Something New

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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

 

“HEAR THE WIND SING and PINBALL 1973” by Two Short Novels by Haruki Murakami (translated by Ted Goossen) (Harvill Secker / Penguin-Random House, $NZ40)

Although he is now in his mid-60s, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has a huge international fan-base, especially with people in their twenties and thirties. Part slacker, part Kafka, he resonates with those who like their existentialism wrapped in short narratives filled with both highbrow and pop culture references. (See on this blog reviews of his ColorlessTsukuru Tazaki and The StrangeLibrary)

Murakami’s appeal is so great that publishers are now marketing to the complete-ists. These two novellas Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball 1973 were the first things that Murakami wrote and had published, back in the early 1980s. They have been around for years in an English translation by Alfred Birnbaum, but that translation did not attract a large audience. Now the two novellas are getting wider distribution in new translations by Ted Goossen. This single volume prints them back-to-back, one right-side-up and one upside-down (depending on which side of the book you’re holding up). The two stories are “bulked up” with blank pages between chapters etc., though in truth each is short enough to be read at a sitting.

Written in 1979, Hear the Wind Sing is a first-person narration by an unnamed 29-year-old looking back eight years, and recalling his younger self when he was a 21-year-old biology student at university.

To call the narrative episodic is an understatement. Presented in bite-sized chapters, it takes us through the narrator’s year of seemingly random encounters. One of the most significant people in his life is “the Rat” an idler and university dropout from a rich family, about the same age as the narrator. While the narrator is bookish, the Rat isn’t. He prefers to spend his time hanging out in coffee shops, reading car mags and porn mags and drinking beer. The Rat does, however, tells the narrator the plot of a nightmare he’s had, which sounds to the narrator like an excellent plot for a story. The narrator introduces the Rat to books, and by the end of this novella, we hear that the Rat has been reading Henry James (whom he judges crap), Moliere and Kazantzakis. Very coffee-bar. There’s another male friend, the Chinese bartender “J”, who is more shadowy and seems mainly a sounding board for the narrator and the Rat, although he does occasionally express pieces of pithy wisdom.

But Hear the Wind Sing is not a story of salvation by reading. It’s more a series of apparently random and apparently unconnected events. There’s the narrator’s recall of once, as a kid, going to a psychoanalyst and being treated by being fed sweets. There’s a meeting with an older woman who tries to chat him up in a bar. There’s the DJ who rings him up and lets him win a redundant t-shirt.

So it trundles along until the girl-with-one-missing-finger, who passed out drunk at a party, turns up in the narrator’s bed.

And here we get this odd thing with hipster narratives. The novella does not suddenly focus of the relationship of the narrator and the girl. Instead, the narrator passes into memories of earlier girlfriends and bed-mates and has his continuing random encounters with the Rat. But it’s clear that the girl-with-one-missing-finger is now the most significant thing in his life, even if their conversations are minimalist and give as little away as possible, and even if the narrator continues to play the role of Mr Cool, never letting his feelings out.

The novella has a soundtrack of course, with all those references to the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” (I found it a relief from all the pop stuff when at one point the narrator and the girl listen to the MJQ instead). It also has a wrap-up of sorts, where what really ails the girl-with-the-missing-finger is revealed to us and it’s thematically linked with the DJ from whom our protagonist won his t-shirt.

Murakami has the great advantage of a very clear style, being mainly simple, declarative sentences. Oddly, the main effect Hear the Wind Sing had on me was one of nostalgia. It’s the pared-back, casting-no-shadows style of American hipster fiction from the 1950s and 1960s, even if it was written in Japan in the 1970s.

There are times when this cool-as-shit style can become irritating, however. Take this paragraph where the narrator describes one of his former loves:

“The third girl I slept with was a French literature major I met in the school library, but the following spring vacation she hanged herself in the shabby grove of trees by the tennis courts. Her body wasn’t discovered until vacation ended and the new school year began – she had been swinging in the wind for two whole weeks. Even today no one goes near that grove after the sun goes down.” (p.69)

So that’s it. No emotional reaction from the narrator to the tragic and dramatic death of one of his former girlfriends? No – because to express emotion would be uncool. But then that’s the game with hipster fiction. We are supposed to join the dots and see the subtext that is latent in the simple factual statements. Trouble is, too often this sort of fiction (surface only, with us having to supply or infer the depth) doesn’t really have much of a subtext once you analyse it.

