Haruki Murakami's evasive fiction

Haruki Murakami, perhaps the contemporary Japanese novelist best-known to Western readers, has a short story, "Scheherazade," in the October 13, 2014 issue of The New Yorker. It begins (in Ted Goossen's translation), "Each time they had sex, she told Habara a strange and gripping story afterward."

Habara, 31, seems to be under house arrest or internal exile in a provincial Japanese city. The woman with whom he has sex is 35, "a full-time housewife with two children in elementary school (though she was also a registered nurse and was apparently called in for the occasional job)." It's not clear whether bringing Habara groceries twice a week and servicing him sexually is part of the job. Nor do we learn her name. Habara calls her Scheherazade because she tells him stories that always break off before the end, as does Murakami's own story here (another reason for my frustration).

We don't know why Habara is stuck in the house. He watches DVDs and reads all day—no newspapers, no internet, no television, and presumably no radio. We know nothing about his earlier life, his family, even his feelings for the woman. "Scheherazade" takes place entirely within the house, giving a claustrophobic feeling.

On The New Yorker's website, Deborah Treisman says, "If Scheherazade is a lamprey eel, dependent on other creatures for her survival, Habara refers to himself as a desert island, isolated and self-sufficient. Do you see him that way? Could he survive with no human contact?"

Murakami responds, "Habara is a man who has experienced an irrevocable turning point in his life. Was the turning point moral, or legal, or was it a metaphorical, symbolic, psychological kind of thing? Did he turn the corner voluntarily, or did someone force him? Is he satisfied with the results or not? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. The instant he turned that corner, though, he became a 'desert island.' Things can’t go back to the way they were, no matter what he does. I think that is the most important aspect of this story."

The reaction of this reader however is a feeling of being cheated. It seems to me that an irrevocable turning point in a life is a story and to evade it is to evade the artist's responsibility to say something meaningful about the world. Treisman asks, "These two characters’ lives intersect seemingly at random—or at the whim of some unnamed person. What made you think of throwing them together in this situation?"

Murakimi responds, "I occasionally think that, in our heart of hearts, we all may be seeking situations like this one—where our free will doesn’t apply and (almost) everything is determined by someone else, where each day must be lived according to the conditions that someone else has laid down. There are people who may already be living that sort of life, to a greater or lesser extent, without even knowing it." In fact, as a volunteer teacher in prisons, I've met hundreds of people who must live each day according to conditions that someone else has laid down. For most of them, it's not a lot of fun or very interesting.

I did not believe for a moment that Habara or his "Scheherazade" embodied anything "real." I thought the situation was interesting (I thought it was a writer's wet dream: be alone to read, watch DVDs, write, and have a complaint woman provide the groceries and regular sex without any responsibility), and I thought the story Scheherazade tells about a youthful infatuation interesting, but (and this may well be my lack of imagination and bias) I found the story irritating and ultimately meaningless.

IQ84 by Haruki Murakami

Spoiler Alert: If you have any plans to read 1Q84, do not read further. Come back when you've read the book.

The thing is so massive that this is going to a collection of random thoughts.

1) The basic story is simple. Two Japanese 10-year-olds, after a silent communication in elementary school, fall in love and twenty years later manage, after many complications meet to consummate the love they've maintained through all the years.

2) The young woman, Aomame, murders abusive husbands in a way that is undetectable after a cursory postmortem. She shows no guilt, remorse, or qualms about the murders. She seems, in that sense, to be perfectly amoral.

3) The young man, Tengo, is an aspiring novelist. He's big and strong and women find him attractive, but he seems to be almost indifferent to them (except for their breasts). He has a married lover, ten years his senior, who visits him periodically for her—and his—sexual release. Midway through the novel, the lover's husband calls Tengo to tell him the lover won't be coming around any more. Tengo takes the news in stride, makes no effort to learn more, and we never discover what happened or how the husband learned of the affair.

