I feared for a while, that even though we tried to make this list of books as diverse as possible, going as fas as consciously throwing in books that we knew were outside of our "comfort zone", I would unarguably come to have a well crafted joy-ride through each one of them. However, "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" was no such joy-ride. What I mean is that halfway through the book I actually thought to myself: "this is bullshit; there's no philosophy here as the back-cover comments so staunchly proclaim, only a pretentiously spiritual mumbo-jumbo; the story is plagued with symbols and passages that fail to give any more consistency to the already drawn out story; and this Toru Okada is an empty shell becoming an even more empty shell who lives out of doing 'something' to the 'somethings' of some people."
But I am forced to believe now, that that senselessness mirrors the helpless confusion that Toru Okada must have been through most of the time. I seemed to have forgotten that one day his wife left him with no explanation whatsoever, and for someone like him, no, for anyone, that cannot be an easy thing to grasp. So I'm sorry, Toru. This is just another way to say, that in the end many loose ends do come together - albeit still in a very abstract manner, because Toru's final conclusions really were something only he (and not the reader) could have figured out, I believe - and my frustration might have just come from the fact that I got too restless with all of the side-stories.
However, this is not to say that it all made sense in the end - in a way, I did feel I was defiled by Murakami's narrative, in the sense that I now have to re-assemble the pieces I have read in order to make sense out of them, much in the same way Creta Kano did, after having been (SLIGHT SPOILER) defiled by Noboru Wataya. Because of this, I will write the rest in a different manner from before: trying to individually recollect the impressions that struck me the most. I will speak mostly of threads and nuances and associations, to try and squeeze some more sense out of them, not so much of the plotline, but some spoiler or other might slip through nonetheless. Then again, being the story that this is, that might not matter very much.
Toru Okada is a curious shell of a character. Most of what he does is resonate other characters' opinions and questions (it bothered me quite a bit that in most of his conversations with, for example, May Kasahara, his replies would usually be "maybe you're right", "it could be possible" or other such non-compromising words). In this aspect, he reminded me to some of Gaiman's characters as well (Shadow in "American Gods", Richard Mayhew in "Neverwhere"), because they too are (at least on the surface), fairly simple characters that provide, to some extent, little more than the eyes (and ears, and fingers...) through which I understood the unfolding story. But at least in those worlds, there was always somebody around who had any idea of what was going on! I like explanations. Which is not the same as being spoon-fed the story, I think, but the fact that every character here knew only a little bit and Toru had to work really hard to put all the pieces together, was a tough one.
Oh, I guess something makes sense now... After all, that's exactly what Nutmeg does with the stories she tells Cinnamon, which eventually become the actual "Wind-up Bird Chronicle". That is also the recurrent question of which ones are real memories, which ones dreams, which ones a cocktail of both, which ones neither. And Toru does throw this right at your face when he thinks about the shared Akasaka stories.Well now I feel silly. I have been confronted before with story-lines that are a kind of mosaic one has to put together (particularly an author from Venezuela, Eduardo Sánchez-Rugeles), but at least in those you can take the individual tiles' truth at face value (minus one or two). Here, each individual tile eventually becomes blurry, true and un-true at the same time, and one has to keep this in mind when trying to make sense out of things. Very Zen, yes... In hindsight, I enjoyed the exercise. At the moment, well, not so much.
Then again, I had been "warned" about this: a few months ago I had a coffee and a conversation with a friend who is a trained psychologist, amongst other things, about Murakami and his works (of which I had read nothing but the autobiographical "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running"). She said that from a psychologist's point of view, most of Murakami's main characters are sort of empty receptacles where the reader imprints her/his own reactions, because they rarely explain or explicitly reveal their emotions and their ways of dealing with things. From a narrative point of view, this may be one of the reasons he's such a popular writer outside of his own Japanese cultural home, because even though the surroundings and historicities are very much Asian/Japanese, the main character isn't culture-bound. And indeed, Toru spends most of the time babbling on about how he's getting closer and closer to the centre of things, but in real-life, he has only done three things: climb down a well, get filthy rich, and move into a new house. As you do.
