I got side-tracked by the summer heat, but now I’m back with another Murakami essay. For those who asked about the next instalment, here it is and hope you enjoy it. More will come soon. And yes, that’s me below, long before I realized I had no chance at a musical career.
“How much do you love me?” Midori asked.
“Enough to melt all the tigers in the world to butter,” I said. (349)
My grandma – lovely woman – would often tell me as a kid that I was special. She said I was going to grow up to be a big somebody, someone that mattered. This way, I entered my teens with the certainty that the only way of being that was worth anything, was being important enough to be rememberable.
Time passed since then. My perspectives on ambition dissolved, reshaped, and reframed. Somehow, a fear of mediocrity persisted and creeped out in those less glamorous moments of life. Doing laundry. Dripping pipe cleaner down the sink. Waiting in line at the supermarket on a late Tuesday afternoon, shopping cart empty aside from two beers and two bananas. Or just looking back at the years that have passed, and at the ones ahead, and cringing at the thought that the “special me” badge I carry might be there for no reason. Being special, when it does not deliver on its promise, turns out to be painful.
Of course, I’m not the only one in this situation (which ironically makes me even less special). As a generation, we are each fed the perception of being different, unique and worthy of whatever we’d like to claim from life. We put ourselves under tremendous pressure to deliver on those labels, many of which are perhaps unattainable. We chase a vision of success that we are sure belongs to us, but we have taken no part in crafting. Once we clash with the commonality of life, we buckle.
Even when we do attain those impossible-made-possible targets we set ourselves, we readjust, create new ones. We realize there are degrees of “specialness” and we now must reach further. Otherwise, we risk failing on the promise of constant improvement we have set ourselves and the world around us. We are afraid, of not reaching our potential, disappointing ourselves, and worse, disappointing grandma.
But perhaps the strangest thing is that even though we manifest such a strong attachment to our identity, we rarely stop and question how our identity was formed. Why do we need to be a big someone? What’s wrong with being ordinary? What’s all the struggle for?
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Reading Murakami is always a wake-up call for me. His characters do not feel and do not act special. They are “ordinary” and comfortable at that. Even more so, they take pride in their ordinariness. They go about their lives at times aimlessly, yet forever light without that “special” yardstick hanging above their heads. They rarely have something to gain, and even better, they almost never have something to lose. They are at ease with their identity and their everyday lives. They do not have ambition and yet never seem to lack it. They exist outside of it. Not that they are always content with who they are, but they navigate the world with fewer concerns. They can descend into tunnels and wells leading to the Earth’s core, walk through forests at night, seek pleasure in spending an afternoon cleaning an old bike. Even when they love, they do it with a looser grip on themselves and more focus on their loved ones. Ordinariness can be liberating that way. Perhaps that is why they are fascinating. Norwegian Wood is the ideal case study.
The novel is Murakami’s fifth and it was published in 1987. This is the one that boomed, selling around four million copies. Murakami became so popular that him and his wife left Japan for the next few years just to escape publicity. And yet, Norwegian Wood is perhaps the least murakamiesque of his works. It’s a love story. A good one, in fact. It’s also one of the few realist fiction pieces Murakami ever wrote. There are no talking cats, no unicorn heads, or magical sheep. Murakami publicly said he wanted to prove that he could write a classic, realist novel. It was a conscious decision and perhaps (I’m going on a limb here) a career decision, that turned him into the forever next-to-be-Novel-laureate-in-literature.
The protagonist of the novel is Toru Watanabe. Toru is a drama student without much interest in drama. The story is about him falling in love with two women and the complicated dynamics of those relationships, on the backdrop of campus life and the revolutionary student movements at the end of the 1960s in Japan. After one of his friends, Kizuki, inexplicably kills himself, Toru develops a relationship with the friend's former girlfriend, Naoko. When she mysteriously disappears out of his life, he becomes involved with another female classmate, the independent and sexually adventurous Midori. Watanabe's relationship with these two girls is a metaphor for the balance he is trying to strike as he enters adulthood:
“Midori, with her short skirts, impulsive behaviour and general effervescence, represents the life-affirming bright side. Naoko, with her absorption in her former boyfriend's suicide, plus her own psychological problems, is the dark side, even the imminent presence of death itself, forever waiting in the wings.”1 [1]
Overall, it’s a story worth reading. I bet you won’t be able to guess the ending even as you start the last chapter.
But, back to Toru. As a protagonist, he is interesting because he is ordinary. He reminds us often about that.