Hear the Wind Sing is prefaced with an introduction in which Murakami explains how he came to write this, his first work, in such spare time as he had when he and his wife were running a jazz-bar. “I hadn’t a clue how to write”, he says (p.x). He taught himself simplicity and directness of style by first writing in his limited English, so that he would be forced into a restricted vocabulary and simple sentence structures. Obviously Hear the Wind Sing is itself partly about the art of writing – its opening chapter is about what writing takes out of one, and two or three times Murakami refers to the (fictitious) American writer of pulp sci-fi, Derek Hartfield, as a model for his own writing. We hipsters refuse not to model ourselves on pop culture, you know, even if it’s a pop culture we’ve made up.

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Pinball 1973 is basically a continuation of Hear the Wind Sing. Written a year later, it concerns the same main characters (anonymous narrator and the Rat), who are now both in their mid-20s.

The narrator runs a translation agency, which gives him a good living. He now cohabits with two young women – a pair of twins. While singleness and alienation remain a big part of the tale, this domestic arrangement sounds more like an adolescent’s fantasy than a young man’s reality. Freaky and dippy things (pardon the dated 60s slang) happen when he is with these twins – such as the funeral they hold for a switch panel that has had to be replaced in their apartment. No meaningful conversations ever occur between the narrator and the cartoonic twins, however. More is said between him and the young woman gofer at his agency. She worries if she is stuck in a rut at her job of filing and making coffee.

Her anxiety is the real mood of Pinball 1973. It reflects very much the time when, post-university, young men and women are wondering what the heck they will do with the rest of their lives and how much longer they are going to stay around in the old neighbourhood.

Murakami adopts a new and interesting strategy in Pinball 1973. While the narration is still first-person, the sections concerning the Rat are written in the third-person. In effect, we get outside the narrator’s head, and we find the Rat’s mind analysed. The Rat goes through a half-defined, vaguely-explained relationship with a woman, but more than anything he is caught up in a strong sense of angst. He no longer feels comfortable playing the role he has played. He wants to move on, but the wider world daunts him. Thus:

“It appeared as though time had stopped for the Rat, as if all of a sudden its flow had been severed. The Rat had no idea why things had changed. Nor did he know how to search for the severed end. He could only wander through the autumn gloom with a limp piece of rope in his hand. He crossed meadows, forded rivers, pushed open doors. But the rope led him nowhere. He was as powerless and lonely as a winter fly stripped of its wings, or a river confronting the sea. An ill wind had arisen somewhere, and it was blowing the warm familiar air that had embraced him to the other side of the planet.” (pp.33-34)

Or again:

“The world awaiting him out there was just too big, too powerful; there seemed to be no place where he could burrow into it.” (p.49)

Murakami “doubles” his theme by splitting the novel into two consciousnesses like this; for if the Rat is ill-at-ease with the world he knows, so is the narrator. He spends much of his time reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and trying to figure out the logic of things.

Pinball 1973 begins, as its precursor did, with some thoughts about writing (in this case introduced by a “man from Saturn”, so we’ve got another sci-fi. vibe here). But very soon it gives us a discourse on playing pinball machines, and how pinball is essentially the art of doing nothing skilfully because, in the end, all the pinball-player is left with is the score on the machine.

Only three-quarters of the way through the novella do we return to this pinball motif as the narrator recalls embarking on a quest to find the Holy Grail of the perfect pinball machine upon which he once played, but which has gone missing. The novella becomes much more robust as a narrative once this quest begins, as does the type of irony Murakami produces. It transpires that the most detailed and meaningful conversation the narrator has is with the pinball machine as he imagines it speaking.

And then he is over his obsession with pinball machines.

It all ends with the Rat leaving to find the big world beyond his own home; and the narrator’s twin bed-mates saying farewell. In other words, at its core Pinball 1973 is a novel about the painful business of growing up, even if it traverses only the first half of becoming an adult. The farewell-to-adolescence part.

Being somewhat more generous in its descriptions, somewhat less minimalist in its dialogue, and far less determined to be cool and detached all the time, I found Pinball 1973 a more engaging and mature piece of writing than Hear the Wind Sing. Murakami was growing up as a writer.

