsukuru Tazaki could think about was dying. He turned twenty during this time, but this special watershed—becoming an adult—meant nothing. Taking his own life seemed the most natural solution, and even now he couldn't say why he hadn't taken this final step. Crossing that threshold between life and death would have been easier than swallowing down a slick, raw egg."

- Haruki Murakami

Fell right into this one. Started Friday night and am already half-way through!

The Human Mind Dwells Deep in Darkness

“It’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault. People have their own reasons for dying. It might look simple, but it never is. It’s just like a root. What’s above ground is only a small part of it. But if you start pulling, it keeps coming and coming. The human mind dwells deep in darkness. Only the person himself knows the real reason, and maybe not even then.”

- Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

A Restless Aquatic Organism

"For not having slept in twenty-four hours, I felt surprisingly awake. My body was hazed to the core, but my mind kept swimming swiftly around through the convoluted waterways of my consciousness, like a restless aquatic organism."

- Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase, page 23

First Lines of Haruki Murakami's "A Wild Sheep Chase"

“It was a short one-paragraph item in the morning edition. A friend rang me up and read it to me. Nothing special. Something a rookie reporter fresh out of college might’ve written for practice.
The date, a street corner, a person driving a truck, a pedestrian, a casualty, an investigation of possible negligence.
Sounded like one of those poems on the inner flap of a magazine.
“Where’s the funeral?” I asked.
“You got me,” he said. “Did she even have family?”

- Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase, page 1.

Cleaning up my bookshelves, I picked up A Wild Sheep Chase and was immediately hooked again. It's an incredible book; each of the first 11 chapters is a fantastic short story in its own right. My memory of this book was clouded by what I remember as a dissatisfying ending and its disappointing sequel Dance Dance Dance, so it's a joy to discover it again, even if it means that i'm losing more sleep than I can afford.

New Murakami Book Covers

Vintage has redone all of it's Murakami book covers in a standardized minimalist design by artist Noma Bar.

More information here. Murakami's books have really raised the bar for book design, IMO. Makes me wish I didn't already have most of these books on my shelves!

For more on other excellent Murakami book designs, check out:

IQ84: Hardcover

IQ84: Paperback

Thoughts on Running the Vermont City Marathon

“My time, the rank I attain, my outward appearance — all of these are secondary. For a runner like me, what’s really important is reaching the goal I set myself, under my own power. I give it everything I have, endure what needs enduring, and am able, in my own way, to be satisfied. From out of the failures and joys I always try to come away having grasped a concrete lesson.”
- Haruki Murakami, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

I finally ran 26.2! The Vermont City Marathon was last Sunday, and your RR&RS bloggers all took part. I was particularlly excited to run the VCM for two reasons: one, I grew up in the Burlington area, and running the first few races as part of a relay team were so fun that I wanted to experience the race in its entirety, and two, I know that Burlington knows how to throw a party. And the VCM didn't disappoint on the latter! The day will filled with incredible sights that I don't have the time to list now, but short list of some of the more memorable ones were: wall-to-wall people lining the streets of the city to cheer us on, a clapping drag queen on Church Street, Eric and Mo’s wives with their “Dads of RR&RS sign, seeing a view containing both Mount Mansfield and Camel's Hump at once, and lots of bands ranging from the to the country rock ensemble on North Street playing “queen of hearts” to the random guys on the sidewalk strumming their guitars or blowing hot oboe riffs.

But all that was in the future. The three of us toed the start line filled with the confidence of a good eight months of training. So good, in fact, that visions of running a 3:30 filled my head, so from the gun, I ran with that pace group, luxuriating in my tapered legs, soaking in the crowd cheering us on, and enjoying seeing some of the old sights from my UVM days (Bove's, the beautiful house of the Fiji fraternity). As we worked our way onto the Burlington Beltway – an out-and-back on a closed freeway – the running started to get serious. Still feeling good, I slowly passed the 3:30 pace group on a downhill and sunk into myself for a bit, enjoying my music and trying to ignore the annoying footing on the canted freeway. Looking back on my splits now, I was running much faster than I had anticipated, but it sure didn't feel that way – I was cruising and feeling damned good doing it.

