Sipped Ink vol 2 issue 7
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle pp421-490
こんにちは, how are we? I cut myself shaving. I’m about 12 pounds heavier than I want to be. I stubbed my toe coming up the stairs just now. How’s your week? As I write this there’s some kind of industrial activity going on outside. I don’t know what it is; it sounds like maybe someone’s trying to cut a car in half with a chainsaw. I could go and look but I’m as many as four meters from the window and my toe hurts. What I’m saying is, if this newsletter is sub-optimal in terms of clarity it’s because there’s a live version of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music being performed a weak-armed stone throw away from me.
It’s been an interesting week full of people looking ahead at the final stretch of the novel and reacting in different ways:
We have a couple of early finishers amongst us: Matt and Mia couldn’t help themselves and just sprinted for the tape this week. Helene’s not far behind them, and all three are now just going about their days possessed of awesome knowledge and power over the rest of us.
Michael also caught back up with the pace car, and Simon expressed his intention to do so.
Even Whitman decided to join in, but in more of a hugging / chewing capacity than a reading one, because he’s a cat. And an idiot.
Back at page 345 I found it odd phrasing to say that Mamiya was ‘strongly attracted to wells’, and again at 418 Murakami uses the same word in terms of May’s relationship to wigs. There are a lot of strange attractions in the novel: people, things, and situations regularly shift subject to the whim of one invisible force or another. Though it’s possible that a little bit of confusion has been introduced by translation, I think Murakami intends the concept of attraction in both of these cases not in terms of emotion or even cognition, but more purely in terms of the acting of forces - something akin to gravity: a persistent, impassive force that works on a physical level.
But what are the relationships between all of the disparate pieces? We have begun to see some overlapping, some merging in previous weeks, and it continues here in sometimes unexpected ways. Like the ‘interlocking system of myths’ that Nutmeg builds for Cinnamon (444), the stories Murakami has laid over the top of and underneath Toru’s are creeping into the primary narrative. In the present tense of the novel we are watching the vessel of Toru Okada being filled up, and as a result of the strange directions in which his life has moved over the last 400 pages, we are witnessing the emergence of a radically different person. Think on the roles that Toru now occupies in relation to other characters in the novel. Think of how the current Toru Okada would appear to the relatively normal one we meet at the start of the book.
This progression, like many aspects of the narrative, seems beholden to its own internal logic. As May says of time, it ‘doesn’t flow in order, does it — A, B, C, D? It just sort of goes where it feels like going’ (449), so the same can be said for much of the narrative’s progression. Last week I compared the novel’s composition to a clockwork mechanism, and I think that’s perhaps misleading in that it connotes logic and consistency. Murakami’s style sometimes has more in common with Dali’s timepieces than those made by Rolex, as it moves onwards in it’s own dream logic.
Perhaps the most explicit example of this is Book 3, Chapter 11. When the boy triumphs in the logical consistency of his argument that ‘I know this is a dream, so what happened before was not a dream. It really, really happened. I can tell the difference between the two’ (419), I for one felt a twinge of envy. When the situation becomes somewhat more complicated, I felt a greater sense of empathy (as a reader) with the titular question he ends up asking himself:
Was this shovel a real shovel? Or was it a dream shovel?
And later, with the Lewis Carol-esque:
If I am already sleeping here, then where should this me sleep? (420)
This reads like Murakami laying his cards on the table. But it’s less an act of transparency and more in the manner of an excellent magician, who prides himself in explaining how a trick works and still fooling you with it. For some the self-awareness of this chapter might be a little on the nose, but it’s also possible to read it as the author showing a sense of playfulness. It is similar in tone, I think, to Toru’s earlier musing on non-sensical art films.
The level of meta awareness of the novel’s obscure forces is growing amongst the characters. In recent weeks we’ve seen Toru speaking about his ‘reality’ as a separate entity, and in her letters to him it seems as though May Kasahara is increasingly cognisant of the forces at work also:
That mark is maybe going to give you something important. But it also must be robbing you of something. Kind of like a trade-off. And if everybody keeps taking stuff from you like that, you’re going to be worn away until there’s nothing left of you. (463)
We’re used, by now, to reading much of the novel in terms of dualities and interconnectedness, and it’s interesting the degree to which the characters themselves are starting to recognise and comment on that. To my mind this develops in an interesting way towards the end of this week’s reading with the introduction first of Cinnamon and his computer, and then of the possibility of using the computer as a means of contacting Kumiko.
Toru’s conception of Cinnamon’s relationship to his computer as ‘moving together in an almost erotic union’ (467), and his idea that with the computer as a tool the mute Cinnamon has a space in which he ‘spoke eloquently and laughed and cried aloud’, seems prescient on Murakami’s part, writing the novel in the early 90s. The manner in which he introduces the concept of communicating with and via a computer seems somewhat laboured now, but only because in the 20 years since its publication its an abstraction that we have become entirely accustomed to. We have our own concepts of an online / offline duality that did not exist at the time of the novel being written (let alone when it is set), and our interconnectedness with each other has been completely re-shaped by our relationships with the technology that facilitate it. Murakami goes so far as to differentiate between the ‘real’ world and that of the computer by employing another of the novel’s metaphors of depth and distance:
I couldn’t help but feel that reality resided for him not so much in the earthly world but in his subterranean labyrinth. (467)
I can hardly recall my reaction to this passage when I first read the novel in 1998, which was around the time that I was first seriously delving into the internet. My guess is that I recognised the relationship that Murakami is describing between person and computer, but obviously that I could have no idea how much and in what directions that relationship would progress between my first and second reading of the novel.
And here’s another thing that has changed since I first read The Wind-up Bird Chronicle: Ushikawa! I mean he’s the same here as he was the last time I visited the book, but he and I are better acquainted than we used to be. So much so, actually, that the way he’s portrayed here came as a mild shock. Last year I read Murakami’s three-volume, 928-page opus 1Q84, which features Ushikawa far more prominently than he appears here. Much of the characterisation is similar—and he’s just brilliantly written—but I had forgotten how in the current novel he is a) an almost incidental character, and b) almost entirely devoid of redeeming characteristics. Without wishing to spoil anything of 1Q84 (as I’m sure you’re all about to pick it up in August and dive right in), I left that later novel with some sympathy for Ushikawa. Re-encountering him here in his earlier incarnation it seems quite difficult to imagine that it might be possible to find him a little likeable.
In Wind-up Bird… Ushikawa is little more than a (particularly grotesque) plot device, but Murakami does keep him around just long enough for him to make another of those meta-analyses of the current state of affairs:
“[Kumiko] is not being held against her will. I mean, this is not a movie or a novel. We can’t really do that sort of thing.” (429)
I know Alison liked this little comment too, and I enjoyed how it gives the reader just a little more information (from a highly questionable source, for sure), but not enough to actually discern what Kumiko’s actual circumstances are. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
That’s it for another week - only two to go now. I hope those of you that haven’t already finished the novel are looking forward to the home stretch. And if you have already closed the book for the last time, perhaps you’d use the final weeks of July to put together a couple of sentences on what you liked or disliked about it. What intrigued you? What infuriated you? Who was your favourite character? Send me anything you like and I’ll compile people’s thoughts to share at the end of this little project of ours.
For some of us, however, there’s still work to do. And if my boy Ushikawa’s to be believed, the best is yet to come - as he says to Toru: “The way it stands now, your life is probably just going to get weirder and weirder.”
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