Sipped Ink vol 2 issue 8

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle pp491-560

Right, here we go then. I hope you’ve set your computer terminals to receive mode, otherwise I’m talking to myself. Not for the first time. And just a warning to anyone out there thinking of setting their message alert tone to the sound of sleigh bells: I will drop your phone into a glass of water.

My toe’s much better, thanks for asking, and the weird metal-grinding noise has stopped, which is a plus. The pinch of remaining pages between the index finger and thumb of our right hands is down to something like 7mm now, which means the end is nigh - there’ll be one more of these next Sunday to wrap things up. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves; there’s work to do.

This week:

• Emma showed admirable dedication by using a good chuck of her holiday to catch up

• Murakami got inside Melanie’s head to the point she had to look up a piece of music referenced in the novel. (Hands up - who else has done this in the last 7 weeks?)

• Helene wrote to us from the land beyond the finish line, to say that the novel won’t leave her alone and she keeps seeing it wherever she looks.

Quite a week. With Murakami it’s sometimes difficult to tell which of the events of a novel are significant, and which are incidental. His style tends to lend both the same weight and significance, and only reading further reveals what had consequence and what did not. With that in mind (and <60 pages to go!) it’s easy to say that it feels like things are wrapping up, but I do feel as though the author is now being a little more revelatory regarding his stance on some of the themes. Where the early part of the book was taken up with setting the pieces together, the majority of it with watching the machine operate and the themes develop along their courses, as we approach the end it does feel as though the author has stepped back in, to hint at where he stands on some of the novel’s (still open) questions.

Comparable to the return of the cat, this week saw Toru & Kumiko in conversation for the first time in a long time. However, just as doubt is cast on whether or not the cat that returned is the cat that disappeared, so too Murakami leaves enough doubt around this dialogue for the reader to choose whether or not to believe that the person that Toru is conversing with is actually Kumiko. And even if it is Kumiko, is she the same Kumiko that he knew as his wife and who left him?

The manner in which the author brings the two back together is perfectly pitched to leave the reader wondering about a great many things, and the language Kumiko uses is central to that. She speaks of the two of them being ‘separated into two entirely different worlds’ (487), and the only reason for this that she offers is that ‘like it or not… this is the proper place for me’ (489). The exact nature of this separation is left unclear. However, the way their communication via the computer concludes provides a neat way of phrasing it:

The screen informs me that the other party has left the circuit. (491)

For Toru’s part he seems to have some intuitive sense that the Kumiko with whom he converses virtually is at least some version or facet of the Kumiko he knew as his wife. He actually seems oddly sure in his understanding:

I can accept the fact that one Kumiko is trying hard to get away from me, and she probably has her reasons for doing so. But there is another Kumiko, who is trying just as hard to get close to me. (490)

And he seems equally confident of the manner in which he’s approaching the problem:

Slowly but surely, though, I am getting closer to the core (491)

What makes Toru so confident that he’s making this kind of progress? Perhaps he is able to intuit, similarly to the manner in which he does with his ‘clients’, something about the nature of the problem that we as readers are not privy to. He senses that he is doing the right thing, just as he senses that this Kumiko is not the whole, genuine Kumiko.

Not being possessed of such powers ourselves, we’re left guessing as to the nature of this shift in Kumiko, how it came about, and what it means. We might wonder whether, like Mamiya, Creta Kano, Toru—and others of the novel’s characters—she has suffered through a traumatic event, which has left her altered and feeling separated from her true self. In this week’s reading we see something similar happen to the vet with the mark on his face as he witnesses first the slaughter of the zoo animals and then the killing & burial of the prisoners:

The vet watched in numbed silence, overtaken by the sense that he was beginning to split in two. (516)

In Kumiko’s case, however, we have the merest hint that it may be something more prolonged and less attributable to any one incident. She tells Toru that ‘“Going bad” is something that happens over a longer period of time’ (488).

This seems to be something that Murakami is concerned with in the novel. The various historical incidents that have been introduced can be read as traumatic events in Japanese history that impact the country’s nature just as the traumas visited upon the novel’s characters separate them from their ‘true’ or ‘original’ selves. It is no surprise that the author of a work sub-titled ‘The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche’ is dealing here with the question of how acts of violence can impact a culture. What Toru refers to as the ‘historical chain of cause and effect’ (498) holds significant power in Murakami’s work. In the present case, the question seems to be to what extent it affects the people who inherit the sins of the past.

Nutmeg refers to her life as ‘nothing more than a convenient passageway for all these things moving through it’ (503), and the vet feels ‘able to sense the implacable power of fate in his very bones and flesh’ (508), coming to the conclusion that ‘individual will counted for nothing’ (510). It is the vet’s belief that ‘an external power cleverly camouflaged as free will’ (510) ‘forced him to decide things to suit its own convenience’ (509). Similarly Nutmeg feels ‘enfolded by a great flow’ (480), not in control of (or entirely responsible for) her own actions. What are we to make of this? That past trauma is so powerful a force as to negate free will? Looking back at the novel what actions might we better attribute to cause & effect rather than to conscious decisions?

It’s in the foregrounding of these questions that I feel Murakami tipping his hand a little this week. Previously we have seen raised the question of how people are connected one to another: empathy, the passing of egos through other vessels, wearing others’ skins, shared facial marks… the list is long. This week it felt as though the aperture has been widened somewhat on that question, and the author is asking us to consider how the acts both visited upon and undertaken by a nation impact upon future generations of its inhabitants.

And just as the workings of things at this macro level remains unclear, so too at the level of human relationships there remains a lot of uncertainty. Whereas the vet reflects that his wife and child ‘are, finally, separate human beings, with whom I have no connection’ (510), May Kasahara seems to have convinced herself that she has taken on the role of some facet of Kumiko (531). And, for his part, Toru characterises his relationship with Nutmeg & Cinnamon as a product of fate:

I was connected with their story through some chance combination of circumstances. (525)

At this stage we probably have to be realistic about the extent to which these questions are going to be resolved. But is it too much to ask that we at least get a little bit of closure on some of the narrative threads? Will Toru & Kumiko be reunited? Will May return from the wig factory? Will Noboru Wataya suffer any consequences for his ill deeds? By the time I see you here next week, we’ll know the answers. Enjoy the last steps of the journey.