Librari[d]an

Finished Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance back on the 10th. For being one of his earlier novels - it was first published in 1988 - I felt that it was vastly superior to Kafka on the Shore. Here are a few passages from pages that I dog-eared. (My commentary follows the page number.) I didn’t include any part of the Kiki finale because none of the diction struck me as particularly noteworthy. However, the culmination of the “crying” dream is rather impressive in terms of atmosphere, mood, and imagery.

Now on to the fair use quotes / copyright infringement. (Circle one.)

“But as she got out, she asked if I would see her to her door. Probably no reason for concern, she apologized, but every once in a while, late at night, there’d be a strange man in the hall. I asked the driver to wait a few minutes, then accompanied her, arm in arm, up the frozen walk. We climbed the two flights of stairs and came to her door marked 306.” (51) Just a shout out to the stacks folk.

“You can ask the cabbage moth, you can ask the alfalfa. There’s not a human alive who keeps promises better than me.” (163) Japanese proverb? Pop-culture reference?

“Evening was gathering, darker and deeper.” (201) Nice - if a bit common sounding - turn of phrase.

“All of a sudden, I was wandering through the labyrinthine viscera of a large organism. Long-dead, cracked, eroded. By something beyond reality, beyond human rationality, I had slipped through a fault in time and entered this . . . thing.” (269) The maze is an important motif in Murakami’s “progressively post-modern” writing. (Lee) This is more for Googlers than anyone else.

“That was when I noticed a third presence in the room. Someone else was here besides Gotanda and myself. I sensed body heat, breathing, odor. Yet it wasn’t human. I froze. I glanced quickly around the room, but I saw nothing. There was only the feeling of something. Something solid, but invisible. I breathed deeply. I strained to hear.

It waited, crouching, holding its breath. Then it was gone.” (323) Creepy! I love to be thrilled like this. That penultimate sentence made my hair stand on end.

“I’m solid with deep inner meaning and pragmatic spirit.”(333) I’d love to hear someone actually say this aloud. The pluck reminds me of Huckleberry Finn and Pollyanna.

“Whenever I’m with you, I feel so relaxed. I never feel the gap. You don’t know how precious that is.” (355) Great use of the word “precious”. I also like how you can read into “the gap”, relating it to the following:

“For darkness terrifies. It swallows you, warps you, nullifies you.” (387) Again, motif driven quotage. I also like just the first sentence. Does a good job of standing alone, no?

:: Bibliography ::

• Lee, Jin Y. Murakami Interview, Part 2. http://selfdivider.com/base/?p=40 (20 February 2008). (Note: A “hasty and imperfect”, unofficial translation by an anonymous blogger. Originally appeared in the January 2007 issue of GQ Korea. See also: Part 1, Part 3, Part 4. Thanks to Ryan for sending it my way.)
• Murakami, Haruki. Dance Dance Dance: A Novel. Birnbaum, Alfred, trans. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1994. ISBN: 4770016832.

I read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle last summer and enjoyed it immensely despite reports from Japanese speaking friends that the translation was shoddy. After a glut of library-related non-fiction, I decided I needed another story about a plucky, slightly damaged person overcoming that oh-so-Murakami black, nameless, ancient Evil.

I intended to read After Dark, but it was out of the library. I placed a recall on it - shameless I know - and took out Kafka on the Shore.

Kafka on the Shore surprised me. It started off amazingly well with pseudo-historic military documents chronicling a strange event (the “rice bowl” incident) in a remote Japanese village during World War II. However, it soon veered into melodrama. (Truth be told, I’m not sure it ever navigated back out.) A story about a bodybuilding, fifteen year-old runaway? No thank you. Although still turning the pages, the story didn’t really engage me again - save for a confessional-esque return to the “rice bowl” - until Miss Saeki showed up with her enigmatic song, elegant mien, and nebulous back story. In retrospect, I think Kafka on the Shore was a pretty good novel; occasionally heavy-handed, it was not as compelling or finely crafted as Wind-Up Bird, but not too far off.

After Dark, in comparison, blew my socks off. The power of this book comes from it’s very brevity. Murakami can be verbose; after the fifth or sixth time he has his characters talking about how this-or-that is like a metaphor you may imprecate carpal tunnel on the man. In After Dark the time constraint (approx midnight to seven p.m.) forces him to cut away the dead wood and forge only the most interesting, adamantine bonds between his motifs: The invariably male embodiment of the id/Evil, the hero(ine) striving to regain an interpersonal rapport thought severed forever, the fear that H/historical damage may be irreparable, etc.

The invariable question: Is After Dark better than Wind-Up Bird? I don’t know. I think it might be. However, it does lack the magnificent historic scope we found in the latter work. In short, the jury’s still out on that one.

“On my fifteenth birthday I’ll run away from home, journey to a far-off town, and live in a corner of a small library. It’d take a week to go into the whole thing, all the details. So I’ll just give the main point. On my fifteenth birthday I’ll run away from home, journey to a far-off town, and live in a corner of a small library.“

The emphasis is Murakami’s own, and I’m still trying to figure out why he and/or translator Philip Gabriel chose to use it. (I would’ve preferred italics, but to each one’s own.) So far, I think I like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle better.

:: Bibliography ::

Murakami, Haruki. Kafka on the Shore. Translated by Philip Gabriel. New York: Knopf, 2005. Page 6.