Sipped Ink vol 2 issue 6

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle pp351-420

The bloody cat’s only gone and come back hasn’t it!? We’re all done here then - mission accomplished and good work. All’s right with the world and we can close the book on this strange chapter of our lives together. It’s been nice knowing you.

What’s that? Oh.

In that case, thanks for letting me back into your inbox again to ramble for a bit about poor real estate decisions, indelible facial blotches, and the massacre of zoo animals. Here’s what you guys got up to this week:

• Whizz highlighted an image that was also one of my favourites of the week;

• Melanie got a bit worried about Toru’s financial situation. (But that was before Nutmeg started buying him a whole new wardrobe.)

• Michael sent another card, in which he worries over the balancing act of both reading the book and writing about it… brother, I feel your pain.

Anything Michael puts to paper that he wants to share, I’ll do so here - and that goes for all of you too. I’m still really enjoying the book and I hope you are, but either way, let me know.

Dualities and separations, it feels to me, have now become not just a principle theme of the novel, but also the modus by which much of its action is generated. It’s always felt like Toru was more of a participant than an agent, and to an ever greater extent it has felt to me as though the plot is advancing (in its own idiosyncratic way) by result of its own machinations rather than being propelled by its characters. After ~300 pages of introducing the pieces and, like a clock-maker, assembling them so that they interlock as he wishes, Murakami has set this novel off to run its course as determined by the quirks of its inner machinery.

One result is that whilst other characters seem to be in the process of healing from (or at least learning to cope with) the damage they have sustained, we are witnessing other characters proceed through earlier stages of that same process.

‘I seemed to be growing more distant from myself with each day that went by’, Toru reports on page 344, as he progresses down a path that now seems inexorable. If Toru is seen as an active agent in his own story at all, it is perhaps here, ironically as he pushes determinedly on with the project of separating himself from himself and the world. He has taken to heart Creta Kano’s lessons, and come to the conclusion that ’[s]eparating from the flesh is not so difficult’ (368), and perhaps one of the milestones in this quest—as it now seems to have become—is the point at which he comes to the conclusion that he must own the well. That realisation is immediately preceded by this moment:

I stared into the mirror for a long time—long enough for me to begin to see my own face as something other than mine. (350)

Toru has intuited that his experience in the well has triggered something in him, and he has come to believe (perhaps narrow-mindedly) that repeating his steps will further his progress towards his goal. How all of this relates to his longed-for reunion with Kumiko is a process perhaps only Toru could explain, and yet he is seemingly uninterested in doing so as part of his duties as narrator.

So what is the process by which this separation happens? And how much volition does the ‘self’ involved have over its progress? There are moments when Toru speaks of reality as an entity entirely separate from himself, the separation from which is sudden and surprising to him:

‘My reality seemed to have left me and was now wandering around nearby. I hope it can find me, I thought.’ (382)

And on other occasions the parting seems more incremental, as in that memorable moment when Toru is at the bottom of the well, clutching his baseball bat, going through a set of ritualistic motions. He describes himself in this moment as ‘in the process of losing [the light]’ (392).

Perhaps there is, as well as the losing, a gaining of something. On page 368 Toru has come to understand himself as ‘a vacant house’. We might compare this to Creta Kano’s self-perception as an empty vessel upon first recovering her original self, following her encounter with Noboru Wataya. Her sister’s solution to Creta’s new emptiness was to migrate others’ egos through her, and perhaps this is the part that is yet missing from Toru’s journey: he has engendered an emptiness in himself that is yet to be filled. We have seen some connections in the beginnings of flourishing: the nightmare last week of taking on another’s skin; the vet in the zoo sequence with the same facial mark - but still Toru seems to be relatively early in his progression of self-(re)discovery.

Other emptinesses in the book, other detachments, are less keenly sought. As with Mamiya’s experience in his own well, the soldier to whom most attention is paid during the (pretty horrendous) massacring of the zoo animals leaves the experience with a seeming separation from his own actions:

He felt only that he had been dragged into a place that had nothing to do with him and had there been forced to perform an act that had nothing to do with him. (402-3)

This is the second incident from the war that has been introduced into the novel, and we might consider how these horrors decades past echo into the present of the novel. How do the actions visited upon Mamiya by the Mongols, or visited upon the animals by the soldiers, impact upon Toru as he sits at the bottom of the well, separating himself from the world? As Toru seeks to distinguish the different types of darkness within and without him, we have to count them amongst the novel’s other darknesses also.

But, amidst the darkening of the novel’s tone I found a few lighter moments this week.

First of all, where the hell is this mark on Toru’s face? He first discovers it when he shaves his well-beard, it’s routinely described as being on his cheek, and yet at page 344 Murakami tells us that Toru’s tried to disguise it using sunglasses and a hat!? The only kind of hat I can think of that would help would be one of those Holden Caulfield things, and if one of those is in Toru’s wardrobe I hope Nutmeg never spots it.

Of course the return of the cat is a big moment, sweetly handled by Murakami (at page 372) in an almost understated fashion, as if admitting that the novel is now about something very different than it ostensibly was at the beginning. Such an admission only strengthened, 8 pages later, by the almost off-hand, and possibly more than a little tongue-in-cheek comparison by Toru of his circumstances to those encountered by characters in ‘so-called art films’. You have to smile at his complaint:

Movies like that never explained what was going on. Explanations were rejected as some kind of evil that could only destroy the films’ “reality”. (380)

Oh Haruki, we’re still with you.

See you guys next week OK?