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People die all the time. Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely. It’s too easy not to make the effort, then weep and wring your hands after the person dies.
–Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
I’ve boiled this quote down to the easily digestible part, which is a shame really, because if you get the whole thing in context then you get one tough cookie of a scene. This a scene where a young girl, terrified by telepathic visions over which she has no control, and largely seeking to escape from the world, tells a writer (who is fairly similar to Haruki Murakami, except he’s a hack rather than a novelist) that she should have treated her mother’s lover better. The writer rejects this; he tells the girl harshly that she doesn’t have the right to be sorry, because she wasn’t fair to the man when he lived.
A very good thesis about this novel would be as follows: Haruki Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance is the story about the excessive questing and emotional involvement necessary to counter the transactional and forgetful nature of advanced capitalism. Nobody is putting words in Murakami’s mouth here; he actually refers to “advanced” or “late-stage” capitalism several times as the novel goes on, and clearly thinks of it as a necessary point of reference.
Nonetheless, this thesis disgusts me. I can’t do anything with it. It sits there like yesterday’s mashed potatoes. I would literally rather have to wade in clown pants through a squalid pond of methanated swampweeds than write on the subject of transactional capitalist apathy.
My guess is that this thesis disgusts me because it is trying so hard to impose something on the individual, and this makes me wonder about the general drift of this sort of resistance-or-death pole vault. In Murakami’s novel, despite the initial claims of the protagonist to a state of vacant ordinariness, he eventually imposes upon himself the task of saving several people. A mystical wise man (the Sheep Man) informs him that he needs to “dance,” and his version of dancing is a series of compassionate acts, undertaken often with only a vague idea about who is being helped, or what they really need.
I highly recommend that you read LittleLight’s new post; incredibly, this is coming just three entries after her amazing prose poetry on the feminism of the monstrous. Obviously, I’m adding her to the blogroll. What LittleLight is accomplishing there is not something that I can accomplish, at least not at the moment, with my stomach feeling the way it does. She is re-creating the quest; the strain of perception which is like going down a rabbit hole, in that it restores the world to wholeness through the willingness to hope (as N. Pepperell has commented, in an insightful entry). A relevant quote: “It was an opportunity to decide if I would be identified by what was broken, or what was whole; by hate for those who had hurt me, or love for those who refused; by what other people had done to me, or what I believed people could do for each other.” The moment of opportunity.
In a post preceding her new series on Blogging for Choice, petitpoussin gives us a beautiful poem by Mary Oliver, which ends,
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
I think that one could read Murakami the same way, as asking a question of us that echoes in the wide chamber of the knowledge of death. He seems to be forcing the moment to its crisis. I will even say the text must be read partly that way.
I have been reading that way for some time now: for the tension, for the point at which the moment seems to jump out of its own skin. I would like to stop doing that for…well, for a “season,” perhaps, if that is the right unit to use here.
I would like to do nothing; or at least nothing where the sounds of it — the sound of a pen, or of water about to boil — get lost in the bustle. I am thinking of the way that a blade of grass feels if you’re stuck in right field, and you hold it so gently that it scrapes across your finger, serrated. I am thinking of the way river water gets warmer at dusk. I don’t want to make so much as a ripple. I imagine that it would be possible to read Murakami’s writer as saying that it makes no sense to push backwards through time, cutting and hacking your way with regrets, meanwhile also pushing forward into a future jammed with projects. Fairness and sincerity are immediacies; the closest you can come to them is the feeling of them, carried forward by a story in which they appear, but you would have to blend that with the feeling of Murakami’s sunsets to make any of it distracting to me.
Somebody saw my picture today and said I looked so much younger in the picture. Somebody saw my picture a month ago and said I looked so much younger. I am going to have to throw out two pairs of sneakers and my slippers.
I am sure that silence and slow time will give me back years. I have been listening to Elliott Smith. I can imagine picking up Beckett again.
So, if you have no quest, this is for you.
If you do — if you are on a wild sheep chase — you still have my ear and best hopes.
This entry reminded me of another well-known Mary Oliver poem, ‘Wild Geese’.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Thanks petitpoussin! This is one of my favorites, and I’m delighted to have it on my webspace.