4) In the first chapter, Aomame, on her way to murder an abusive husband, walks down an emergency exit from a Tokyo expressway and finds she is in an alternate world, one in which the Japanese police carry weapons, there are two moons, and there's a joint Soviet/US effort to build a base on the moon. In this world, it is no longer 1984 but 1Q84. After some half-hearted efforts to learn more, Aomame accepts the new world and continues her life much as before.

5) A policewoman friend Aomame makes is murdered during rough sex in a Tokyo hotel. The murderer is never found.

6) Tengo has intercourse with a 17-year-old girl, Fuka-Eri. She is not worried about getting pregnant; she has not started menstruation. Aomame, on the other side of Tokyo and who, at this point, has not reconnected with Tengo does become pregnant. Aomame, although she has not seen or heard from Tengo for 20 years and has not had sex with anyone in the period in which she became pregnant, realizes she is carrying his child.

7) Virtually all of the cultural references are western: music (Leos Janacek, Miles Davis), movies ("Thomas Crown Affair,"), books (Aomame holed up after murdering the leader of a religious group, reads "In Search of Lost Time"). All of the action takes place in Japan, in Tokyo and elsewhere.

8) The book left me with too many unanswered questions. I'm willing to accept a world in which a man can have sex with one woman and another—his true love—becomes pregnant. I can accept a world in which Little People come out of a dead goat's mouth and build an Air Chrysalis. But I want to know what happened to the married lover. I want to know what happened to Fuka-Eri, who is a major character but who simply walks off stage and disappears. I want to know more about the religious sect, a key institution in the book, their beliefs and why a best-selling novel is such a threat to them.

9) I think the book needs an editor. Although how do you tell an author who reportedly sells a million copies of the book in the first few weeks it's published in Japan he needs editing? But people continually echo what someone has just said. They muse interminably about unanswered and unanswerable questions. They ask rhetorical questions. They think in long italic sections.

10) Finally, having slogged through all 925 pages, I'd like to have something for the effort. This may well be my failure, my inability to see themes or to read into the text the deeper meanings Murakami has imbedded. Is it a good idea to murder abusive men that the law can't touch? Are there alternative realities we can slip into like a train switched onto another track? Is the emotion you felt as a 10-year-old strong enough to sustain without any contact for 20 years? (I had a lot of trouble with that idea, but I'm probably in a minority.) Can a novelist create an alternate reality in which other people can enter and live?

Maybe that's what Murakami is doing.

Reading Murakami's 1Q84

I've begun one of my Christmas presents, Haruki Murakami's massive (925-page) "international best seller," 1Q84. I'm not going to say much because (a) I'm only 170 pages into it; (b) it has been reviewed and commented on extensively. Having said that, I'll now say something.

1Q84 was published in Japan in three separate volumes and I'd read that Knopf hired two translators to produce the English edition in one volume. In the first books, the point of view of each chapter alternates regularly between Aomame, a 29-year-old woman who appears to be on a mission to rid Japan of men who abuse their wives, and Tengo, an aspiring novelist who becomes involved in a plan to anonymously rewrite a young woman's novel.

One of the challenges of writing from alternate points of view is to make each character's perceptions, thoughts, dialogue, and personality clearly individual. Ideally (I think), the author should not have to identify in a chapter headnote from whose point of view the chapter is being told. I'm sensitive to this issue because I'm attempting to individualize three characters in my current work in progress. Barbara Kingsolver does this brilliantly in The Poisonwood Bible. I thought that a neat way to accomplish this almost without trying in 1Q84 would be to assign the Aomame chapters to one translator, the Tengo chapters to another.

The publisher didn't do that. Jay Rubin, who has written an entire book about Murakami (Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, Harvill Press, 2002; another wonderful book by the way), translated the first two books of 1Q84. Philip Gabriel translated book three. I suspect they flow seamlessly (I'll let you know). And thank goodness Rubin and Gabriel did translate because otherwise we who do not read Japanese easily would not have the pleasure of Murakami's imagination and company.