“It was nearly five years ago now, but I lived next to a baseball field. This was during my third year of college. I say baseball field, but it really wasn’t anything all that spectacular, just a field with some tufts of grass. There was a backstop, a pitcher’s mound, a makeshift scoreboard next to the first base bench, and then there was a metal net that surrounded the whole thing. The outfield, instead of a nice grass, was a bunch of weeds, all dry and crumbly. There was one small bathroom, but there was nothing like a changing room or a locker room. The field belonged to this steel company that had a huge factory close by, and they hung a sign on the entrance that said ‘Unauthorized Entrance Prohibited.’ Whenever Saturday and Sunday rolled around, ad hoc teams of steel company businessmen and workers would come and play baseball. And then there was the official company team, which practiced on weekdays. Besides those there was also a women’s softball division. It looked like the company really liked baseball. But living next to a baseball field isn’t all that bad. My apartment building was just behind the third base bench, and I lived on the second floor. If I opened the window, the metal netting was right in front of my eyes. So whenever I got bored — and during the day I was bored every day of the week — I passed time by just gazing at the games or practices. But watching baseball was not the reason I came to live there. That was for a totally unrelated reason.”

After the young man said that, he paused his story, took a cigarette from his jacket pocket, and took a few drags.¹

Thus begins “Baseball Field,” one of Haruki Murakami’s lesser-known short stories. Part of the story was extracted, edited and expanded into “Crabs,” published in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, but the entirety has never been published in English. The young man in the story is at a café with Murakami himself. He mailed Murakami one of his short stories (the content of which the real-life Murakami later turned into “Crabs”), and Murakami, charmed by the young man’s interesting handwriting and somewhat impressed with the story itself, read all 70 pages and sent him a letter of suggestions. “Baseball Field” tells the story of their subsequent meeting over coffee. The point of view goes back and forth between Murakami, the young man, and, briefly, the characters in the young man’s story. Voyeurism is a major theme (the young man actually moved to the apartment to spy on a girl he had a crush on), and storytelling as an act of voyeurism, looking into other people’s lives, is the central theme of the collection in which “Baseball Field” was included: Dead Heat on a Merry-go-round 『回転木馬のデッド・ヒート』.²

In this collection, Murakami experimented with techniques he used in Norwegian Wood and later in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and by looking at how Dead Heat came into being, we can better grasp the development of Murakami’s thought process. Not only did he gain valuable experience writing “realistic” fiction, he was able to sharpen the point he wants to make with his writing: reality is strange, and humans have little control over the path their lives will take.

Murakami began his writing career in 1979 by submitting a novel, on a whim, to the popular literary magazine Gunzō.³ The novel, Hear the Wind Sing (『風の歌を聴け』, 1979), won the magazine’s prize for new authors, so he decided to write more, but it was not until after his second novel, Pinball, 1973 (『1973年のピンボール』, 1980), that he sold the jazz bar he owned and started to write full-time.⁴ His output expanded dramatically after Pinball, 1973: he wrote essays, short stories, movie reviews, and translations for many different magazines and publishing companies.⁵ In 1982 he published his third novel, A Wild Sheep Chase (『羊をめぐる冒険』) using the same cast of characters as his first two novels.

These early novels were written in first person, telling the story of an unnamed “I” (boku), his girlfriend, a bartender named “J,” and a friend named “the Rat.” In addition to the boku persona, another notable characteristic of Murakami’s early fiction was the use of the fantastic: girls with magic ears, talking pinball machines, and a “Sheep Man.” Murakami’s short fiction during the period — with the exception of a few stories, notably “A Slow Boat to China” and “Firefly” — was also very surreal.

In the fall of 1983, there were still four more years before Murakami would publish Norwegian Wood — the bestseller that changed Murakami “from a writer into a phenomenon.”⁶ The period from 1983 to 1985 was a formative one for Murakami, in which he can be seen honing his unique version of realism and developing a distinct worldview. He would later note that after finishing the Rat series, he wanted to try and write “a completely new type of fiction using completely different themes.”⁷ Murakami’s next set of stories would depart from his standard first-person narration and fantastic themes to directly address the shared reality around him in Tokyo.