So just what do you have against yesterday’s mashed potatoes? If you’re not having them, mind if I finish them for you?
:) ¡Con gusto! I should have titled this thing “Free mashed potatoes!”
Sweet, I’m starving!
i was just thinking of “Wild Geese;” i think i actually posted it some time ago (QOTD)
it is interesting to see different peoples’ reactions to it.
First of all, thanks for this post. Please excuse the following naive question; although a Murakami-lover, I am also a perfect dilettante reader — yes, I read novels mostly to ‘escape’ and release pressure. I am in need of someone who could defend Murakami’s repetitive use of what you call the protagnist’s ‘state of vacant ordinariness’ and his mission, despite himself, of saving his fellow protagonists (from loneliness, from defilement, from loss, from oblivion…whatever it may be). No matter how original or breathtakingly charged with poetry each of his novel is, a lingering feeling of ‘deja-vu’ is increasingly irritating me. What do you say?
One more thing.
[this is former 'French Boo' talking]
It seems that from now I have to be called Snuggle Bunny.
So Snuggle Bunny I will be from now.
Good night (good day) to you.
Snuggle Bunny: You alone, as indicated by your new alias, have comprehended the fundamental seriousness of this onto-philosophical blogging project.
As for Murakami, more in a few hours…
The Bunny can’t wait.
Belledame:
I encountered the Oliver as something pinned to the wall, in the old bedroom of a close friend, in a house enclosed by redwood forest where I stay during the holidays. The poem seemed to have the radiance and warmth of that home.
What is the nature of its litmus test? How do reactions to it differ?
Snuggle Bunny,
The real drama of Murakami’s novels, as I understand them, lies in watching what happens to the women and the playboys. Both of the novels I’ve read (Norwegian Wood and now this one) see the main character swept along by one or more polished golden boys, often reminiscent of Gatsby, and by several women who divide a stock of nervousness, madness, sexual knowledge, and daring amongst themselves.
What happens to these two types is believable, and the differences between the novels reads like a map of different possibilities. In one novel the Gatsby character is rich but anonymous, in another he is a famous actor but besieged by debt and celebrity. In one novel the mad woman is a schizophrenic schoolgirl, in the next an autistic photographer of genius.
Since I love the diffracted personalities of characters in Proust and The Alexandria Quartet, I enjoy watching these types dissected from different angles, and meeting different fates according to their luck.
However, none of this excuses the blankness of the main characters, or the sentimental quests into which those characters are kidnapped, where good intentions are always enough. I imagine that I, too, will reach my limit, perhaps after just one more of his, and move on.
Dear Joseph,
I found your reading of Norwegian Wood, as compared to Gatsby, very compelling. I am not sure though, if you answered my question, which I completely understand as you have only read two of Murakami’s novels. Please let me articulate what I meant in this short demonstration (which, I hope, you will not find painful).
In his Kafkaesque novels, Murakami explores the themes of loss, reminiscence of the past, defilement, void (seeking to be filled), social alienation, self-discovery, sexual perversion, lost connection to the inner-self. His characters attempt come to terms with their past, in narratives where crisp realism and fantastic elements mix up to explore a concept of double-consciousness, or connection between the real world and another dimension (is it what we call the subconscious? Is it Death? Or altogether another world?).
In Norwegian Wood, Naoko lives in the past, and so does, through her, Toru Watanabe. An absence (Kizuki’s – her boyfriend, and his best-friend) both links and separates them; meanwhile, he is drawn to Midori, whose own deficiencies are explained by parental abandonment. Throughout the novel, the characters endeavour to fill each other’s void.
Similarly, in Dance, Dance, Dance, in his quest to discover what happened to the woman he loved, the protagonist is drawn to a thirteen-years-old fan of the Talking Heads (Yuki), who tries to evolve between a careless mother and an inept father. What will be unveiled is a sordid story of sexual perversion and murder.
Toru Watanabe’s wife disappears without explanation (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle); in his quest to find her – and their cat –, he meets the teenager May Kasahara, but also unveils a difficult truth (‘defilement’ and incest), which outcomes he can only fight (literally) through the powers of his mind.
