Sipped Ink vol 2 issue 3

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle pp141-210

First order of business, a little housekeeping note: I think I’m going to shift these a little so that Sunday’s newsletter covers up to Saturday’s reading. That way you don’t have to wait until you’ve read Sunday’s pages to read the newsletter, and far more importantly, I don’t have to wait until I’ve read Sunday’s pages to finish writing the thing.

So then. How are we? What a week huh? We’ve had another mysterious rendezvous, another unexpected visitor, a trip to Mongolia - and we’re still no nearer to finding that cat. In fact, I’m sure we were all dismayed to hear Malta Kano saying it’s now very unlikely to turn up. And if that wasn’t bad enough it looks like Toru has now managed to lose his wife as well. Careless.

Here are some highlights from our little community, which made me all warm and fuzzy inside:

• Simon came through and made the page 32 sandwich

• He also pointed us to a review by Jay Rubin of Minae Mizumura’s The Fall of Language in the Age of English which I found pretty interesting

• Alison expressed relief that someone in the novel… relieved themselves, she’d been worried about that

And, inspiring less warmth and fuzziness, I want it on the record that Mia has threatened my personal safety “if anything happens to that cat”.

Fellow #clockworksummer readers may wish to exercise some caution this week if considering reading whilst eating over the next few days...

— Ramblingsofanobody (@ramblingsblog_) June 15, 2015

So let’s deal with it then: were you sickened, were you appalled, were you put off your lunch (despite Melanie’s warning)? When I read the novel in 1999 it was my first exposure to Murakami and I think what I found most disturbing about that passage was the tone with which it’s delivered: in the same measured cadence as the description of Toru making spaghetti. I had just finished Bret Ellis’s American Psycho, which came freighted with a (deserved) reputation for all sorts of graphic content (both violent and sexual) but there was something about this content appearing unheralded in an otherwise sedate Japanese novel that was a bit of a shock to the system. In the years since, of course, I’ve become far more familiar with Murakami’s propensity for this sort of thing. The flaying scene no longer stands out for me as an outlier, just a particularly memorable instance of the author’s interest in the human capacity for violence.

Following the initial shock, perhaps the most disturbing element of the whole thing is that it’s not by any stretch the darkly fanciful invention of the author but a description of an actual practice - something that actually happened. You may not want to think about it too much but, here it is—Murakami seems to say—a part of life. Following the 1995 terrorist attack that released sarin gas into the Tokyo subway system, Murakami wrote a great non-fiction book titled Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche in which he meditates on the psychology both resulting in and resultant of the action. Why did a group of people decide to carry out this horrendous act? And how has the act they perpetrated affected the psychology of Japan in its wake? It’s less the action and more the psychology of it that interests him, and I would argue that the same is true here. The depiction of the act is no less, but also no more, graphic than that of cooking a meal. What is treated at greater length, though less explicitly, is the effect it has had on Mamiya, and Honda, and now Toru.

Elsewhere this week we had a continuation of the themes I referred to previously as ‘relationships between space and emotional wellbeing’. This is probably most prevalent in Mamiya’s narrative, wherein his cover story for the company’s presence on the wrong side of the river hinges on the fact that the ‘view is always better from higher ground’ (156). But, the failure of that story to convince the Russian leads to his being plunged down into a well.

I just love the description Murakami gives for the feeling of landing after a long fall:

It felt as if all the air inside me had burst through the walls of my body. (163)

If it wasn’t for the fact that Mamiya is talking to Toru in the present, we might wonder whether his fate is that alluded to earlier as ‘contributing [his] bones to the Mongolian earth’ (53). And, at the bottom of the well, it is not just Mumiya’s body that is damaged but also his sense of self. He reports that ‘I felt that I was being deceived, deluded’ (163) and eventually:

As if beaten down by some huge power, I was unable to do—or even think—anything at all, unable to feel even my own physical existence. (167)

Mumiya’s own sense of the problem is that there is ‘something wrong with the connection between my mind and my body’ (164), which reminds the reader of Creta Kano’s experience when, free from perpetual pain, she recalls ’[B]etween myself and the body I saw [in the mirror], I felt a long, terrible distance. (99)

In Mumiya’s case the problem complicates further. First it seems as though the light, which visits briefly each day, provides some solace to him. In its momentary glare he feels ‘an overwhelming sense of unity’ (166). And yet the light seemingly then shifts to something which ‘burned up the very core of my life, until nothing was left’ (170). Like Creta, Mumiya eventually ‘ceased to feel anything in the bottom of my heart’ (170). It’s interesting that where Creta speaks of ‘terrible distance’ in the mirror, and Mumiya speaks of ‘unity’ in the light, both are rendered unable to feel by their experiences.

The other theme that seemed to start echoing more strongly for me towards the end of the week’s reading was that of artificiality. For his faults Toru Okada is a relatively simple man, and not one for too much ornament or artifice. He is, by and large, a truthful man whose exterior reflects his interior; I think that’s why he is so troubled by his dreams when they don’t reflect (what he perceives to be) his real feelings.

It begins to disturb Toru that he has started to notice an ever-greater degree of seeming fraudulence around him. Of people he passes on the street of his neighbourhood he wonders ‘did they know how unnatural and artificial they looked?’ (182), and during his unexpected meeting with Noboru Wataya he remarks that the other seems as though wearing a ‘new mask’, his real face ‘covered over by something slick and artificial’ (197). In a novel where the rules of reality are already being toyed with, it’s interesting that the narrator has begun to make such distinctions.

Toru’s recollection of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms made me smile because it is also largely my own. My memory of the majority of the book is very patchy, but I recall pretty clearly the section at the end where the narrator drinks a lot of grappa whilst waiting for his wife to give birth. It gets pipped for favourite moment this week, however, by that all-too-knowing, reader-baiting chapter heading on p 185:

No Good News in This Chapter

I bet Sarah loved that too.

Are we done? We’re done. Your turn: send me your thoughts on sanitised Beatles music, red vinyl hats, flaying and anything else you’d like to talk about, either by reply to this email or by using the #ClockworkSummer hashtag on Twitter. I’d also like to conduct a quick straw poll for those initiated in the ways of House Bolton: would you rather take your chances with Ramsay Snow or the Mongols?

Before you answer that, actually: Murakami briefly mentions Genghis Khan, and if that’s a subject you’d like to delve into, Whizz enthusiastically recommends all ~8 hours of this podcast!

Right, I’m signing off. I’m pretty sure the cat’s going to turn up in this next chapter and it’s just going to be 70 pages this week of stroking its fluffy little belly, and chasing balls of yarn. I mean, Toru deserves a break don’t you think?

See you in a bit.