So I was surprised when I started feeling my calves around mile 10 as we turned onto Church Street. Not good. I've experienced this before in races: the calves tighten up because of the faster pace of the race and the extra pounding on the pavement. I slowed down and tried to drag my toes a bit in an attempt to stretch out the calves as I ran, but as we started south the situation wasn't getting any better.

My own personal cheering section!

One major highlight was mile 12, where my family gathered to offer me encouragement and water. After that, after this my race went sour. I knew I was in trouble because my calves were hard as rocks and not loosening up. I was drinking lots of water and Gatorade in fear of cramps. I was stopping  to stretch the calves. None of this helped. At the half-way point, I just tried to relax and enjoy the awesome scenery of the Adaronaks across Lake Champlain, and this distracted me enough to get me to the Burlington Taiko drummers situated at the foot of the course’s major hill: the assult on Battery.  Hearing the pounding of all of these deep drums was incredibly invigorating, and fueled what was a great run up the hill: it was actually a good rest for my calves. Unfortunately, as I crested the hill and started down North Ave around mile 16, I started experiencing sharp nerve pain in my right knee.

KBVCM Splits

I toughed it out for a while, but by mile 18, I was half walking and half jogging in an attempt to mitigate what was an electric nerve pain shooting from my knee. It was occasionally so debilitating that I literally couldn't run at all. Cursing my bad luck, I sunk into a dark place within myself as I struggled to keep moving, completely ignoring  the lawn parties lining the race route as we weaved our way through the suburbs north of the city. By mile 20, I was miserable and debating giving up. People were passing me left and right, and I wasn't even enjoying the families offering me water, oranges, watermelons and, in one extreme case, small cups of beer.

The turning point was at mile 22, when a guy in an oversized foam cowboy hat passed me, smiling and having a grand old time. This finally drove home that I wasn't going to achieve the time that I expected, and just needed to relax and focus on finishing. My dirty secret is that I’m a stubborn bastard at the core, so I vowed to keep moving the best that I could and finish the race even if I needed to walk the rest of the way. I felt like DeNiro chanting "I've come too far" in Midnight Run. So I soaked my head in a garden hose sprinkler, took a bathroom break, texted my wife to let her know not to expect me until after the 4:00 mark, and figured out a way to “run” that minimized the pain. This involved pumping my arms as hard as I could, which eventually lurched my legs into motion, and I alternated between this shuffling jog and speed walking for the last few miles. For this reason, the last hour of the race passed in a delirious haze - all I really remember is the pain, my thoughts as I struggled to keep moving, and a few more memorable scenes (incredulous joking with another slowpoke that we were doing this for Michelob; the woman wearing diamond-studded Mickey Mouse ears; an annoying sign claiming that "Pain is Weakness Leaving Your Body").

I wish I could say that I crossed the finish line and felt an incredible sense of accomplishment at my time of 4:15, but honestly I was just glad that it was over. I grabbed my knees and sucked wind for a few moments, tossed back a few chocolate milks and a banana, and worked my way over to my family, where the endorphins carried me through an over-loud and overcrowded “reunion zone.” It was a hot day and my kids were overstimulated, so we didn't partake of the end-of-race scene: we took some pictures and headed to my Mom’s house for BBQ and cold Magic Hat. Is there anything better than a cold beer in the sun after a long race?

It was a long race, and one that I enjoyed overall, despite the uncomfortable finish. Reflecting upon the experience, I've been pondering which concrete lesson to take away (as Murakami suggests above), and  the major one is how humbling running 26.2 miles is. I consider myself a pretty fast runner, and yet 343 runners passed me in the last six miles of the race! Still, I finished, which I didn't believe I could do even six months ago. I'm also surprised I let ambition take over my belief that running is practice, but next time i'll be more diligent about adhering to my pacing plan - really, just looking at the marathon as another long run. And there will be a next time, because at some point, i'm taking another crack at 26.2: I want to see what I can do with a healthy knee!

