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Two Books from Haruki Murakami
In A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) the main character and narrator lives a mediocre existence. He is passionless; seemingly unaffected by his wife's betrayal and subsequent divorce, and only attracted to his current girlfriend because he finds her ears to be "marvels of creation" that can incite irresistible desire in any man who sees them. This shallow view of life is further emphasized by the fact that, throughout the book, no characters are referred to by proper names.
When the "Rat," a nomadic friend of the narrator, sends him a photograph of some sheep from Hokkaido, a chain of events is set in motion. The sheep picture comes to the attention of a shadowy figure simply known as the "Boss" -- a mythically powerful underworld kingpin -- who has a dire need to get a hold of one of the sheep in the photo. The Boss sends a messenger to the narrator making it clear that unless he finds that sheep, he will face financial ruin, if not worse.
What follows is a surreal journey from Tokyo to Sapporo and points north, including a hotel that could be right out of a Kubrick film and creature known as the Sheep-Man, who is worthy of David Lynch. In the course of this journey, and in the face of extraordinary events, our narrator confronts his superficial world view and the affect it has had on his life.
Set six years later, Dance, Dance, Dance (1994) is murder mystery, but one in which the clues are revealed by chance rather than dogged investigation - often by a seemingly random psychic encounter. Our narrator has resumed a normal life as a freelance copywriter. He refers to this as "shoveling cultural snow" -- doing the thoughtless and thankless work that needs to be done to clear the path. He is fairly well disengaged from humanity, spending a lot of time alone doing absolutely nothing. Yet, in the midst of this anti-social life, he finds that his long missing girlfriend, the one with the amazing ears -- is calling to him as if in a dream, and she is weeping.
Once again, a chain of events is set in motion. He travels back to the strange hotel to find it modernized and corporate. He has another encounter with the Sheep-Man who tells him to "keep dancing." In the course of story he encounters, and finds sympathy for, a disaffected adolescent girl from a dysfunctional family, and an old high-school acquaintance who has become a famous movie star. Through his relationship with these characters he solves the mystery of his missing girlfriend, not through directed investigation but just by staying engaged with life and society -- by keeping up the "dance."
As a Westerner reading these novels, I was struck by how different the Japan portrayed here is from the hyper-efficient, sanitized, sexless and safe Japan of common impression. This is late twentieth-century post-modern Japan. References to Western pop culture are incessant. Call girls abound. Characters find themselves entangled in confusing, neurotic relationships worthy of HBO original programming. And nobody is practicing Kendo.
These books are hard-boiled -- that is to say, they are written in the hard-boiled style defined in the mid-twentieth century by U.S. mystery writers Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet. There is a stark contrast between the blunt, gritty realism of hard-boiled style and the surreal, supernatural events that occur. This causes the stories to seem solidly planted in the real world, despite the occasional bizarre episodes.
There are certain shortcomings; the camera's eye perspective of the hard-boiled school lends itself to a bit too much dwelling on the details of setting. This is primarily in evidence at the beginning of A Wild Sheep Chase. And one suspects something is lost in the translation from the original Japanese. For example, this passage from Dance, Dance, Dance:
"... and if you consider the telephone as an object, it has this truly weird form. Ordinarily, you never notice it, but if you stare at it long enough, the sheer oddity of its form hits home. The phone either looks like it's dying to say something, or else it's resenting that it's trapped inside its form. Pure idea vested with a clunky body. That's the telephone."
There is a certain vagueness that may not be intentional. One is left with the feeling that "form" doesn't quite convey the same meaning it did in the original language.
Reading Murakami has been described feeling like you've just awakened from a deep sleep and you aren't sure if you're still dreaming. These are fascinating, engrossing books that will leave you full of ideas and impressions to dwell on for a long time to come.
You can purchase A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance,Dance,Dance from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I discovered Murakami through A Wild Sheep Chase last November. Within three months I'd read every book that had been translated to English.
I'm not a science fiction fan, but his books are just barely science fiction. They usually leave me feeling depressed (like the stereotypical main characters of his books... always a depressed, solitary male) but they're amazingly well written.
Sheep Chase is great for a quick introduction, but once you've read that, I highly reccomend reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It's 600 dense pages, so chunk out some time, but it's absolutely worth it.
I've always been told that Dick's defining characteristic is a bitterness along with "European" sad endings. How does this guy rate on that? I admit, I skipped the review because I hate spoilers and such.
