Over the years I have read my fair share of Murakami short stories but I am yet to read him in the longer format. And now I must. Why? Because we are acquainted now. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. He knows of me. He does! Or at least that’s what I intend to believe. I have exchanged emails with his agent, Sam in NY to procure a license to perform one of his short stories for the next event at Readings in the Shed. This is how my mozzarella-like stretched imagination imagines the chat between Sam and Murakami.
S: So, there’s this girl Himali, brilliant writer it seems from her emails, she has written to me for a license to read your story…
M: Uh huh (I imagine he is a man of few words…he saves them for his stories)
S: It is for this brilliant initiative (Here Sam goes on to extol the work of Readings for a full 5 minutes)
M: Wow (High praise coming from him!)
S: So should I give them the license?
M: Hai!
Or, more likely Sam is at his filing cabinet checking his list of documented instructions on license requests for Murakami stories and gave me a thumbs up without any calls to Tokyo.
But, I am going to go with scenario one.
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I choose Norwegian Wood. It is the story of Toru Watanabe, in flashback, as he recalls his years at university. When Toru starts university, besides the usual pressures of transitioning from a teenager to an young adult, he is also coming to terms with the suicide of his best friend. He goes to class, makes new friends, gets up some shenanigans, has one night stands, falls in love and has his heart broken. But, he also grapples with issues far behind his years, death, mental illness, loss, friendship…and he wades through all this and comes of age. Watanabe is the smartest, sportiest, handsomest or for that matter any -est. But, it is impossible not to fall in love with him, much like the many female characters in the story. He is not the perfect guy but there could not be a better guy. One of his love interests Midori tell him, “I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window. That’s what I’m looking for.”
Toru is that guy.
Murakami describes Norwegian Wood as his most realistic story. He says he made a conscious effort to steer away from his preferred surrealist style and write something that more people would enjoy. While the story may be more realistic, the quality of writing brings out the extraordinary in the ordinary.
He lends depth to commonplace thoughts: “The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too soon needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute—like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness.”
He creates images that demand a second read to be savoured: “Long after the firefly had disappeared, the trail of its light remained inside me, its pale, faint glow hovering on and on in the thick darkness behind my eyelids like a lost soul.”
Mental illness is a huge part of the plot almost to the point of being rampant amongst the youth of Japan. The novel is set in the 1960s, about 20 years after the Second World War and the nuclear bombings – the darkest period in the country’s history. Murakami’s characters would have likely been born just after the war. Could the adult generation’s occupation with rebuilding the nation and coping with the loss have contributed to building an emotionally stunted generation? Perhaps. Or, perhaps it is simply the novel’s fabric.
I am shocked by the sex scenes. Their graphic nature would make writers of hardcore porn turn deep shades of red. I admit I would have been less.hocked had the story been set in America. The young characters discuss sexual acts with an abandon that I do not associate with Japanese people. I have a single image of the Japanese in my head – they are shy, reticent people and correct to a fault in their speech and behaviour. I had succumbed to the danger of a single story (despite Chimamanda’s warning) and had assumed all Japanese as the same. It is due credit to Murakami, that not once do I question the realness of his characters, despite what I mistakenly perceive as their un-Japaneseness. Toru, Midori, Naoka and every other character become living, breathing windows to Japan. Such is the power of good fiction, it opens the mind to the realities of the world.