Cross-posted on Reading, Running and Red Sox

Murakami's 1Q84

“…pure solitude and tranquility. That was the best thing the moon could give a person.” – 1Q84, p 528.

It's been a while since I’ve finished 1Q84. I've sat down a number of times to write my reactions, and I’m finding it difficult to do. Partly because the book was such a monster - at 925 pages, it took me almost a full month to read - and because my dislike of the ending colored the rest of the book. I wanted to be careful.

Murakami’s 1Q84 starts with a bang, or more specifically, a song and a vivid description of Aomame - a sharp dressed woman - escaping from a freeway parking jam by climbing down a multiple story fire-escape ladder – a tale that would have made a good short story in and of itself. It gets even better when we find out that Aomame is an assassin – one trained at a unique, untraceable form of killing at that! – and we’re off to the races. The novel alternates chapters between Aomame and Tengo, another of Murakami’s passive males, who gets pulled into a ghostwriting scheme. The two stories leisurely percolate along, both very entertaining in their own right; both of the characters are well fleshed out, and they both find themselves in bizarre circumstances that, like the best of Murakami's novels, could go in any direction. My only quibble is that I found Aomame to be the most masculine female character I’ve seen in a major novel - even her sexual escapades – and there are many of them, surprisingly - read like what a male would imagine (fantasize?) a female wanting. I didn't find her believable as a woman, but despite this, Aomame’s toughness and mystery made her my favorite character in the book, at least until part three.

And that’s the rub. Part three of 1Q84 was not good.  The first two sections were sprawling, obscure, with dead-end subplots and thousands of hints of something deeper beneath it all – and it was fascinating! Little by little we learn that Tengo’s ghostwriting story might not be fiction after all, but instead describe a mysterious race of “little people” that permeate and control the world - and, oh yea, it might not be our world after all, but an alternate reality of some kind, one with two moons in the sky and enough subtle changes to throw everything askew. In short, it's a riveting tale, and one beautifully written in Murakami’s singular prose. But like a poorly paced runner, Murakami runs out of gas in part three. While it may be unfair to judge the three sections as a complete whole – apparently he had finished and published parts one and two and only later decided to put out another 300 pages - I don’t understand what he was hoping to accomplish with his ending. Part three rides an unsatisfying middle road: it didn't resolve any of the important plots that kept me riveted  (who exactly are the little people anyways? What are they trying to accomplish?) or it spelled out situations in too much detail (I personally didn’t need to see Aomame and Tengo get together). This problem is exasperated by two major flaws in part three – Murakami’s continual repeating of themes and phrases  to the point of annoyance (mainly around Aomame’s taking care of “the little one”) and introducing the point-of-view of the repugnant Ushikawa whose purpose here I don’t comprehend.  The failure of part three, while not ruining the book, definitely left a bad taste in my mouth. It didn't tell me anything that parts one and two hadn’t already told me, nor did it present any new “wow” moments.

In the end, though, a flawed Murakami book is still better than 99% of the books out there. I still remember the feeling of anticipation I held onto all day long as I waited to get back to the book at night. 1Q84 holds a place of honor on my bookshelf, because I'll definitely be reading this book again – only this time, I’ll stop after section two.

Cross Posted at Reading, Running and Red Sox

The Painful Truth?

Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from."

- Haruki Murakami, 1Q84, page 441

From One Cage to Another

"What did it mean for a person to be free? she would often ask herself. Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren't you just in another, larger one?"
- Murakami, 1Q84, page 184

Sunday Time

Time flows in strange ways on Sundays, and sights became mysteriously distorted.
- Haruki Murakami, 1Q84, page 153

First Lines of 1Q84

"The taxi's radio was tuned to a classical FM broadcast. Janáček's Sinconietta--probably not the ideal music to hear in a taxi caught in traffic. The middle-aged driver didn't seem to be listening very closely either. With his mouth clamped shut, he stared straight ahead at the endless line of cars stretching out on the elevated expressway, like a veteran fisherman standing in the bow of his boat, reading the ominous confluence of two currents. Aomame settled into the broad back seat, closed her eyes, and listened to the music."

- Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

Loving what I've read so far!

Murakami's Boundaries

I’ve often read that a good deal of Haruki Murakami’s writing is powerful because it evokes many unconscious trends of Japanese society. Without knowing much about Japan, it’s hard for me to speak to that, although it might explain away the strange underpinnings of his more abstract books. Personally, I find the subtle dark undertones of his writing to be mesmerizingly suggestive, but find that it's powerful because of this lack of specificity, not in spite of it. It's with this in mind that I ponder his obsession with boundaries. Boundaries between the real and the imaginary, boundaries between good and evil, boundaries between the certain and the uncertain.

His most famous boundary is the doorway that exists between the bottom of a dried up well and the mysterious hotel room in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, but it doesn’t take a lot of deep reading to find equivalencies in his other books. The most obvious one is spelled out in the title of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World in that most of the novel is about the journey between those two realities. I won’t bore you with more examples but pick up any one of his books and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

His 2007 novel After Dark is no exception. In fact, this short novel almost explicitly deals with the barriers between two states of being. These include:

• The city before and after trains: “Between the time the last train leaves and the first train arrives, the place changes: it’s not the same as in daytime.” (p. 55)
• Eri’s journey out of the “sleep coma” that she’s been in for the last few months
• Takihashi’s speech about criminals vs. non-criminals: “[The criminals] live in a different world, they think different thoughts, and their actions are nothing like mine. Between the world they live in and the world I live in there’s this thick, high wall.” (p. 91)
• One side of the mirror vs. another: Both Mari (p.63) and Shirakawa (p.127) occasionally have reflections that stay in the mirror after they have left the room – and Shirakawa’s reflection even does things that he does not!
• Takahashi’s music: “You send the music deep enough into your heart so that it makes your body undergo a kind of a physical shift, and simultaneously the listener’s body also undergoes the same kind of physical shift. It's giving birth to that shared state.” (p. 88)
• Night vs. Day “The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at a river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend. Takahashi is unable to tell for sure which side – which world – contains his center of gravity.” (p. 173P

I could go on and on. The entire book is almost a meditation on complimentary opposites, ying and yang swimming both with and against each other. He even writes very evocatively of what it might take to truly be transported from one side to the other (a description of Eri’s journey through the TV screen that starts on page 102). All of these musings come to a head during this remarkable passage:

“What we see now is a gigantic metropolis waking up. Commuter trains of many colors move in all directions, transporting people from place to place. Each of those under transport is a human being with a different face and mind, and at the same time each is a nameless part of the collective entity. Each is simultaneously a self-contained whole and a mere part. Handling this dualism of theirs skillfully and advantageously, they perform their morning rituals with deftness and precision: brushing teeth, shaving, tying neckties, applying lipstick. They check the morning news on TV, exchange words with their families, eat, and defecate.

With daylight, the crows flock in, scavenging for food. Their oily black wings shine in the morning sun. Dualism is not as important an issue for the crows as for the human beings."

So what is it about Japanese society that fuels this obsession with boundaries? Again, I don’t feel qualified to speak: I’m on the far side of yet another boundary in that Murakami’s message is coming to me not only across cultures but also through the filter of a translator. It's a fascinating obsession, and I'm in awe not only that so much of his message gets through, but at how powerful it remains after repeated readings.

Cross-posted on Reading, Running and Red Sox.

Quote of the Day

"Well, I think there has to be something like reincarnation. Or maybe I should say I’m scared to think there isn’t. I can’t understand nothingness. I can’t understand it and I can’t imagine it."

"Nothingness means there’s absolutely nothing, so maybe there’s no need to understand or imagine it."

"Yea, but what if nothingness is not like that? What if it’s not the kind of thing that demands that you understand it or imagine it? I mean, you don’t know what it’s like to die, Mari. Maybe a person really has to die to understand what it's like."

- Haruki Murakami, After Dark, p. 157

Do You Know What I'm Saying?

