Toru and Naoko’s Loss: Who am “I” without you?

 In Precarious Life, Judith Butler argues that when we lose someone, we lose more than that person—in addition to losing the other, we lose the part of ourself reflected in the other, and the relational bond between oneself and the other. The bond that is lost is a bond constitutive of oneself, so when you lose another, you lose part of yourself, too. When Toru and Naoko’s relationships with Kizuki each end, Toru and Naoko both lose the part of themselves that existed only in relation to Kizuki—no longer are they the same people. Reflecting on the past, Toru describes this sentiment: “The night Kizuki died, however, I lost the ability to see death (and life) in such simple terms. Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being…” (25). Part of Kizuki is dead, but he must go on living. He does not know who he is, without Kizuki; he does not know if there is an “I” that exists within him without the other who made him who he was. Explaining her relationship with Kizuki to Toru, Naoko says, “Our boy-girl relationship was really unusual, too. It was as if we were physically joined somewhere” (127). Naoko and Kizuki seem like they were even more tightly bound together than Toru and Kizuki; they were inseparable, unintelligible to themselves without the other. But something remains for both Toru and Naoko—the image of the Kizuki which still exists in their minds. Kizuki was always the link that connected Naoko and Toru together—and years after his death, their relationship still seems to rest on that foundational link. I think that Naoko and Toru are so drawn to each other because being with each other enables them to keep getting to know Kizuki. Naoko gets to learn the part of Kizuki which existed only in relation to Toru, and Toru gets to know the Kizuki that existed only in relation to Naoko. Those parts of Naoko and Toru reflected in Kizuki remain dead, but through their relationship with one another, Naoko and Toru can build a new image of Kizuki which reveals parts of his past self that they hadn’t known. They can regain a relationship, though different, with Kizuki by developing their relationship with each other. I think that’s the reason why they say they can only possibly get better together—because together is the only way they can get a part of Kizuki back. 

Juliet 

Murakami’s Literary Universe

Upon reading several of Murakami's works, we can see his tendency to incorporate in each work a regular set of elements: mirrors, loneliness, investigation, numbers, surrealism, interest in western media, cigarette brands, and so much more. Some of them are simply mentioned in passing. Based on some interviews, it wouldn’t be a bad guess that Murakami has said that these don’t specifically symbolize anything, even if they probably do. Often when I read his books or stories, the text to me feels like Murakami's writing. Maybe it is his unique style as well, but the cameos of various objects or personalities always seem to appear, as if the stories all take place in the same universe. This sort of “universal symbolism” is just like the blending of the American culture into the Japanese language, which without the mentions of Japanese cities, wouldn't immediately imply the story took place in Japan. There is a constant element in Murakami's writing that despite its various forms, is ever present. His book The Strange Library is what I think is a play on his writing with these characters as his cast. It combines the surrealism all together into a story that gives me excitement every time something familiar appears.

-River

Naoko's Connection to Mancini & Brahms

 As talked about in my last post, Murakami draws a lot of inspiration from music in his works, which can again be seen throughout Norwegian Wood. As a warning, this post will contain spoilers for Norwegian Wood as well. I would like to focus on Naoko in this post, as she is a complex character struggling with many mental health problems, and the connections to her favorite pieces of music. To start, we are told early on that Toru buys Naoko a record of her favorite song, "Dear Heart" by Henry Mancini. Below I have listed the main lyrics that are repeated throughout it:

Dear heart wish you were here to warm this night

My dear heart, seems like a year since you've been out of my sight

A single room, a table for one

It's a lonesome town all right

But soon I'll kiss you hello at our front door

And dear heart I want you to know

I'll leave your arms never more

"Dear Heart" is unmistakenly a piece about loneliness, with an intense yearning for a lover that is constantly evading our grasp. This theme is very prominent when we look at Naoko. She lost her best friend and lover Kizuki to suicide, and cannot stop reverting into herself. Toru and Reiko both attempt to help Naoko along this journey, and yet to no avail. Although this song isn't explicitly about self harm, the last 3 lines can be painted that ends with Naoko's suicide at the end of the book. The front door can refer to the gates of the afterlife, and the dear heart of this song can be in reference to Kizuki, as we know from Chapter 1 that Naoko never loved Toru. And in death, the two will remain inseparable. 

Murakami also tells us that one of Naoko's favorite pieces is Brahms' Symphony No. 4 in E minor. While Toru was able to get 2 tickets for free for him and her to go, he unfortunately had to take care of Storm Trooper, causing Naoko to again end up alone. It is standard for romantic era symphonies to end in the major key, and yet Brahms chooses to end his final work in E minor, which doesn't bring us the happy ending we usually see with this form of music. All we get is this deep, dark emotional punch into our gut, alluding to Naoko's suffering and fate. While Brahms was writing his 4th Symphony, he was in the midst of reading Sophocles, one of the three main Greek tragedy authors. It is said that he was influenced by the themes and motifs of Greek tragedy, which can potentially be linked to the extensive talk on Euripides we see in Toru and Midori's class. Greek tragedy explores human suffering, their choices, and their fate. This again can be linked to Naoko, with her suffering from her mental health, and her ultimate fate to commit suicide. This could all just be by coincidence, as it is unknown if Murakami thought of these connections when writing Norwegian Wood. Although, it is interesting to think about once you see the connections between her character and the main themes of her two favorite songs.