Even better, how does this guy rate against Heinlein and Asimov?
BlackGriffen
Murakami usually deals with normal life stories, science fiction, or simply fiction is not his area of expertise.
His masterpiece is Norwegian Woods, which tells the story of a young man, in the mid of the japanese 68. We can say that there are a lot of biographical points in the book: the music, the environment, probabily the personal experiences.
I can tell you, Norwegian Woods is one exceptional, emotional book. It's not science fiction, but still, one of the best books I've ever read.
Murakami has also witnessed two of the recent tragedies of modern Japan: the sarin gas attack in the subway and the Kobe earthquake.
In the book (Underground) about the sarin (nerve) gas attack from a religious sect, Murakami acts as a journalist, interviewing survivors and members of the sect, trying to find a logic in what happened.
The Kobe earthquake is handled differently: it is a collection of short stories, mainly of people marginally touched by the earthquake, and how it affected their lives. You can find fictional stories, where the earthquake is caused by a huge worm living underground, to more personal, intimate stories.
Anyway, Murakami is an excellent writer, you should read at least one of his books.
Jay Rubin translates most of his books. I think Alfred Birnbaum did a few. Rubin does a better job in my opinion.
If anyone wants a sample, there's a Murakami short story over at the New Yorker.
In college, I decided to use those two years of required foreign language and read a few books. My two favorites were Le Petit Prince and L'étranger. What other non-English classics should I take a look at? Be it that Slashdot is an international crowd, I'm sure that there are a few good suggestions out there.
After A Wild Sheep Chase was required summer reading for me (over 9 years ago - this review is a little late) I also became a big Murakami fan, and went on a reading kick of his books. And I experienced the exact same effect - I got depressed. Good writing and excellent translations, but they made me feel lousy.
This is true of so many excellent books (and music, and films, etc.) but still many love them. I'm sure there's a lesson to be learned here, but I'm not quite sure what it is.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
That was a pretty poor review, if all you can say about Murakami is that his books weren't what you expected, they weren't full of stereotypical Japanese doing kendo. Don't you have any opinions on the content?
The reason Murakami is compared to PKD is that he uses the most mundane of language or situations, with a slightly shifted psychological circumstance, perhaps even apocalyptic conditions. So for example, in a Dickian twist, Murakami's "TV People" describes how one day some people come to his home to deliver a TV, they're perfectly regular in every sense but one, they're only 3/4 scale people.
I've read a lot of Murakami in the original Japanese, and it's a very interesting experience. Many writers use complex language forms but Murakami is relatively plain, it is hard to describe the subtle monotony and relentlessness of his plain language. Probably his most startling work was "Underground" which is just now available in English for the first time. It's the book where he writes the least, the book mostly transcripts of interviews with victims of the Aum Shinrikyo poison gas attack in 1995. But between the interviews is Murakami's reconstruction of the events, and essays about Japan's society and how Aum could have happened right in front of everyone's eyes.
And here's where Murakami sort of goes off the deep end. I've read a few of M's essays lately, he has taken on the role of social critic. His essays focus on "ishiki no arikata" which is loosely translated, "the way people are supposed to think about things." He made some particularly hilarious remarks denouncing recent fashion trends like "yamamba" and "ganguro" as unJapanese and would lead to the moral corruption of the nation. He sounds like he's becoming an old fart, cranking about what's gone wrong with those darn kids today. My opinion was confirmed after I read a couple of his travel books. They're all full of gripes like "I hiked around Malta, the food was greasy and the toilets were dirty. I had to have fresh sushi sent by DHL from Tokyo once a week or I'd have nothing decent to eat."
Ah... but what does he mean by sexless?
Obviously the japanese have sex. There are erotic and pornagraphic works of all kinds. And throughout Japanese history and culture it has been treated with considerably more candor than in most of the western world. But perhaps that's not what he was talking about. I think one could make a pretty good case that romance plays a rather small role in Japanese culture, and that compared to western style romance is so faint as to be almost irrelevant. Or perhaps he was talking about something else entirely.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I'd agree. Wind Up Bird Chronicles is my favorite book, tied with David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.
About a year ago, a friend recommendeded it to me, the first time I'd encountered Murakami other than having eyed Norwegian Wood because of it's cover design.