But hey, I guess sometimes when you put rice pudding in the microwave, you do get cheese macaroni, right? Wise May Kasahara... Maybe this explanation helped Toru go along with it. Maybe he didn't get it at all.
The recurrent symbols... So many of them, I'm sure entire I.B. Higher Level Language papers could be (have been?) written about them. There's the mark on the cheek, shared by three people. There's labyrinths throughout history and worlds: the mines in Siberia, the hotel corridors, and the then-a-novelty circuitry of Cinnamon's computer, are all depicted as labyrinths in one way or another. All of these, places where people went to realize themselves one way or another - to die in the mines, or to execute great feats in the computer, or the risk for either one in the hotel corridors and room. There's the wells, as a practice for this: the one in Mongolia where Lieutenant Mamiya loses himself, and the one in the "hanging house" where Toru finds himself - then loses himself again. There are wigs that May Kasahara makes for bald people, and there are scalps taking from dead men's heads hanging from the ceiling. There are the new clothes that give Toru his new path towards Kumiko - his new persona, perhaps - and there's the old clothes that belonged to Kumiko, which Creta Kano wears in peculiar situations. There's the mark that May licks, the same mark that Nutmeg masturbates, the same mark that Noboru Wataya (?) slices open with a knife. There is Noboru Wataya's boot-licking dog, Ushikawa, and Toru and Kumiko's rather normal cat, Noboru Wataya. There's the Wind-up bird winding the spring of the world throughout time, but why is it only heard by a few particular people? That is still a mystery to me. Was it only heard by people holding the bat? I suppose the guitar player in Sapporo had some idea of what was going on in the world. But didn't the zoo's vet hear it too? I don't remember him being particularly keen-eyed.
In any case, when all of these come together in the end, what I got was a remaking of a classic fairytale: Noboru Wataya, the gifted and heinous tyrant with dark magic powers rises to glory and kidnaps our hero's princess, Kumiko. Upon realizing that the hero is figuring things out and meddling with unstable forces, he tries to throw him off the path, but alas! Toru Okada does not desist, and through unorthodox means breaks the spell and defeats the monster!
So is "The Wind-up Bird" the force of good? Or love? The desire for Toru to save Kumiko? Didn't May Kasahara think that Toru was trying to protect her? Were Kumiko, the woman on the phone, Creta and May the same person all along? Were Noboru Wataya and Boris Manskinner the same person too? Was rebel in baseball uniform No.4 both Toru and Noboru at the same time?
Kind of silly though, that it all boiled down to that - the dubiously honourable hero retrieving the promiscuous damsel in distress - yay gender roles... yay - in an otherworldly battle reminiscent of Inception's proportions. Though I don't think it's as simple as that, for if May, Kumiko and Creta are the same person (which I still think might be the case) (and if there's one thing this story puts forward without a doubt) it follows that no one story is "the truth".
But then, the one other relevant impression left in me was the one provided by the guitar player from Sapporo, that first night on stage: this is another story about stories. This is a premise I have always enjoyed (as most of "The Sandman" by Neil Gaiman is based on it - note, I hardly think Gaiman and Murakami are similar authors, there have only happened to be these two common traits), but this was, for me, a completely new focus to it:
Seeing individuals suffer or rejoice, we empathize - this is scientifically supported by what are called "mirror neurons" - but we have to look at pain or joy to the eyes to feel this, both for mirror neurons to trigger, and for such accounts to be as strong as they can be: the stories of massacres in the Siberian mines trigger indignation, helplessness, loss of faith. But the vivid description of the man being skinned alive in the middle of the Mongolian steppes, the telling of the chinese hostages being bayonetted to death, and the continuous cracking of skulls... Those trigger physical revulsion, nausea, nightmares, and tears. Individual stories matter. And looking back upon this as an age-old story of the struggle between creation and destruction, told in such personal terms, I think - maybe - I can forgive the winding roads.
Ingen kommentarer:
Legg inn en kommentar