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami’s 1997 novel, is a novel of stories. It’s not only the tale of Toru Okada’s quest to find his missing cat and wife, but it’s also about the stories that the rest of the characters tell each other about their lives, and how they create meaning in their lives by spinning their stories. Whole chapters of the book pass in this way: May Kasahara (Toru’s teenage neighbor), Malta and Creta Kano (mediums helping Toru find his cat), Lieutenant Mamiya (long story), and Cinnamon (at one point, Toru’s assistant) all share their tales with Toru, an everyman who’s a great listener. In one sense, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is simply a compilation of these stories intertwined with Toru’s ongoing narrative. One could even argue that the main plot – concluding with the bizarre magical realistic events in a mysterious hotel room – is only a story that Toru tells himself in order to heal himself after his wife’s departure. It’s Murakami’s genius that he leaves this question (and many others) unanswered.

Murakami’s writing is what makes this collage of stories work together. His prose uses precise language to describe mundane and ambiguous things, while underpinning it all with a subtle sense of menace like a David Lynch film. He’s precise where he needs to be, as when he explains how his wife’s brother was successful in politics: "consistency and an established worldview were excess baggage in the intellectual mobile warfare that flared up in the mass media's tiny time segments." But along with this clear prose comes many fantastical and bizarre elements, such as a scar that appears on Toru’s cheek one day – the same mark that appears on the faces of the protagonists of several other stories. What does it mean? Murakami never directly explains, and while some might be annoyed by that, others like myself can simply go along for the ride, for The Wind-up Bird Chronicle never fails to entertain.

In fact, the first two-thirds of the book are so good I literally couldn't put it down – and this was my second time reading it! However, the book as a whole loses steam in the final third of the book, mainly because the stories that were so cohesive earlier on start to become less connected. I’d argue that by that point you’ve built up such a head of steam that the coast to the end is still great reading. And parts of the ending are absolutely riveting, like when Toru finally gets into the mysterious hotel room, but other stories read like Murakami was just trying to tie up loose threads. At one point, Toru even says: "I think you are [my wife]. Because then all kinds of story lines work out," as if he's admitting that he doesn't know how to complete the complex pattern he’s been weaving. But while the ending might be a bit anticlimactic, at the end of the day The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is easily one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Cross-posted on Reading, Running and Red Sox.

Quote of the Day

I stretched out on the sofa and closed my eyes for a long time, thinking of nothing. It was not hard for me to think of nothing, the way I felt at the moment. In order not to think of any one thing, all I had go do was think of many things, a little at a time: just think about something for a moment and fling it into space.
- Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, p. 206

Quote of the Day

"Brushing my teeth in the bathroom, I studied my face in the mirror. For over two months now, since quitting my job, I had rarely entered the "outside world." ... And in all that time, I had hardly seen anyone. ... It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it became, and the more it betook of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called strange. They had been there all the while, it seemed, waiting in the shadows for me to stop moving. And every time the wind-up bird came to my yard to wind its spring, the world descended more deeply into chaos."
- Haruki Murakami, p 125 The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (t. by Jay Rubin)

What Makes Murakami Addicting?

I was in a weird mood the other night, and so didn't want to continue reading You Don't Love Me Yet (Lethem's excellent rock and art and love novel), so, in anticipation of IQ84, I blew the dust off of Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and lost myself in the first two chapters. I mean, seriously lost myself: I stayed up way too late because I got lost in that Murakami groove.

This morning, I pondered: what is it about his writing that is so mesmerizing? I mean, it's not like his prose is anything unique; on the contrary, some of the descriptions are so bland that they verge on cliche. For instance:

"An old, brown, withered Christmas tree stood in the corner of one garden. Another had become the dumping ground for every toy known to man, the apparent leavings of several childhoods. There were tricycles and toss rings and plastic swords and rubber dolls and tortoise dolls and little baseball bats. One garden had a basketball hoop, and another had fine lawn chairs surrounding a ceramic table." p.13

There are portions of his novels that just go on and on like this. In fact, to me his uninspiring novels (I'm looking at you, Dance Dance Dance) border on boring for this very reason. What I think it is is that this familiarity of prose (can't think of a better way to put it) really puts you in the mindset of his typical protagonist, a "boring" male in his 30s who is a bit of a stranger to himself, into routines, etc. This sucks you into a certain ordered mindset, and the bizarre events start occurring - and they do! - the juxtaposition is that much more jarring. You see this in great effect in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, where the "normal" chapters are interspersed with the "fantasy" chapters and while they tell completely different stories, the manner of telling is exactly the same.