The first thing I noticed about Murakami was his pacing. It's a little on the slow side, but feels just right. The characters are honest and seem very real, especially his ubiquitous disaffected male leads. The story got weirder and weirder, but as the reviewer says, his hard-boiled style makes it all seem plausible, somehow.
After I finished it, I read 6 more of his books all in the next 8 months, and a couple of those twice.
The only one I found disappointing was Sputnik Sweetheart, it felt like a weaker Norwegian Wood or South of the Boarder, West of the Sun (both of which I read twice.)
As for the Philp K. Dick angle....
if you like the structural weirdness that Dick frequently employes, his habit for changing EVERYTHING you know to be true half way through a story, or the way the aforementioned make you think about stories in general, I *highly* recommend Italo Calvino and Jorges Luis-Borges.
Specifically: The Collected Short Fiction of Jorges Luis-Borges, and "If on a winter's night a stranger" by Calvino.
When Murakami was young, he read a lot of pulp authors (Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, etc.), even translating the works into Japanese.
My two favorites by him are Wild Sheep Chase and Pinball, 1973 (translated into English by Kodansha, but not sold in the states, maybe Bookfinder...)
Both those books have a touch of magical realism working, but could be seen as modern takes on noir.
It is strange, as Murakami's biggest hit in Japan was Norwegian Wood, a title that, due to culture as much as anything, really captured the imagination of Japanese men and made him a superstar--but it's hard for an outside like myself to get into quite the same way.
Maybe the biggest secret to Murakami Haruki is the way pretty much all his characters are outsiders, loners, and the women they meet the same, coming as he does from a country, Japan, where the biggest focus is on the group.
Definitely recommend Wild Sheep Chase, Pinball, 1973 uses the same characters and serves as a kind of prequel.
I've been a Phil Dick fan for years, ever since I read A Scanner Darkly. There are definitely resemblances in Murakami - a feeling of dissociation from the world, a sense that you can peel back it's surface and find something totally different. Murakami is, I think, a more subtle writer, and his characterizations are stronger than Dick's (although character wasn't the focus of Dick's work in the way that it is in Murakami). If I have to compare his writing to another writer's, I usually think of Raymond Carver (whose writing he's translated into Japanese). But it is probably safe to say that if you enjoy Phil Dick, you'll like Haruki Murakami.
I was surprised - I didn't hate Minority Report. I thought it was a credible job, and Tom Cruise only annoyed me for the first half hour. I haven't read the story that the movie was based on, but I got the sense that Spielberg didn't capture the kind of perspective shifting that Dick did so well. As a movie, I enjoyed it, but I'm still waiting for someone to bring Phil Dick to the screen properly.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
kobo abe - "woman in the dunes". existentialist tragedy that makes camus look like a comic book. avoid the movie (thankfully).
yukio mishima - "the sailor who fell from grace with the sea". mishima tried to overthrow the japanese government by force of arms in the 70's and committed suicide after failing. let's see thomas pynchon do that! alarming parable of post-war reconstruction of japan. depravity, vengence, ennui... it's all here. avoid the movie.
kenzeburo oe - nip the buds shoot the kids. oe won the 1994 nobel prize for literature. this first novel is his grittiest. it's often compared to the lord of the flies but this is only because the main characters are children faced with the difficult decisions of wartime that even adults often cannot deal with. no movie.
2 1337 4 u!
I haven't read Dance, Dance, Dance, but I did read A Wild Sheep Chase. AWSC was good, but not nearly as good as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which was longer, deeper, and generally more involving. If you're going to read Murakami, that's the place to start.
when norweigan wood was first published in japan it came in two volumes: one red, the other green. legend (perhaps even fact) has the novel was so popular amongst the university crowd that fans of the book would dress entirely in the colour of the volume they most identified with. street battles are even said to have been waged between the factions.
that may sound a bit far fetched... but don't forget that mishima's literary club, the "shield society", followed him in his attempt to overthrow the government by force of arms.
2 1337 4 u!
Uh...
Norwegian Wood was Murakami's *first* major book, not a more recent one.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
I'd argue that Murakami has a lot more in common with Raymond Chandler than Philip Dick.
And then, maybe Vonnegut is closer.
In any case, Murakami feels a lot less like a methanphetamine trip than PKD, and less of a bad mushroom experience than Burroughs.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Katoktok only asking.