Angus Black

Abandonment by Women in Murakami

I've noticed across our readings that Murakami's narrators frequently find themselves facing abandonment, infidelity, or unexplained disappearance by women important to the narrators. From Tony Takitani, A Wild Sheep Chase, Norwegian Wood, South Bay Strut, and Drive My Car, the elements mentioned above can all be found in the female figures. This is not meant to antagonize Murakami or meant as a moral judgment, but I wonder if he has some psychosexual problems that he unwittingly lets spill out on the page. In A Wild Sheep Chase, the unnamed girlfriend abruptly leaves, leaving the narrator heartbroken. In Tony Takitani, the girlfriend dies, again leaving the narrator bereft. In Norwegian Wood (although I have not read to the end), the girl suddenly vanishes to go to a sanatorium and only contacts the narrator many months after he is ghosted. In South Bay Strut, the woman who posed as the lawyer's assistant betrays the main character in a setup. Finally, in Drive My Car, not only does the wife cheat on her loving husband, but she even manages to die tragically afterwards. 

This thematic throughline interests me because Murakami often portrays women as these enigmatic muses who give meaning and light to the narrator's life and then vanish. The disappearance of these women also plays a large part in the narrator's character development, and in stories like Norwegian Wood or Drive My Car, the story would not even exist without the female characters' disappearance. It's almost as if the vanishing is necessary to Murakami's storytelling in a way, because many of his stories focus on loneliness, and his male narrators often do not have many close friends besides their romantic companions, so it is only through the loss of these women that the main character's emotional grief or loneliness can reach a heightened state. Reading these stories of abandonment leaves me feeling cynical and disillusioned... as if Murakami is trying to show that there is no such thing as everlasting love, no matter what feelings came before. Death, cheating, and disappearance is portrayed oftentimes as inexplicable, unexplained, and one of the prime mysteries that his stories are so famous for. Consequently, this gives the female love interests a slightly unreal, uncanny, ghostlike aura. These stories can be read as sexist as a result, but I feel that, strangely enough, in many of these instances, the readers are meant to sympathize with the women to some extent. They are portrayed as having some urgent, pressing need to act in various ways, in a way unfathomable to the main character and therefore to the audience, but nonetheless highly important to them in some way. If I knew more about psychoanalysis, I could probably read more into it, but I'll just leave my analysis there for now.

- Katherine

Out with a Whimper — Murakami & T.S Eliot

 Hi everyone!

When researching my presentation for Heart of Darkness, I came across (which I mentioned in the presentation) the epigraph for T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" which was "Mistah Kurtz — he dead" from Conrad's novella. The hollow men are referenced explicitly by Murakami in Kafka on the Shore, but after finding this out, I combed back through A Wild Sheep Chase to see if there was any intertextual dialogue between the poem and the book. (It's not exactly a 1:1 comparison between the two but there are a few interesting similarities so bear with me.)

The poem itself is about spiritual listlessness, moral malaise, and what it means to be "hollow" — or as I prefer it "sheepless." The final lines of the poem even partially remind me how the novel ends, "not with a bang, but with a whimper." The ideas to me seemed fairly congruent with the quiet presence of absence in A Wild Sheep Chase and especially the usage of the suffix {-less}. In the first section where the main character is talking about his ex-wife the narration uses these two pairs between a few pages: "Colorless shadow...tasteless shadow." The suffix here signals something banal (and maybe someone who speaks Japanese could tell me how this operates in Japanese! I would appreciate it), but it indicates the presence of color and taste within the shadow, a usually grey, amorphous thing, just as {un-} in "unblocked ears" signifies that being "blocked" is the natural state of her ears. In Eliot's poem, the lines "shape without form, shade without colour," is eerily reminiscent of the above descriptions of shadows. 

The ephemerality of the shadow is also interesting to me, and the idea of absence is mirrored in a few ways using the senses as in the way sight or taste are used above. Chronologically, his girlfriend's "glimmer," which she was able to "at will, summon or control" and without which she effectively disappears into a crowd, is visually rare. The conversation that continues between the two at dinner and his reaction to her ears is mostly about the singularity they possess and the clarity of mind that they create, and he brings in other senses in order to describe this sensation: "I heard the sound of waves, recalled the the scent of a long-forgotten evening...When it was raining, the smell of the rain came through crystal clear. When the birds were singing, their song was a thing of sheer clarity." This sensation and that of the sheep professor is The spiritual connection between the Sheep Professor and the sheep is also something discussed as if it was a natural feeling: "It just felt like there was this sheep inside me. I felt it in the morning. I woke up and there was this sheep inside. A perfectly natural feeling." 