This is a long way of saying that to me, it's really the plot of his novels that is so engaging. Bizarre occurrences and complete normality live side by side with no real explanation and after a while just start to make sense in a strange way. Think "Johnny Walker" and "Colonel Sanders" in Kafka on the Shore and how they fit into the novel. Critics writing about Murakami bandy about labels like "dream-like" and "magical realism" (which always makes me think of "Latin" authors (think Gabriel García Márquez) but I think what Murakami is trying to do is different - it's more subtle, subconscious, and ironic. And I just can't get enough of it!

In just the first chapter of TWUBC, the narrator is called multiple times by someone who wants to talk dirty to him and exclaims that "Ten minutes... is all we need to understand each other." He makes spaghetti and listens to Rossini and tells us about his lost cat and boring job. He falls asleep in the yard of a 16-year old girl who puts him to sleep by whispering about "the lump of death... something round and squishy, like a softball, with a hard little core of dead nerves. I want to take it out of a dead person and cut it open and look inside. I always wonder what it's like." p. 20

This type of writing combines the boring and cliche with the bizarre and unlikely, and presents it all equivalently. Most of his writing is ambiguous, as if the author himself wasn't entirely sure what it all means. To foax like me, who loves to try and fill in the blanks, it's a heady brew.

Cross Posted at Reading, Running and Red Sox.

Defending the Short Story

Yesterday, Joel wrote about his dislike for stand-alone short stories, and as the two of us have discussed before, we’ll have to agree to disagree about this. To me, the best short stories are like Tapas to the full-meal of the novel. When done well, they present one of several things:

- A completely focused mood piece. Think of some of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, capturing what it feels like to have your first girlfriend break up with you, or to be stuck with insomnia thinking about death. Other examples: Stephen King’s most excellent stories in Skeleton Crew and Night Shift.
- Pondering an idea. Perhaps done best in SciFi, these short stories present an interesting idea and the consequences of that idea. Philip K Dick was the best at this; he’d present an interesting idea that might not hold up over the course of a novel and explore it in a short story. (Note that both Total Recall and Minority Report were adapted from PKD short stories, not novels.)
- Experimenting with form, voice, etc. Authors just fucking around to see what works.

In short, I see a short story as a more informal, concentrated taste of story telling. Potentially containing the possibility of something that could be explored further, but not necessarily. (Of course, I've always been attracted to flaws more that perfection - I wrote a bit about this over here.)

I also think that there are authors that are better at novels and those that are better at short stories (and the rare few, like Stephen King, that are good at both). For instance, I love Haruki Murakami, but (after the quake excepted) his short stories are awful - he needs the space of the novel to present his themes and wandering narrators. I wonder if Ondaatje is one of this authors whose writing favors the novelistic form?

(Cross Posted at Reading, Running & Red Sox)

Quote of the Day

But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly that she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.
- Haruki Murikami, p.28, South of the Border, West of the Sun

Quote of the Day

"Something about her expression pulled people in. It was as if - this is something I thought of only later, of course - she were gently peeling back one layer after another that covered a person's heart, a very sensual feeling. Her lips changed ever so slightly with each change in her expression, and I could catch a glimpse deep within her eyes of a faint light, like a tiny candle flickering in the dark, narrow room. ...
There are some things in this world that can be done over, and some that can't. And time passing is one thing that can't be redone. Come this far and you can't go back. ... After a certain length of time has passed, things harden up. Like cement hardening in a bucket. And we can't go back anymore."
- Haruki Murakami, South if the Border, West of the Sun. Page 14