Sputnik Sweetheart (perhaps my favourite) deals again with the theme of defilement (Miu’s chilling story) while K. desperately tries to find out what happened to Sumire. Loss again is at the centre of this short but deep novel, which explores in a very poetic way the complexity of emotions.
Perhaps the most original of the lot, because so different, is Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World – isn’t it a wonderful title? this is what first attracted me to Murakami: find out what story hid itself behind such a title. The main character, a ‘Calcutec’ (or ‘human data processor’) is charged to encrypt a message, while he is also, in another dimension, a ‘dream-reader’. In the process, he is not only saving a scientist and his (sexy) granddaughter, but also himself. Interestingly, none of the characters in this novel are named : ‘chubby girl’, ‘librarian’, ‘the old man’, ‘Junior’ and ‘Big Boy’… is all the author offers of their identity.
Finally, young Kafka Tamura (Kafka on the Shore) runs away from home to go in search of his disappeared mother, and finds himself connected to an eccentric old man who converses with cats and predicts (accurately) fish and leeches falling from the sky.
All his main characters, are, without exception, idle, male, and share, as you say, this ‘vacant state of ordinariness’; teenagers are effortlessly cool; women beautiful, sexy (often unwillingly) and dressed with tasteful simplicity. There is nearly always a (gruesome) murder; if not, a rape (or both).
Dimensions (otherworld? underworld? death?) are connected through a ‘door’, either place or object, enabling the protagonist to communicate with: the Sheep Man through the Dolphin Hotel (Dance, Dance, Dance), his wife through a well (the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), his inner-self through the skull of a unicorn (Hard-Boiled Wonderland), people from the past through a forest (Kafka on the Shore), etc.
Finally, each of the novels breathe through a liberating element, who brings relief as much as the key to find the truth, in the form of clairvoyants: Yuki (Dance, Dance, Dance), Malta and Creta Kano (Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), Nakata (Kafka on the Shore) etc…
What one could explain as ‘consistency’ is finally the repetition of a successful formula, which dramatically tones down the eccentricity and sheer originality of his work; or is it precisely this continuity that brings stability to the metaphysical universes he creates, a familiarity which protects the reader from the protagonists increasing insanity?
Snuggle Bunny, I was astonished by this analysis — by its density, and its comprehensiveness.
Overall, you appear to have “solved” Murakami, which is a big problem, since the best novelists cannot be reduced to their essence so quickly.
On the other hand, most novelists do revolve around predictable themes. For example, Jewishness and sexuality appear in every Philip Roth novel, and every Jeannette Winterson novel subverts traditional gender categories.
Over the course of a writer’s career, these similarities can actually be the key to a deep catalogue, because the writer is remembered for having thoroughly mined a given theme. Is it interesting for you to compare Midori and Yuki, as I would be tempted to do on the grounds of their insouciance and independence? Is it interesting to compare Naoko, from Norwegian Wood, and the hotel clerk from Dance Dance Dance, both of whom are nervous and isolated?
It is to me. The interplay of sameness and difference between such characters, who are of similar types, interests me much more than carnivals of pure fathomless diversity (like one finds in the new Pynchon, Against the Day). The same thing with repeated events; do we learn something about crime, particularly sexual assault, from the way Murakami writes and re-writes it?
I’m also encouraged by the fact that I have a more positive take than you do on Yuki and Midori. Good novels should create such divergences, with all parties able to give credible evidence.
I don’t think Murakami tries to protect us from the insanity of his characters, or plots — in fact, he tries hard to put us inside Naoko’s head. The only thing that really gives his universe stability is the nauseating excess of vague good intentions on the part of the hero. That is why, at the end of Dance Dance Dance, the dreaming hero leaps through walls to save his lover from the freezing void — he has a lot of good intentions.
There is clearly an element of formula at work, one that drives Murakami to lamely satirize himself as the character of Yuki’s father. It is a delimited world, but Murakami seems to know a lot about it, and your comment has persuaded me to go on and read Hard-Boiled Wonderland. Well, and a unicorn’s skull told me to do it.