The wondrous interior worlds of Haruki Murakami.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Translated from Japanese by Jay Rubin, Alfred A. Knopf, 611 p.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of
the World Translated by Alfred Birnbaum, Vintage International, 400
p.
The Elephant
Vanishes Stories, Vintage International, 327 p.
"People were no more than dolls set on tabletops, the springs in their backs wound up tight, dolls set to move in ways they could not choose? Most of them died, plunging over the edge of the table."
We are wind-up toys. We know as much about ourselves as we do about soup cans without labels, regarding ourselves from the outside, guessing at our own contents. We are moments away from monsters in the subway and strange, subterranean realms. Welcome to Haruki Murakami's existential universe.
Murakami's works are filled with all of the problems that the post-Cartesian world brings with it. Identity is not in the body, nor does it reside in consciousness. Both his new novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and his 1991 Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World bend and stretch the constraints of how we are who we are, taking more or less normal people and thrusting them into weird, dark underworlds and realities that fold in on themselves.
The constellation of Murakami's characters include different people sharing the same body, a man becoming a living organism within television, and a woman who believes she is the third incarnation of herself in the same lifetime, like Fausto Maijstral in Thomas Pynchon's V. A cat and a person share the same name, people go by acknowledged pseudonyms, and unrelated characters all named Noboru Watanabe show up in several of the stories collected in 1993's The Elephant Vanishes.
Wind-Up Bird stands alone in Murakami's work. It is what Underworld was for Don DeLillo. The overarching image is the "wind-up bird" of the title, an unseen creature whose song sounds as if it's winding the spring of the world. But a wind-up bird is also a mechanical toy with a key sticking out of its back. And from within this contradiction that straddles the idea of agency, the novel asks the question: who does the winding, and who is being wound?
The novel is itself like a meticulously crafted mechanical object. The protagonist's cat wanders off and a dizzyingly intricate plot whirrs to life, one tiny gear setting off the next, casting our hero into the unknown. And while Wind-Up Bird is epic in theme, it is brilliantly compact, an economical and intricate little world.
Compact like an atom, the tiniest of worlds, the microscopic particle that erased Hiroshima from the map just by splitting in two. The atom bomb is Wind-Up Bird's linchpin, and yet it lies strangely on its periphery. In one scene on mainland China, Japanese soldiers are carrying out their absurd orders to shoot the animals in the zoo when a mushroom cloud appears across the China Sea. It blocks out the sun for a time, but arouses no more notice than anything else floating in the sky. The soldiers continue about their assignment while their homes are obliterated and Japan changes forever in an instant.
Wind-Up Bird is both concerned with the very small and the very big: how the little alienation of the hero plays out against the Big Alienation of the culture. The strange identity games Murakami plays in all his work are given greater context here as a society itself seeks to take its own measure.
In the war stories of Lt. Mamiya, who witnessed Japan's overextension in China and fought against the Soviets at Nomonhan, Murakami has found the source of his alienation. Like Faulkner with the Civil War, or Portuguese author Antonio Lobo Antunes and the Communist revolution in the '70s, Murakami is bearing witness to the moment of his nation's collapse. And it is in the vast, blank expanses of the Mongolian steppes that Lt. Mamiya realizes the Japanese are doomed.
This is perhaps the most ambitious work from an author whose métier is ambitious work. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, for instance, reads like a collection of correspondence between Raymond Chandler and Robert Coover.
The main character in Hard-Boiled Wonderland, as the title would suggest, is put through the paces of the genre. He discovers that his subconscious has been scooped out and replaced by a mad scientist's idea of what a subconscious should be. He is visited by the gleefully perfunctory little-guy-who-talks-and-big-guy-who-smashes tag team. He is living in two worlds, the hard-boiled physical world and the world of his artificially manufactured subconscious, which, he discovers, is a narrative unto itself about a walled city that houses unicorns.
The stories are full of absence and disappearance. Cats disappear, wives disappear, elephants disappear. A couple wakes up at the exact same moment with the same terrible hunger. These are detective stories with characters trying to locate what's absent.
But all the postmodern theoretical trappings aside, Murakami is simply an astonishing storyteller. He can be very touching or very funny, and he is completely engrossing.
In one scene in Wind-Up Bird, a bedraggled outfit of Japanese soldiers - the ones in the zoo - must also execute four Chinese cadets. The cadets are dressed up in baseball uniforms, and they are to be killed with their own baseball bats in order to save bullets. The lieutenant orders one of his men who has never seen baseball to execute the last remaining cadet, and spends a while showing the soldier how to hold a bat, how to swing his hips, how to follow through. There is a heartbreaking tenderness to the scene. It could be a father and son in a park. But then the soldier brains the cadet.
Following the disappearance of his wife, the hero in Wind-Up Bird finds a dry well and develops a habit of sitting at the bottom of it. In total darkness and isolation he grieves. After a kind of out-of-body experience - whether dreamed or actual is unclear and, in fact, irrelevant - he "awakens" to find the dry well filling with water again.
Murakami has tried the same thing with the novel, crawling down a deep hole to bring something back that may help to set things right. By fictionalizing moments from Japan's history, he gives testament to a great jingoistic hubris transformed into a national humiliation. He dreams a past and a world that is a "puzzle in which truth was not necessarily fact and fact not necessarily truth," where the line between fiction and history is erased.