Murakami devotees will be quick to tell me that these two early works were the prelude to A Wild Sheep Chase, a third book about the narrator and his pal the Rat. But as I haven’t read this third instalment, I can’t comment on it. Suffice it to say that these two novellas will satisfy the Murakami fans and were worth publishing.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“THE STRANGE LIBRARY” by Haruki Murakami (Harvill Secker / Random House, $NZ34:99); “THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN” by Paula Hawkins (Doubleday / Random House, $36:99)

Do you know what I mean by a freak or “sport” in the book world? I mean an odd little volume, which seems designed to appeal to a very specialised audience. Haruki Murakami’s The Strange Library is such a sport. Barely 80 pages long, and most of that taken up with illustrations, this long short story could be a children’s story, except that it has a chilly, nightmarish and very Kafkaesque tone to it. As I said once before on this blog [look up my take on his Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage via the index at right], the Japanese fabulist Haruki Murakami is openly and avowedly very influenced by Kafka.

The Strange Library is told by a little boy, on his way home from school, who goes into the library and, when asked what he wants, thinks of the oddest subject he can and says: “How taxes were collected in the Ottoman empire”. At once he is swept down dark corridors and through an underground labyrinth to a special closed reading room where he is given three books on this arcane subject and is told he must read them at once. But he cannot check them out. They are reference books. So he is locked in a cell, with a ball-and-chain attached to his leg, until he has read them. And he is further warned, by a strange submissive sheep-man who brings him donuts, that if he does not remember everything he has read, then his brains will be eaten out by the old man who is the library’s sinister keeper. After all, if you extract information out of libraries, why can’t libraries extract information out of you? A pet starling, a sinister black dog and a beautiful girl who cannot speak also come into the story – and if you think this is all sounding distinctly Freudian, then I think you are right.

But what does it all mean?

I admit I haven’t the least idea. Is it saying something about how daunting libraries can seem to children? Is it talking about the power of a child’s imagination in conjuring up, Caligari-like, a sinister milieu out of something quite mundane? Is it about the power of memory and imagination, especially in the moments when the boy is swept into the books he has to read and imaginatively becomes an Ottoman tax collector?

Blowed if I know.

But it really is a “sport”, and quite a charming one, mainly illustrated (in this English-language edition which is apparently designed quite differently from the original Japanese-language edition) with “found” images from nineteenth century prints or mid-twentieth century cookbooks or manuals of astronomy, especially where the phases of the moon are concerned.

And who precisely is the audience? NOT children, I would guess. More likely its “specialised” audience are Murakami’s worldwide legion of fans and complete-ists, without whose existence it might not have got a translation in the first place,.

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I’ve said this so often on this blog that you are probably tired of hearing it, but it’s still worth saying. So forgive me for repeating myself yet again: If a novel is newly-published, I consider it unmannerly for reviewers to spike all its surprises and give away all its twists.

This is especially true of whodunits of course, and as Paula Hawkins’ debut novel The Girl on the Train is a whodunit, I hereby make a solemn promise to provide no spoilers and to break off my synopsising when I am at most about a third of the way through the narrative.

Okay?

Here goes.

Rachel, a very unhappy woman in her early 30s, commutes on the train each day from Ashbury to Euston Station in London. Her life is a mess. Her husband Tom divorced her when she couldn’t produce a baby and when she started to hit the bottle. To make matters worse, Tom has remarried Anna, who has produced a healthy baby, so Rachel feels permanently humiliated. Rachel’s drinking has progressed to the point where she is virtually an alcoholic. Sometimes she has blackouts (which will be crucial to the way the story develops). She has not told her very forbearing landlady that she was fired from her job months previously (for drunkenness, of course). So when she travels to and from London, she is only pretending to go to a place of work.

But one thing brightens up her days. She loves looking out from her commuter train at the houses that back onto the line, including the house where her ex-husband Tom and his new wife Anna now live. As she remarks on the novel’s second page

“My head leaning against the carriage window, I watch these houses roll past me like the tracking shot in a film. I see them as others do not; even their owners probably don’t see them from this perspective. Twice a day, I am offered a view into other lives, just for a moment. There’s something comforting about the sight of strangers safely at home.”

Near where Tom and Anna live, Rachel regularly spots from her train window a couple who seem to be the perfect, contented middle-class couple. She envies them. She makes up pet names for them. But we as readers soon discover that their real names are Megan and Scott, and all is not as well with them as it looks from a passing train window. Megan feels neglected by Scott and is suffering a severe case of what used to be called suburban neurosis.

