Comments on: Murakami Haruki B-Sides

By: Japan Navigator » Blog Archive » From the Japanese web (and elsewhere) - May, 2008

Fri, 22 May 2009 15:35:28 +0000

[...] Neomarxisme, Daniel Morales writes expertly about a neglected collection of short stories by Murakami Haruki (”Dead Heat on a [...]

By: Daniel

Daniel — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 22:19:50 +0000

There isn’t a separate book, but they were included as the last few stories in the collection “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.”

http://www.amazon.com/Blind-Willow-Sleeping-Vintage-International/dp/1400096081/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215296465&sr=8-1

By: Jasper

Jasper — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 14:11:57 +0000

Hey,

Anyone know if there is an english translation of ‘ strange tales from tokyo’ ?

Murakami should get the nobel prize for literature.

Cheers,

Jasper J

By: JPS Sharp

JPS Sharp — Sat, 17 May 2008 02:11:44 +0000

NC: ‘honest’ — the thought was that if you write stories of people that only you can hear, there’s minimal standards for correctness and the moral equations to your work as an author in representing others is equally minimal. But when you start talking about real characters or real situations with which other people also have familiarity, both of those factors start to constrain the fiction — if you don’t let the facts (or a reasonable reflection of them) inform your work, you can be charged with negligence on both the accuracy and moral fronts.

In Underground Murakami basically lets the facts speak for themselves — interviews are left as interviews. (Or if you thought he had made them up and that it was fiction, you could still say the interpretation of Aum’s actions is put in the mouths of others, not his own.) But an author can’t refrain from comment or disown his comment like that in a novel. One way or another, the question of whether *Murakami’s* narrative is an honest reflection of the modern-day situation will arise. It’s a question of ‘honesty’ just because you can’t say a ‘true’ reflection, in so far as its fiction — but despite not being true to the facts exactly, people will nonetheless recognise the current situation and respond to it on the basis of that recognition (in addition, of course, to the usual literary basis).

In other words, it just sounds like he’s embarking on a more demanding project that connects with the various things that he’s tried before.

But now that I’ve said all that, I wish I hadn’t mentioned it. There’s no point second-guessing – may as well just wait and see what Murakami comes up with.

James

By: NC

NC — Fri, 16 May 2008 01:41:20 +0000

I agree, it’s an iffy proposition to try and do a direct overlay of something like the Tono monogatari and all of Murakami’s fiction. I was trying to point out the elements of the fantastic and construction of nostalgia for Yanagita, which I do think carry over to Murakami’s writing. Confining the comparison to the countryside is a pretty narrow conception.

I like your post on the 街. Do you think he’s still turning his back on the hometown? I am thinking specifically of the end of Umibe no kafuka and the focus on having a place to return to, where people remember you.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 16 May 2008 00:29:46 +0000

I think that’s a stretch. Sure, Murakami uses inaka as a backdrop for many fantastic scenes, but I don’t think it always represents a nostalgia for the countryside. Anyways, his nostalgia is most potent in his early stuff and it’s more for the era gone by rather than the countryside.

That said, I think your point might be stronger if you look at how Murakami uses the term 街.

If you’ll excuse the shameless blog pimping (or as one of my friends called it, ‘shameless pimp blogging’), I wrote a little about it here:
http://howtojapanese.blogsome.com/2008/05/14/p45/

From 1979 – 1987, the 街 is central in almost all of his works. It’s his hometown in the first few novels, it’s the End of the World in HBW, and there are even a few scenes in Norwegian Wood where it turns up. Dead Heat is the first time that Tokyo and not the hometown is the 街. Like the narrator in Wild Sheep Chase, Murakami kind of turns his back on the hometown after that novel.

By: NC

NC — Thu, 15 May 2008 22:44:40 +0000

Daniel, “constructing tradition” is most definitely another way to say nostalgia. I think that nostalgia can be read in many ways, for example ironic (postmodern) or sincere (“real” desire for something in the past), but “constructing tradition” in the context I was using it refers to the idea that the lost tradition is only recognized after the fact. At its origin, a tradition is not seen in that way– it is only when something, such as the guy pushing his fish carton the street every afternoon, is threatened by new ways of living that tradition needs to be saved. However, it can’t work because once it’s vanishing, it will never come back exactly like the perceived original (if it’s preserved at all). The recognition it needs to be saved is recognition that has been consciously turned into tradition, thus it is already removed from its origins. And the further the distance between the present and perceived tradition, the greater the feeling of nostalgia.

In the Tono monogatari, the use of fantastic folktales are supposed to make Japanese people in 1910 feel nostalgic for the countryside. In Murakami, too, fantastic scenes occur in the countryside, such as the Hokkaido cabin in Wild Sheep Chase, the End of the World, Manchuria, or the Shikoku forest in Kafka take place in the countryside. The cabin and the forest in particular include encounters with nostalgic characters or elements.

I haven’t read the Palahniuk collection– thanks for letting me know, I’ll check it out.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 15 May 2008 22:14:33 +0000

JPS: I think your comment is right on. It’s pretty amazing how the Underground stories turned out, considering that they were all fact. And his stories in after the quake are all informed by the Underground interviews. (Total sidenote, but…it reminds me of this New York Times piece where a 9/11 firefighter went on to divorce his own wife and marry the widow of a dead firefighter. Did anyone read that?)

NC: Hmm…Tono monogatari is only vaguely familiar to me, but it doesn’t surprise me that the technique has been used before. (Chuck Palahniuk used it recently in his collection of short pieces Stranger Than Fiction.) Could “constructing tradition” be a long way to say “nostalgia”? If so, it could apply.

By: NC

NC — Thu, 15 May 2008 18:23:26 +0000

Indicating in the preface that he has written the stories “just as he heard them” reminded me of Yanagita Kunio’s preface for his Tono monogatari. The stories were based on (often fantastic and gruesome) folktales told to him by a man from Tono in northeastern Japan, but Yanagita claims the stories are “present day facts” and that he has recorded them faithfully without embellishment. It is known that he did embellish them quite a bit, but this seems to fit into his philosophy that the more one tries to record facts just as they are, the more unnatural the result. More effective is to record something as if it were factual. Marilyn Ivy has written about the Tono monogatari as a kind of defense mechanism against the encroachment of modernity in the first decade of the 1900s, a way to try and construct ‘tradition.’ We are a century removed from that historical context, but Murakami maintains a healthy distrust of modern life– by this I am referring to his characters that typically eschew the path many Japanese people would expect to take through college, company, etc. His characters are looking for connection on a deeper level, and perhaps he is looking to construct tradition, too?

JPS Sharp, as to your comment on whether or not Murakami is trying to write an honest account, what do you mean by this? Clearly he is not writing brute facts, so do you mean he is trying to get at the essential reality of life (or something similar)?

By: JPS Sharp

JPS Sharp — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:38:53 +0000

I’d have been interested to hear how you felt Underground slotted into the above. On the surface, it’s the same sort of thing — stories of people trying to live on despite the incursion of forces they don’t understand. Moreover, the sympathy expressed by many of the interviewees towards those trapped in the spiritual enclosures like Aum suggests the share an understanding of the need for personal frameworks to try and get a grip on the incomprehensible merry-go-round of life. But the difference here is that the stories were ‘non-fiction’.

Since the next major novel also deals with the same sorts of issues as Underground, only in an extended format, it seems to me like there might be a progression. Far from the artificial In Pocket tales to which only he could listen, do you suppose Murakami is now trying to write an honest account of what we have all been listening to — namely, the disorder in the modern world?

James