In October 1983 Murakami started to serialize a set of stories in IN POCKET, a new, pocket-sized Kodansha magazine run by his former editor at Gunzō.⁸ The eight stories for the magazine were written under the collective title Views of the City (『街の眺め』), indexed along with other “short serials” (短編連作). The first story of the series, “Poolside” (「プールサイド」), begins in the third person. A man has turned thirty-five and decides that it is the middle point of his life. A recreational swimmer, he looks at life in the same way he looks at swimming laps; his thirty-fifth birthday is a confirmation that he’s halfway through the pool of life. After a few pages, Murakami abruptly switches to first person, addressing the reader directly:
Continued »

Kawakami Mieko took home the 138th Akutagawa Prize last month for her novel Chichi to Ran (『乳と卵』, “Breasts and Eggs”). At its core, the work is a simple story about a crisis in the relationship between Makiko, an Osaka hostess and single mother in her late thirties, and Midoriko, her 12- or 13-year-old daughter. Makiko feels that life has quite literally used her up and has decided that breast augmentation surgery is the only way to recharge her body, and therefore, her life; Midoriko is standing at the edge of puberty, terrified that it will make her life her mother’s.

Natsuko, our narrator, is Makiko’s thirty-something younger sister who lives in Tokyo. Makiko and Midoriko have come to visit for a long weekend, and she relates the events that transpire in a stream of Osaka dialect that, as Kawakami readily acknowledges in interviews, owes much to Higuchi Ichiyō’s writing: “sights, sounds, feelings … all knitted together without any quotes or punctuation marks.” In fact, Chichi pays homage to Higuchi’s most celebrated work Takekurabe on a number of levels. Chichi’s character names are all borrowed from Takekurabe (except for Natsuko, who is named after Ichiyō herself), and the work relies on the same melancholy view that the end of childhood means an irreversible loss of control.

We get this view more or less directly from the young Midoriko: the novel uses short, determined essays from her notebooks that periodically interrupt Natsuko to rail against menstruation and childbirth. Self-consciously written, they stand in opposition to Natsuko’s purely verbal presence as shaman-narrator. Natsuko is generous and free-wheeling, while Midoriko is wary of committing too much of herself to anything unknown. Many of Midoriko’s essays take words themselves as their theme — the kanji etymology of shochō (初潮, “menarche“), the -shi (子, “child”) in ranshi (卵子, “ovum”). Before long we learn that Midoriko only uses writing to communicate with her mother because, she explains, talking always leads to fighting.

Midoriko and Natsuko share one main topic, of course: Makiko. Midoriko, preoccupied by her attempts to erect a coherent philosophy that can protect her from adulthood, uses her mother as a sort of anti-role model: “I love her, but I don’t want to become her”, she says. Her writing is shot through with helpless guilt over having played a part in making her mother’s life and body what they are now.

Natsuko has no such agenda, and so her Makiko is vivid and human, so clearly delineated by her words and deeds that she is by far the most believable character of the three. Midoriko is serious, almost Buddhist in her determination to break the cycle of birth. Natsuko is neutral, rarely making her opinions explicit. Makiko therefore supplies basically all of the comedy and most of the pathos that brings Chichi to Ran to life.

Kawakami’s self-imposed literary restrictions do limit the structure to a certain extent. Natsuko’s in-story narration is really just a linear chain of jo-ha-kyū, bouncing off Midoriko’s self-exposition — which is in turn immature and fragmentary by design. Even working together, these two voices don’t work up quite enough steam to drive the final climax. The denouement is plenty entertaining, but its believable aspects don’t come as a surprise, and its surprises feel a little forced. Refreshing as it is to read a work of character-based fiction that doesn’t use withheld closure as a cheap substitute for realism or depth, Kawakami goes so far in the other direction that she ends up dangerously close to a pat conclusion. (Perhaps this is a reflection of her other career as singer-songwriter?)

