J Lit I Like

Following up on the post below about The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, I've been pretty indifferent to Japanese literature for many years now. I just inhaled the stuff when I was an undergrad just beginning my foray into Japanese studies. I still vividly remember reading Natsume Soseki's Kokoro on a ferry in the Japan Sea in February 1984. The ferry ride was tough, thirty-one hours on a rough sea, but the novel was so absorbing, I barely noticed (or, I should say, I barely remember the ferry ride itself). I plowed through much of the modern classics—Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Mori Ogai, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Shiga Naoya and many others. But once I got to grad school, I wasn't finding that much that interested me anymore, although Izumi Kyoka was an exception.

But I have read two things in recent years that I found very powerful: Medoruma Shun's short story "Droplets" (translated by Mike Molasky in Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa) and Kirino Natsue's Out. Both of these books were viscerally effective.

Medoruma's story is a magical realist piece about memory anxiety and the memory economy in Okinawa. Apart from how great it is to use in a class on war memories, I think it is just a great piece of storytelling.

Kirino's novel is ultra-creepy on so many dimensions. Set in a lunch-box factory, she captures the alienation of modern suburban Japan to perfection. Once the murders start, however, the thing takes on a tremendous paranoid tension.

These are both great reads.

The Wind Up Bird Chronicles

I recently finished reading Murakami Haruki's The Wind Up Bird Chronicle.

I read my first (and, until now, only) Murakami novel, Pinball, 1973, in graduate school and didn't care for it much. It seemed to me to be another one of those contemporary Japanese novels in which nothing much happens to a person who can't manage to give a damn or form an opinion about anything. While I'm sure I have given all of those novels (Yoshimoto Banana's works, for example) short shrift, I've also not been able to overcome my boredom. Perhaps I'm shallow, but when it comes to pleasure reading I'd actually like a story.

I first started hearing about The Wind Up Bird Chronicle from students when I'd talk about Manchuria in class. Students would come up to me afterwards, excited, saying, "Its just like in that novel, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle!" I'd feign knowledge (not hard after the first few times) and say, "Yes, yes. Just like the novel" and then change the subject.

While I had no intention of moving beyond the feigned interest at first, I soon began to feel like I should get over my Murakami aversion and read the damned book. In part it was because I felt some slight tingle of responsibility to the students to be able to converse a bit about Japanese literature (seeing as we have no one in our Lit department who does J Lit). In part it was because the WWII memories project I was doing with Alice made me want to read across broad swathes of contemporary Japanese writing that touched on the war. Finally, I found the references to the novel coming with greater regularity once I started interviewing a Japanese man in a neighboring town who had spent eight years in Manchuria, from 1945 to 1953. Every time I mentioned his story to someone, they would come back with, "Its just like in that novel, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle!"

So I finally got over it and picked up a copy at the Literary Guillotine, my favorite bookstore in town. The owner, David, winced when I brought it to the counter. He said that he had tried to get through it, but just couldn't (this coming from a man who has recommended things like Don Delillo's Underworld, a novel I haven't been able to get through yet). I winced back at those words, remembering my own earlier experience with Murakami. But, I bought it, nonetheless, brought it home, started it, bogged down after 20 pages and put it on the shelf to "ripen" for several months. I finally picked it up again this past December and pushed myself through the whole thing.

I should say, at this point, that I thought it was a much better book than Pinball, 1973. The Manchurian passages were also by far the most gripping. There were, at the same time, some of the characteristic features of a Murakami novel that are far less interesting to me. (I joked with my friend Sakae that my heart sank when I opened the novel to find the main character cooking spaghetti in the very first paragraph. "What is this obsession that all his characters have with spaghetti?" I asked.) But, in the end, it is a novel that seems to be sticking with me.

For the record, the story of my Japanese man's time in Manchuria is nothing at all like the stories of Manchuria that Murakami tells. Murakami's Manchurian stories are terribly brutal. And in the context of Japanese memories of WWII, necessary. My man's stories are, to the point we've uncovered, rather different.

What I'll be chewing on for awhile is how The Wind Up Bird Chronicle is a story about post-Imperial Japan, how the failure to deal head-on with the colonial legacy creates deep psychic scars. I'm want to resist the historian's tendency to read fiction allegorically, but at this point I do read the novel as a story of several people suffering the long-term effects of a past trauma (traumas not always directly related to Manchuria, but linked by the authorial voice to a kind of primal scene in Manchuria) and the transformation of the main protagonist into (and out of) a psychic detective/therapist.

It wasn't always enjoyable for me, but it was worth reading in the end and, as I said, will likely stick with me for awhile.