Then one day, from her passing train window, Rachel sees something very disturbing. And soon after, Megan disappears and is presumed murdered.

Which is all the set-up and beyond which point, a third of the way through the novel and as promised, I cease my plot summary.

The narration of the novel is first-person, mainly told by Rachel, but with sections where Anna and Megan take over – so we have a chorus of three women’s voices and the further we get the more we discover how unhappy all their lives are. Rachel is the prime witness to some nasty things which she tries to convey to the police – but as she is clearly a bit of a fantasist, an alcoholic, a liar and a stalker (of her ex-husband and his wife), the police quite understandably see her as an unreliable witness and do not believe her. So Rachel proceeds with her own investigation. There is in this novel the big inbuilt improbability that a woman who is such an emotional train-wreck would have the doggedness to proceed with her sleuthing, especially as she so often reminds us of her weaknesses:

“My better angels lost again, defeated by drink, by the person I am when I drink. Drunk Rachel sees no consequences, she is either excessively expansive and optimistic or wrapped up in hate. She has no past, no future. She exists purely in the moment. Drunk Rachel – wanting to be part of the story….. she lied. I lied.”(p.109)

Still, we can accept it as a convention of the whodunit, just as (through slightly gritted teeth) I accept the conventions of the author withholding vital information from us; and of the eventual unmasked culprit neatly tying up the loose ends by giving a confession of how exactly the crime was committed.

To begin with, an investigation sparked by something glimpsed from a passing train reminded me of Agatha Christie’s 4:50 from Paddington (filmed long ago as Murder She Said). A main character who acts as voyeur into other people’s lives has overtones of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. But Paula Hawkins seems mainly to be writing for people of her own generation, so the focus of the novel is on younger people.

Improbabilities and all, it stacks up as a good psychological thriller and it has already been optioned for filming, in which format it will probably become better known than in this novel form.

Something New

“COLOURLESS TSUKURU TAZAKI and His Years of Pilgrimage” by Haruki Murakami (translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel (Harvill Secker; distributed by Collins-Random House, $NZ45)

You might suspect you know the territory in which you have landed as soon as you read the opening paragraph of Haruki Murakami’s novel Colourless Tsukuri Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. It reads thus:

“From July of his sophomore year in college until the following January, all Tsukuru Tazaki could think about was dying. He turned twenty during this time, but his special watershed – becoming an adult – meant nothing. Taking his own life seemed the most natural solution, and even now he couldn’t say why he hadn’t taken this final step. Crossing that threshold between life and death would have been easier than swallowing a slick, raw egg.” (p.1)

We are, it would seem, about to be plunged into a novel of angst and alienation and potential suicide. And thus it is for much of the novel’s length.

When Tsukuru was at high school, he was close friends with four other students. In Japanese, the names of the other four all

referred to colours. The two boys were Aka (Red) and Ao (Blue). The two girls were Kuro (Black) and Shiro (White). Tsukuru, “colourless” Tsukuru, alone had a name which did not refer to colour. Instead, his name meant “to build” or “to make” – a most appropriate moniker, given that Tsukuru was intent on studying civil engineering and designing the railway stations with which he was obsessed.

At high school the five of them were inseparable.

Then something went badly wrong.

Tsukuru moved to Tokyo to pursue his studies. His four friends all stayed in the provincial city of Nagoya. When he returned there on holiday, none of them would speak to him. They were unavailable on the phone. They would not answer his calls. They consciously cut him off and shunned him. When he tried to ask one why this was so, he was told coldly and seriously that he should surely know why they now wanted nothing more to do with him. He got no further explanation.

