This is the original text of the lecture I gave on the eve of publication of Haruki Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage at the Big Green Bookshop, London.
Murakami – normality versus the ordinary
In the autumn of 1997 I was a bookseller in Birmingham. The sales rep for
Harvill came into the store and told me that he had a book I would love. He
said don’t bother about the cover; it really is something. I took it home. I
had no money and when the electricity meter went off I had to light candles as
I was already on emergency. I picked up the book and started reading, still
somewhat put off by the horrible yellow jacket. I was still reading some six
hours later, six hours in which I thought I had finally found my writer.
I hadn't dared re-read the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle until a week or so
ago. Re-reading is a dangerous thing to do to books you have fallen for so
deeply and not had chance to return to. Declan Kieberd wrote in his
introduction to Ulysses that you do not read Joyce’s book, Ulysses reads you.
And to me that’s a fair assessment of any book: timing, mood, manner of
discovery, the place where it was read have a profound effect on the
experience. Reading the Wind-Up Bird would be to go back to that bedsitting
room, strange cooking smell coming from the man below me, the burr of the
heater that didn't work even had there been electricity. It felt a suitably
Murakami thing to do. At least it wouldn't mean sitting at the bottom of a
well.
The temptation was, of course, to read the new book first - Colorless
Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. I had an advance copy ready to
read, the thrill of that never ceases, and I could easily have just elected to
read that and spoil the whole reading
experience for you by giving you my cock-eyed opinions. But I went back,
primarily to work out what it is that we’re all doing here. What it is that
makes this writer different to any other literary writer in the world? Why are
we here, on a Monday night waiting for a new book to be allowed to be
sold? What is it that we read in Murakami
that we don’t get anywhere else?
What surprised me perhaps the most was the freshness of those opening
pages of the Wind-Up Bird. Fresh despite having a clear memory of reading it,
fresh despite so many of the tropes we have come to associate with Murakami being
present inside the first six or so pages. Here’s the opening page.
[I read the opening page, I can’t type it out, sorry]
To me this, up until the section break on page 6 is the ur-Murakami
text. Almost all of his tics are here: cats, food, music, sex, the surreal and
the normal clashing while the narrator shrugs his shoulders and tells us he’s
just a normal, regular guy. It felt fresh despite this, fresh also in
comparison to his other subsequent big books – Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84.
These are words and sentences worth analysing, picking apart. The music is
important, because Murakami is a musical writer, not just in the sense of his
appropriation of everyone from Nat King Cole to Duran Duran, Janacek to The
Lovin’ Spoonful, but in the way he builds his stories. As Jay Rubin says in his
excellent book Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, “Murakami knows how
stories are told – and heard” which is getting closer, I think to the crux of
the matter. Murakami knows where the white spaces are, the silences, the beats
you miss because you’re concentrating on the complete sound of his world.
Let me explain what I mean. In that opening section of the Wind-Up
Bird, we have Toru explaining his routine and how it has been interrupted by
someone wanting to get to know him, later who will talk dirty to him down the
phone. What we hear, as described by Toru is an ordinary person to whom
something extraordinary is happening.
Incidentally as a quick aside, this is why so much of modern British
literary fiction is so anaemic. British literary fiction has a tendency to
invert what all great American and world fiction understands, that being a
normal person thrust into an extraordinary situation is what gives a story its
great narrative drive. A lot of British fiction does the opposite: it puts extraordinary
people in ordinary situations. There are too many geniuses, writers and
grotesques in British fiction. One of the reasons Harry Potter was so popular
was because he was just an ordinary boy, who was suddenly caught up in
something incredible. Read Martin Amis, later Ian McEwan people like that –
their characters do not understand what it is to be normal; they exist in a privileged,
extraordinary manner.
And even though that’s an aside, it comes back to my initial point
about what Murakami does that is so appealing: the ordinary. He present ordinary
brilliantly, and the extraordinary brilliantly too, but it is the ordinary
which has me in awe. And it comes back again to the music, and what we really
hear.
