Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

Haruki Murakami. Photo by Wakari­m­a­sita. Spe­cial Effects by Cuchulain.

One of the most con­sis­tently inter­est­ing writ­ers of the last twenty years is Haruki Murakami, the Japan­ese dynamo whose nov­els defy cat­e­go­riza­tion. Well, actu­ally, they can be cat­e­go­rized under a rubric all their own. Murakamism, let’s say. By that I mean … the strange and sur­real dis­lo­ca­tion of humans and their inter­ac­tions approach­ing the gate­way. The gate­way being the door into or out of another dimen­sion, a hid­den world, for a moment.

In most of his nov­els, Haruki Murakami makes this dance with the gate­way even more bril­liant, strange, and unique by giv­ing us a nar­ra­tor who seems quite ordi­nary. Some­thing Edgar Allen Poe did to per­fec­tion in many of his best short sto­ries. In Murakami-​​land, that nar­ra­tor is usu­ally a young man, thirty-​​ish, a loner, smart, savvy, and very laid-​​back. He’s also cross-​​culturally adept, at home with the Bea­t­les, with Amer­i­can Jazz, and with the cadence of hard-​​boiled, tough-​​guy writ­ers like Hem­ing­way, James M. Cain and Ray­mond Chan­dler. Murakami’s nar­ra­tor is almost per­ma­nently nos­tal­gic, wist­ful about his child­hood and the child­hood of the world, with­out being naive in the present. And there’s always a girl to think about, things to regret and mourn. There’s always a beau­ti­ful girl to remem­ber, and a tragedy to explain, a mys­tery that can’t be solved.

Murakami returns fre­quently to the idea of sis­ters, be they of the same blood or just sis­ters in spirit, sym­bol­i­cally related, con­nected. The older of the two is gen­er­ally the more phys­i­cally attrac­tive and self-​​absorbed, a femme-​​fatale of sorts. The younger is typ­i­cally street-​​wise, tough but vul­ner­a­ble, and often deeply hurt for being passed over so many times in favor of the older, more osten­si­bly beau­ti­ful girl. The nar­ra­tor may or may not real­ize the dif­fer­ence between them in time. May or may not dis­cover the impor­tance of that dif­fer­ence and how it impacts his life and what he should do about it.

These women are not really stock char­ac­ters. They are obses­sions, recre­ations, derived from Murakami’s own expe­ri­ences. In Jay Rubin’s won­der­ful study, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, we dis­cover just how much his sur­re­al­ist nov­els gain their start­ing point from real life. His obses­sions some­times take the form of sym­bols, and those sym­bols often appear as women, but under­neath all of that is sub­stance taken from his own life, trans­lated into a com­po­si­tion we find no where else in literature.

This, of course, seems counter-​​intuitive at first glance. That real expe­ri­ence is behind his bizarre cre­ations. But that is the case. The result is a deep­en­ing, a lay­er­ing of real­i­ties designed to form mys­te­ri­ous skin, mys­te­ri­ous bones and mys­te­ri­ous blood.

My favorite of his nov­els is Dance, Dance, Dance, though Nor­we­gian Wood ranks a very close sec­ond. The lat­ter of the two is some­times con­sid­ered more tra­di­tional, less involved in Murakami’s alter­nate worlds. It also prob­a­bly comes clos­est to pro­vid­ing his read­ers with a Rosetta Stone of sorts. Read­ing Nor­weigian Wood brings us clos­est, per­haps, to the bare bones of his obses­sions, stripped of some forms of sur­re­al­ity. Closer, in a sense, to the world we all inhabit. Or could.

After read­ing six or seven of his books, I still can’t get enough of them and plan some­day to devour his entire oeu­vre. The pages fly past me, and I can’t put his nov­els down. I don’t want to leave his cre­ated world, his wild jux­ta­po­si­tions, his mun­dane cityscapes, Jazz bars, hotels and motels crowded with the desire to escape into the extra­or­di­nary. I don’t want to leave Murakami-​​land, with its wounded young women, with their spe­cial, funny ears, their entirely love­able idio­syn­cro­cies, their tragic pasts and that Jazz-​​loving, Beatles-​​loving, oh so ordi­nary voice in the cen­ter of it all.