Sixteen years later, at the age of 36, and with a sort of girlfriend, called Sara, to confide in, Tsukuru, “colourless” Tsukuru, has a life which seems the paradigm of buttoned-down normality. Late in the novel it is summarised as follows:

“At least from the outside, Tsukuru Tazaki’s life was going well, with no particular problems to speak of. He’d graduated from a well-known engineering school, found a job in a railway company, working as a white-collar professional. His reputation in the company was sound, and his boss trusted him. Financially, he had no worries. When his father died, Tsukuru inherited a substantial sum of money and the one-bedroom condo in a convenient location near the centre of Tokyo. He had no loans. He hardly drank and didn’t smoke, and he had no expensive hobbies. He spent very little money. It wasn’t that he was especially trying to economize or live an austere life, but he just couldn’t think of ways to spend money. He had no need for a car, and he got by with a limited wardrobe. He bought books and CDs occasionally, but that didn’t amount to much. He preferred cooking his own meals to eating out, and even washed his own sheets and ironed them.” (p. 187)

But Tsukuru is still eaten up with the thought of how he was ostracised by his former friends. He has difficulty forming strong relationships with anybody. He has an intense friendship with a male student of Physics called Haida. But when Haida begins to invade his erotic dreams, Tsukuru sleeps with a woman just to reassure himself that he isn’t homosexual. He cannot quite fully commit himself to Sara.

Sara takes matters into her own hands. Methodically, she finds out what has become of each of Tsukuru’s former friends, and where each now lives. She urges Tsukuru to visit each and to clear up what is blighting his life. Tsukuru does so. And at this point, a little shy of halfway through the novel, I break off my neat synopsis. I consider it unmannerly to give away vital plot twists in a new novel, and there is one as soon as Tsukuru proceeds to investigate his own past. It is something both shocking and startling, which is the way I prefer to leave it.

How do I judge this curious novel? It begins as a sort of existentialist fable about the solitary individual’s place in a mutable and incomprehensible world. The sudden change in Tsukuru’s status and fortune that happens when his friends, for no clear reason, ostracise him, is almost like the sudden change from man to bug that happens to Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I do not say this without some prompting. The novelist Haruki Murakami is a great fan of Kafka, once wrote a novel called Kafka on the Shore, and won the international Franz Kafka Prize. Yet, to my mild disappointment, this novel slowly transmutes from fable to psychological case study. It ceases to ask how strange and alien the world can be, and proceeds to ask merely what is wrong with Tsukuru Tazaki. Indeed, it becomes more Bildungsroman than fable as it goes through many of the phases of a young male’s mental maturation – expulsion from a comforting social group and loss of friends from schooldays; fears of not matching up to social expectations; performance anxiety in sex; fear of being homosexual; anxiety about the worth of a chosen career; and so on.

Having not a word of Japanese, I am of course dependent upon Philip Gabriel’s translation to gauge the tone and style of the novel. It is a very clean, clear prose, wasting few words. Sometimes I suspect the translator has embellished it. (Were the “gaggles of garrulous geese” on p.204 alliterative in the original?) Sometimes it is mildly portentous, as when a man showing Tsukuru the way is described as being “like the Grim Reaper having shown a dead person the road to Hades” (p.218). It certainly has a strong strain of overt symbolism. Tsukuru is “colourless” because he has yet to develop any distinctive personality and sense of self. There are repeated references to recordings of Franz Liszt’s “Years of Pilgrimage” (hence the novel’s subtitle) to remind us that this is a novel with psychological growth as its goal. Tsukuru’s career as a designer of railway stations echoes his desire for an ordered, regular, timetabled life, in compensation for his sense of being an outcast. The most clumsy chapter is Chapter 17, wherein Tsukuru seeks, from a friend living in Finland, an explanation for his life’s woes. Here the author opts to spell out, in very expository dialogue, ideas that would have better been left implicit.

But I would certainly not underrate the novel as a representation of modern Japan and its material culture. One of the friends who have forsaken Tsukuru has made money by training people to become dutiful employees committed to company ethics. Somewhat scornfully, Sara describes his business thus:

“ ‘The name’s new, but it’s not really much different from a personal development seminar,’ Sara said. “Basically a quick impromptu brainwashing course to educate your typical corporate warriors. They use a training manual instead of sacred scriptures, with promotion and a high salary as their equivalent of enlightenment and paradise. A new religion for a pragmatic age. No transcendent elements like in a religion, though, and everything is theorised and digitalized. Very transparent and easy to grasp. And quite a few people get positive encouragement from this. But the fact remain that it’s nothing more than an infusion of the hypnotic into a system of thought that suits their goal, a conglomeration of only those theories and statistics that line up with their ultimate objectives….’ ” (pp.116-117)

Becoming immersed in the commercial crowd is as much a nightmare as being turned away by friends. It looms large in those sections of this novel that approach satire.