Seeing her ears or being inhabited by the sheep are two euphoric, yet perfectly natural sensations, yet when this ephemeral thing leaves them, their absences are different. The power of her ears is strangely transient in that she decides to hide them, but can be convinced to show them. The power is her own, and the effect on others is immediately assuaged as soon as her ears are hidden again. When you see her ears, you are given something gratuitous and pleasant, but when you don't see them nothing has been taken from you. The feeling of the sheep being inside someone is life altering, disruptive, and damning because it is completely removed from the voice of their desires. The motives of the sheep are hollow in the sense that they are unintelligible to others. When the sheep leaves you, you exist in a constant state of wrongness and hollowness. There is something missing when the sheep goes — sheepless — as there is not with the ears because the sheep seems inherently linked with something intransient and internal: greed and power.

As I stated before, the end of the poem is "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper." Formally, the novel does end with a sort of lingering bang — in the sheep and Rat's death — bit it really ends with a whimper — the sound of waves reminiscent of what he heard when his girlfriend first showed him her ears. The end of the novel, perhaps when read alongside "The Hollow Men," purports that there was something gained after all. 

Alana Lopez

Western Style in Murukami

 One thing I have appreciated in this class is reading Murakami's works alongside the influences he may have drawn on while writing. Whether these influences are overt or subtle, finding the threads of connection between these works gives us insight into how Murukami wants to incorporate Western influence into his novels.

Although his novels are undoubtedly Japanese, from the settings to the cultural values, to the characters themselves, by far the largest role that Western influence has in Murukami's works is upon its style. Whether that comes from imitating the hard-boiled detective genre, to mystery, to the bright satirical comedy of authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Haruki Murakami, Murakami borrows from the authors he admires and incorporates them into a Japanese tradition. It reminds me of how Japanese animation studios adapted and borrowed from American animation techniques, technologies, and styles while simultaneously birthing something novel and unmistakably Japanese. With the rise of global modernity, what has been made possible is this recombination, fusion, and invention of styles and admixtures between cultures. In addition to the style and form of Murakami's writings being influenced by Western media, the character traits of "boku" have also been tampered with. In the Wild Sheep Chase, Boku's critical and stubbornness seem to align with that of Phillip Marlowe from The Long Goodbye. One of the negative instances of Murakami's favorite authors' influence on his writings is the centralization of male perspectives and characters, again, very commonplace in genres like traditional detective mysteries and older works from America and Europe. I wish that Murakami could have admired more female writers or books with female protagonists like Austen, Woolf, or George Eliot. 

- Katherine Chen

Boku and the Rat's "Long Goodbye" - Kevin

 A Wild Sheep Chase was one of my first Murakami novels, and it quickly became my favorite after I finished it some 4 odd years ago. Since then, I have re-read both WCS and its companion novellas a handful of times, with each read further cementing it as my favorite of Murakami's works. That being said, what really captures my love for the Rat trilogy is its masterful handling of sentimentality, nostalgia, and the friendship between Boku and the Rat. 

While its supernatural and unusual storytelling elements draw me in the same way any other novel by Murakami would, it is the character dynamic between the story's main characters that leaves me with a feeling that has kept me coming back.

While the context provided in Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 is non-essential, I think it provides meaningful insight into our main characters' actions. For the Rat, we see him characterized as a man who is rash, nostalgic, and immature. In his struggle to handle his emotions, he abandons his hometown, his past girlfriend, and, for the most part, his dear friends Boku and J. In the case of Boku, we see that he and the Rat used to be close friends, with Boku always being there for the Rat in his times of need, however begrudgingly it may be.

This added context to the relationship between Boku and the Rat makes the events of WCS make more sense- the Rat's letters become more endearing, Boku's abstract journey to find his old friend (and the sheep by proxy) has more logic behind it, and most of all, the Rat's final goodbye becomes a lot more sentimental. The Rat has always been a character who struggled with goodbyes, and for him to set up this elaborate chase for his old friend is about as on-brand as I can imagine. It also explains his decision to end his life with the sheep inside him, as his decision-making has always been quick, rash, and driven by gut feeling rather than logic. 

Ultimately, I've always felt as if the relationship between Boku and the Rat is quite endearing, and the whole conclusion of the novel (from their conversation in the house to the scene in J's bar) has always felt so raw and emotional for me.

As with many other Murakami novels, I try not to attribute too much meaning or analysis to the supernatural elements in WCS, trying to focus more on the way that the book makes me feel. In this case, after reading it alongside A Long Goodbye, I feel as if Murakami captured the essence of a "Long Goodbye" perfectly, or at least much better than the way Marlowe and Terry ended their relationship. It feels real, emotional, and entirely possible given the context of Boku and Rat's relationship, capturing a heartfelt goodbye between two men who struggle to handle their feelings properly (however surreal the journey may have been). What I love about the book is the way that it can portray this alongside its strange setting.