(The Hindu, 1 December, 2002)
Haruki Murakami’s sweetly deceptive Sputnik Sweetheart crash-landed into my life like an out-of-control rocket. Before I knew it, my world had exploded and for the next few months I was devouring his novels like an addict running out of fixes. If you ask me to name all the books I read in quick succession after that first, earth-shattering encounter – grabbing whatever came to hand, with no regard to order or chronology – I could rattle them off without a pause: Norwegian Wood, South of the Border, West of the Sun, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, The Elephant Vanishes…But if you asked me to tell you what it was about these books that so completely consumed me, I would have to grope in the dark, like a Murakami character, tracing long-forgotten hieroglyphics and enigmatic patterns, strangely comforting, oddly familiar, but with no name or description to put a word to.
How do you describe a Murakami novel? Take one part hard-boiled detective fiction à la Raymond Chandler, throw in some Philip K. Dick, add a dash of Kafka, a sprinkling of Borges, and for good measure, shake the whole thing up with lots of oddball love and sex and…well, you get the idea. To read a Murakami novel is to be immersed into an experience, to journey into a world that is at once familiar and utterly mysterious. Superficially, this world is usually Tokyo but in reality, it is a chthonian alter-universe, a labyrinth of the subconscious, where Murakami is simply the lead explorer, as shocked and confounded as we are by the unexpected glimpses thrown up by the wandering arc of his flashlight. In an interview, he once said, “I write weird stories. I don’t know why I like weirdness so much. Myself, I’m a very realistic person. I don’t trust anything New Age…or reincarnation, dreams, Tarot, horoscopes. I don’t trust anything like that at all. I wake up at 6 in the morning and go to bed at 10, jogging every day and swimming, eating healthy food. I’m very realistic. But when I write, I write weird. That’s very strange. When I’m getting more and more serious, I’m getting more and more weird. When I want to write about the reality of society and the world, it gets weird. Many people ask me why, and I can’t answer that.”
Murakami’s books are certainly weird and it is this “weirdness” factor that gives them their unique quality and makes them so addictive, a bit like watching a soap opera by David Lynch…which, come to think of it, wouldn’t be that far-fetched as Lynch is one of many influences that Murakami cites. But his books are also hip, funny, sad and deeply moving. As meditations on contemporary life, Murakami has few peers for he is the quintessential post-modern writer, effortlessly transcending cultural borders, unselfconsciously plundering whatever influences suits his fancy, making no distinction between “high” and “low” culture. Thus, his books are peppered with references to everything and everyone from cooking the perfect al dente pasta to Kerouac, Stephen King, Scott Fitzgerald, Len Deighton, The Doors, Rossini, Duke Ellington, Talking Heads, Nat King Cole, Casablanca…This is one reason why it is so easy to identify with Murakami’s characters. They are not so much Japanese as representatives of the new global cultural village, a world governed primarily by the lingua franca of shared art, music, movies and books.
Murakami writes in a deliberately understated style, deadpan and matter-of-fact, shot through with a wry sense of humour, which lulls the reader into a false sense of suburban security – “I was awakened by music. Far-off music, barely audible. Steadily, like a faceless sailor hauling an anchor from the bottom of the sea, the faint sound brought me to my senses.” – and is all the more effective for the baroque, fantasy roller-coaster of a ride that he is about to hurl us on. Growing up in the port city of Kobe, Murakami’s influences were primarily American – rock and roll and jazz (before he turned seriously to writing, he ran a jazz bar in Tokyo for seven years), television shows, cars, clothes, but above all, the detective stories of Raymond Chandler, Ed McBain and Mickey Spillane. Later, he discovered Truman Capote and Raymond Carver, both of whose works he has translated into Japanese. Murakami consciously turned his back on Japanese literature and, unencumbered by the weight of his own literary tradition, was free to forge an idiosyncratic style, one that borrowed more from the sparse, unadorned prose of his literary heroes, Chandler and Carver, than from the more formal language of his immediate predecessors, Mishima, Kobo Abe and Kenzaburo Oe.
