Sipped Ink vol 2 issue 4
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle pp211-280
Well, well, well.1
How’s your week been? I’m willing to wager it was probably better than Toru’s huh? Not that everyone’s feeling too sympathetic toward him; here’s a message I got from Mia earlier on in the week:
Please tell me that numpty isn’t going to spend the next 400 pages contemplating his navel at the bottom of a well….
To which the response is… kinda? But—without wishing to sound too much like a Marks & Spencer advert—this is Murakami navel gazing. Which—as we all now know—incorporates hallucination through near starvation, weird power games with your teenage neighbour, and maybe the ability to visit some kind of other realm beyond a gelatinous wall. Actually that would make a good Marks & Spencer advert.
This week:
Simon tried to start beef with his local record shop over that sandwich
Michael sent another well-chosen postcard
Melanie at least pretended that she doesn’t regret signing up to read this novel for the second time in three years
Otherwise all was quiet. The hashtag has cobwebs all over it from underuse. No one threatened my physical wellbeing. All proceeded silently.
I felt more weight being added to the reality / unreality dichotomy in this week’s reading. For me this started with Mamiya making precisely the point I tried to make in last week’s newsletter:
‘I myself can only wish that my stories were, indeed, nothing but incredible fabrications’ (208)
But it’s almost as though Murakami makes the concreteness of this facet of the novel explicit in order to undermine the sense of reality elsewhere. It is not long after Mamiya’s story that Toru notes he’s having trouble discerning truths and deceptions:
The sense of reality was now strangely absent. (213)
And he’s not the only one: Kumiko also says something similar in a conversation Toru recalls, when she relates the feeling of a ‘little burglar’ within her that acts of its own volition:
’There’s a kind of gab between what I think is real, and what’s really real.’ (236)
And yet elsewhere Murakami is painstaking about imbuing all aspects of Toru’s physical and intellectual worlds with properties, to the extent that the boundaries between the two are becoming blurred. What are we to make of phrases such as this?:
Even intangibles such as time and memory shared the goodness of the summer light. (220)
Perhaps that there are innate qualities in all things, the interaction between which is a kind of invisible commerce, beyond human volition, which shapes the world. Murakami gives each aspect of the world an essence of its own (eg. ‘[A] certain kind of darkness, goes on propagating itself’ (202)) and in this week’s pages reveals to the reader that the world also comprises heretofore unseen depths: ‘the realm of the jellyfish’ (238) which is both the majority of the world and also unknowable.2
What chance for our hapless narrator then? His descent to the depths of the well can be read as an attempt to separate himself from the world he has begun to distrust the authenticity of, even if only sensorially. And for his trouble he buys only a weakened sense of self:
I became less and less convinced of the fact that I actually existed. (230)
Over his time in the absolute dark of the well Toru becomes ‘part of the nothingness’ (256). And yet, his project of self discovery is probably more failure than success, and is even openly mocked by May in telling language:
‘And even this idea you have of remaking yourself: even that was made somewhere else. […] And that’s what you’re being punished for—by all kinds of things: by the world you tried to get rid of, or by the self you tried to get rid of.’ (262)
If the world is concrete and is possessed of immutable properties, and yet several of our characters seem unsure of what properties they themselves possess, where does that leave us? One of the answers I feel Murakami has begun to give is the idea of interdependence. In one of the weirder moments of the week (which is a pretty high bar) a mysterious singer ends his performance with some kind of stunt wherein he holds a flame to his own hand and seemingly makes audience members feel the pain of it. All of this is couched in talk of the power of empathy and is more or less designed to start us thinking about interdependencies one character to another.
‘Results aside,’ Malta Kano tells Toru, ‘the ability to have complete faith in another human being is one of the finest qualities a person can possess.’ (201) This comes shortly before he attempts to isolate himself from the world, and is potentially condemned to die by one person, before apparently being rescued by another. How do we untie that knot? I’m certainly not going to attempt any such thing until we have more evidence to examine.
Things really feel like they’re hotting up now right? Murakami’s positioned Toru right at the centre of a swirling, complex mess, and we have the pleasure of watching how he attempts to make his way out. Will he dig down to the roots, walk through the walls, or climb the precarious rope ladders?
Are you as excited as I am? Are you rooting for Toru a bit more now, and if so is it because he’s suffered physically or because he got that ice-cold heartbreaker of a letter from Kumiko? I’m just as interested if you still think the guy’s an unredeemed loser. What have your own powers of empathy led you to feel?
OK, I’m done. I have some shirts to iron and some videotapes to return.3 Take care of yourselves, and if you’re going to rely on the good graces of your weird teenage neighbour to rescue you from any life-threatening situations this week, make sure you leave me something in your will OK?
Bye!
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