Still, these faults in the last few pages don’t detract from the rest of the book. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll learn about breast augmentation surgery. Just follow Kawakami’s lead, enjoy the characters, and let the symbolism take care of itself. (Aside to non-native, non-Kansai-based readers: You really don’t need to know more Osaka dialect than you can pick up from a few hours of TV in the evening. Think Huckleberry Finn, not Trainspotting.)

Suwa Tetsushi’s Asatte no hito (『アサッテの人』, “Day-after-tomorrow Man”) comes wrapped in a screaming green cover and obi copy to match: “Double winner! An achievement unmatched since Murakami Ryū 30 years ago!” It’s hype, sure, but the facts back it up: Asatte no hito is the first novel since Murakami’s Kagiri naku tōmei ni chikai burū (Almost Transparent Blue) in 1976 to win both the Akutagawa and the Gunzō Prize.

That being said, Murakami — who is now an Akutagawa Prize selection committee member himself — didn’t think it deserved to win because, as he bluntly stated: “It was a boring novel.” Miyamoto Teru also deemed it unworthy of the prize, and Ishihara Shintarō called Suwa’s technique “obscure and annoying.”

Counterbalancing their complaints were the pro-Suwa side, which included Yamada Eimi (who claimed that it was the first Akutagawa Prize nominee to make her laugh since she had joined the committee), Kuroi Senji, and the newly appointed Ogawa Yōko and Kawakami Hiromi. The latter praised Suwa’s quiet portrayal of “the awkwardness that in reality many people feel about having to live and interact with people using words.”

So Asatte is divisive, and it is a novel about words. Not only the work itself but every character within it, from the narrator on down, concerns themselves primarily with the struggle against a common enemy: language. Indeed, the narrator ends the first chapter with an admission of defeat:

The most vexing point is this: is the novel Asatte no hito itself, emerging as it does from a collage of drafts and diaries, in the end a finished product or another draft? This is the question, and of course I do not at the present time have the skills required to answer it. I shall simply rearrange events into their proper order, and what emerges from that shall define itself as the finished product.

This is the frame through which we enter the world of Asatte, in which language manifests itself as a physical as well as emotional presence. The narrator, charged with the task of clearing out his uncle Akira’s apartment after the latter’s mysterious disappearance, arrives to find it full of junk — including a “mountain of books” that fills two-thirds of the upstairs floor and seems to mock his assertion of authority over it:

Most of the books were already in cardboard boxes. But now it was the cardboard boxes that took up space, and the room did not become any less uncomfortable a place to be in.

The narrator’s world is cramped and claustrophobic, and moreover, deserted; the only way out is to dig deeper. So he slips into the earnest, innocent voice of his aunt — “a recreation based on my notes from conversations with Tomoko herself” — and, later, a collage of his uncle’s diaries and his own family memories. Layer upon layer of story is wound around the mysterious absence of his uncle until the shape of his life emerges, defined by his struggles with language and its “artifice” as he gropes towards the titular “day after tomorrow.”

What surprised me was the realization that the words Yukihiko had spoken [in his madness] had been nothing more than clusters of sounds. Once words, they had become empty husks, floating around him like dust. And he himself did not realize how unusual this was… This was a way of being that was as close to death as you could get.

As noted above, Asatte no hito has been criticized for its self-conscious intellectualism, and much of it is indeed artfully ambiguous, distorted by viewpoint and implication. The reader must find their own way through, and every reader’s will be unique. The meaning of the exercise remains unspoken; hidden behind the omnipresent first-person voice of the narrator, Suwa remains unseen and unheard. It is no coincidence that some of Asatte’s most intense, exhilarating scenes are relayed to us through closed-circuit television — fragmented, grainy, uncannily silent.