The typical Murakami story is narrated by a thirty-something male, often nameless, usually unemployed (or, if working, engaged in some undemanding profession), who is unremarkable, unambitious and seemingly ordinary. But it is these very qualities that sets him apart, that makes him something of a rebel – albeit without a cause – a misfit existing on the fringes of a society that demands complete conformity and participation. The banal life of this character is shattered by a series of fantastical coincidences and encounters, usually triggered by the disappearance of a loved one (or sometimes, an animal), which leads him deeper and deeper into another reality where the truth may be found. It is here that our nondescript, anti-hero displays surprising resilience and a grounded sense of humour that sees him through even the most bizarre and trying situations. The alternate reality that he finds himself sucked into may simply be a mental state and indeed, Murakami characters often succumb to mysterious bouts of emotional breakdown. But it can also be a parallel universe, populated by real and shadowy figures that may or may not be the projection of our own subconscious. In this sense, Murakami’s elaborate conundrums rarely resolve themselves conclusively; more often than not, we are as confused at the end as we were when we started out. But in some subliminal way, we feel we have experienced something profound; we arrive at our anonymous destination, content and strangely elated.
If there is one common thread that can be said to link all of Murakami’s works, it must be his preoccupation with love, romantic love, in an old-fashioned sense. One could even go so far as to say that his books, stripped of their hard-boiled/fantasy/science fiction veneer, are at heart, love stories. It is love, or rather, the obsessive yearning for love, that drives his characters and makes them embark on impossible quests; the object of their love is also the object of their search. And it is this most basic of emotions that sustains his stories, gives them their human anchor, their warmth, poignancy and humour, even as they spin out of control into ever more preposterous trajectories. Do his heroes ever find love? We can guess that there can be no conventional ending to these unconventional love stories, no hands clasped at sunset, no passionate don’t-ever-leave-me-again embraces…but even so, there is always, within the ambiguity of loving, the faintest hint at the possibility of redemption through love. This is as much as we can expect and it is enough.
Given the willfully bewildering nature of Murakami’s works, where the themes of love and loss constantly recur, where reality and fantasy effortlessly overlap and no easy denouements are forthcoming, it would be easy to grasp at symbols in an attempt to find some coherent explanation, but Murakami has rejected the idea of symbolism in his works: “To me the subconscious is terra incognita. I don’t want to analyze it, but Jung and those people, psychiatrists, are always analyzing dreams and the significance of everything. I don’t want to do that. I just take it as a whole.” Murakami has said that he has no idea what awaits him when he begins to write a novel, that what transpires is as surprising to him as it is to the reader. And in that sense, his novels are anti-intellectual; they strive for an almost mystical epiphany that is experienced rather than understood. It is for this reason, more than anything else, that one keeps coming back for more, craving yet another fix, another submersion into the intriguingly obscure world of Haruki Murakami.
I’m sitting in a strange city far from home. Cesaria Evora’s achingly melancholic vocals drift languidly from the stereo, a whiff of desolate wharves and lost loves. A chilled bottle of beer sits reassuringly on the table (Murakami’s protagonists drink a lot of beer). Outside my window, the many lights of this unfamiliar metropolis stretch coldly to the horizon. I open the first page of yet another Murakami novel:
“I often dream about the Dolphin Hotel.
In these dreams, I’m there, implicated in some kind of ongoing circumstance. All indications are that I belong to this dream continuity.
The Dolphin Hotel is distorted, much too narrow. It seems more like a long, covered bridge. A bridge stretching endlessly through time. And there I am, in the middle of it. Someone else is there too, crying.
The hotel envelops me. I can feel its pulse, its heat. In dreams, I am part of the hotel.”
Like the junkie I am, I breathe a deep sigh of contentment. I know I’m in the Dolphin Hotel too, and I’m ready for yet another journey into the known unknown.