Let’s take again that opening of Wind-Up Bird. This is a guy making
lunch listening to the radio when a woman starts talking to him as they are
close confederates, then she hangs up, he makes the pasta, goes back to his
library book, then the phone rings and it’s his wife suggesting he works for a
poetry magazine, who then reminds him to go and look for their missing cat.
On the face of it, this is entirely the notion I described earlier, an
ordinary man for whom the extraordinary happens. Except, Murakami is playing a
kind of jazz brush drum beat in the background that if you don’t listen closely
enough to, you’re likely to miss.
Yes, this seems fairly normal: man listens to radio while cooking food.
But the normality that Toru is so insistent he represents is not actually so
normal at all. Firstly he is cooking pasta at 10.30am, which isn’t the kind of
thing regular people do. Secondly, he is out of work, we later learn, simply
because he quit his job, with nothing to go to, with no plan in mind and no
interest in what happens next. Then a woman calls him for some phone sex and he
just sounds…mildly irritated. Phone Sex he says, Fantastic.
What we therefore see as a ‘normal’ life is far from that, he is, like
most of his characters, not normal, not regular, not even close to a Joe Schmo
slob. The voice is intoxicating, didactic even, telling you what to listen to,
while leaving everything else in the background. It’s this I think that gets to
heart of Murakami’s great gift: making everything seem normal, when actually,
there is nothing normal to cling to.
One thing that grabbed me on the second read of Wind-Up, which I had
forgotten from the first time around, if I even noticed it, is the clear
evasions of Toru’s wife. She is coming home later and later, seems now, all of
a sudden happy with her husband sitting at home all day, is a different woman
than she was just a few months before. Toru registers this, but does not
investigate it. A normal reaction would be suspicion, but he just lets
everything slide. The normal world, such as it is, is no less dangerous than
the one that can be found at the bottom of a well.
It’s a popular idea that Murakami writes two different kinds of novels,
the big, surreal opus like Hardboiled Wonderland, Wind Up Bird and 1Q84 and the
smaller, more winsome tales such as Sputnik Sweetheart and Norwegian Wood.
However, I’d argue that all actually come from the same space and from the same
yearning: to see the world in a more magical, yet more real way than it often
is presented in fiction. Even at his most faux-realistic, the nature of
Murakami’s prose means that it inhabits a fictional realm means it feels other,
strange, but distinctly our own. He is playing with our own notions of what we
want from life – love, sex, food, adventure – while also subtly showing that it
is here in our own lives if we look hard enough.
This section of the Wind-Up Bird originally appeared as a short story,
the opening to his collection The Elephant Vanishes. This is a book I have read
many times, perhaps because it includes the other great pillar of Murakami’s
work, a very short story called "On seeing
the 100% Perfect Girl one Beautiful April Morning". It is, to me, one of the
very great short stories: simple, but heartbreaking, stylistically and formally
inventive, but with a story as old as humanity. If The Wind-Up Bird is
Murakami’s masterpiece, this story distills his gifts of love, sex and fate into
just a few pages.
[Here I read the story, you can too,
here]
The crucial line in the story, for me is the two cliche's tucked in to the end of the second paragraph: "The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest and my mouth is as dry as a desert." These are faux-naif words, but one that immediately grounds us in the ordinariness of the narrator. He is one of us, one of those people who gets tongue tied and can't really explain the world around him in any great or significant way. The simplicity sets up an expectation of realism and normality. We are in the realms of a pop song - where hearts beat like a drum and love is everlasting and permanent.
However, this set-up is reversed in paragraph four. "Much as I like noses," he writes "I can't recall the shape of hers - or even if she had one." It could be a joke, the style is conversational and wouldn't feel out of place in that kind of comic deadpan way. Yet it actually puts a tremor through the still and normal world Murakami has created. How normal is this set up anyway? How can one be so sure that someone is the 100% perfect person for you? The normality is false here; there is something strange right from the get-go; Murakami just doesn't allow you to fully see it.
It's this, I think, that draws us to his work, draws us deeply
in. His work tells us that really, we don’t need a Malta Kano, a wild sheep or a
talking cat to see the strangeness abound; we just need to look around us to take in the fantastical oddity
of the world we inhabit.