“I’m just an ordinary guy - ordinary family, ordinary education, ordinary face, ordinary exam results, ordinary thoughts in my head.” (145)
In fact, he’s so confident and “ok” with being ordinary, that this is how he reacts when a girl comments on the size of his penis.
“It’s not so big. Just ordinary.” (22)
Toru floats aimlessly as a university student. He does not seek to leave an imprint on the world. In dialogues, you can barely hear him – he listens more than he talks. He embraces life happening to him, being pulled in random situations. Despite his lack of attachment to anything around him, he does retain however an eerie clarity over his own feelings:
“By the second week in September I reached the conclusion that a university education was meaningless. I decided to think of it as a period of training in techniques for dealing with boredom. I had nothing I especially wanted to accomplish in society that would require me to abandon my studies straight away, and so I went to my lectures each day, took notes, and spent my free time in the library reading or looking things up.” (63)
He is an interesting character that I struggled for a long time to visualize as a real, living human. He is so different from anyone that I know. But one way to understand Toru, and in fact most of Murakami’s characters, is as postmodern personas. They are postmodern in the sense that they revolt through detachment from modernisms “strong-is-good” and “love-is-beautiful” ideologies2. They are not trying to get anywhere (akin to progress), nor are they defined or dependent on romantic relationships (akin to love). Struggling to make sense of the world around them, they distance themselves from rationalization and extreme emotionality. They appear aimless because they do not share in modern obsession with evolution and progress. They do not force themselves to arrive anywhere. At times, they see the world as a game because they gave up on the idea of rationality as a logical foundation of society and its underlying layer, the cult of evolution. Once evolution is discarded, the characters live in dystopia, floating aimlessly, disenchanted with rationality. They do not act like we might expect them to act or even in their own good. For instance, when a relationship fails, they wonder aimlessly, taking train rides across Japan until they run out of money and have to sleep on public beaches. As an adaptation mechanism, they favour detachment, a form of light numbing to shield themselves from living in an irrational world. They are different and peculiar, even though they deem themselves ordinary.
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I have an intense fascination for characters such as Toru Watanabe. As a man who for many years ran after a carrot only to realise that it’s not carrots he’s craving, I’m absorbed by his alternative way of being: lighter, unencumbered by societal or personal expectations. He rarely craves, he rarely hustles. Toru is free, as free as I could imagine any man to be. That is something to learn from Murakami’s characters. You could call them humble, or less self-involved, but that’s not really it. Instead, it’s a sort of detachment that allows one to actually focus on living and less so on becoming, more on the present, and less on the future. I see precious wisdom in that.
To be fair, I doubt Murakami planned all of this in his novel. The story is written so loosely that there was probably no specific plot in mind, nor any “lesson” to bestow on the reader (Murakami is notorious for making things up as he goes along3) Instead, I believe Murakami “felt” these things. He is a postmodern character himself, ordinary, detached, yet rebelling against an irrational world.
Murakami, describes himself as an ordinary man, yet he chose a sort of ordinariness that was against the current and strangely enough turned in his favour. With both his parents working as Japanese literature teachers, Murakami read mostly American and British literature. Growing up, he refused to follow the Japanese corporate dream and opened a jazz café instead. One day he felt like writing, so he started writing. The way he describes his life, all these things sort of “happened” to him, without him chasing a specific vision or idea of success. These moments, however, are also marks of quiet rebellion against a culture which he found too stiff and difficult to navigate. He chose his own path, and at times, he paid for it. Early in his career, Murakami was under heavy scrutiny by the literary critics in Japan, bothered by what they defined as his obsession with Western, particularly American culture. He became popular in the West well before he did so at home. It was all a matter of time in the end.
Murakami shows that choosing to be ordinary is quite special these days, especially if one manages to find a space of contentment within their own body and mind. When the majority aspires to be special, yet all do pretty much the same thing, they become ordinary. Those who step out of the race, end up walking the least ordinary of paths. Strangely enough, they’re the ones who end up having remarkable lives. That’s the world Murakami’s characters inhabit.
Is this our world too? Is this something aspirational? Hard to tell. The point that his characters make is that nothing really matters. That we shouldn’t give ourselves too much importance. That we should exercise some healthy detachment. That we should realize how we all live within our own little worlds and how there is comfort in that. Stress and pain are birthed from our constant need to get somewhere or something. Once we release our hold on it and internalize that decision, the pressure dissipates. We become free. And perhaps a bit more ordinary.
Murakami, F., 2002, Murakami Haruki’s postmodern world, Japan Forum, 14:1, 127-141.
www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2/the-art-of-fiction-no-182-haruki-murakami