"James, Jamie - East Meets West" - читать интересную книгу автора (James Jamie)
Jamie James - East Meets West
Jamie
James
East
Meets West
November 2 1997, The New York
Times Book Review
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle By
Haruki Murakami. Translated by Jay Rubin. 613 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
One of the preoccupying
themes of Japanese literature in this century has been the question of what it
means to be Japanese, especially in an era that has seen the rise and fall of
militarism and the decline of traditional culture. But from reading the books of
Haruki Murakami, one of the country's most celebrated novelists, you'd never
know he was Japanese at all: his characters read Turgenev and Jack London,
listen to Rossini and Bob Dylan, eat pate de foie gras and spaghetti, and know
how to make a proper salty dog. In Murakami's early books, the references to
Western pop culture were sometimes so obscure that they even flew over the heads
of many Americans. Murakami's protagonists are soft, irresolute men, often
homebodies with dynamic girlfriends or wives, who go through long, inert periods
of ennui -- a blatant renunciation of the frenetic, male-dominated ethos of
modern Japan. Perhaps for that reason, his books are huge successes there: a
two-volume novel called Norwegian Wood (taking its title from the Beatles
song) has sold more than four million copies, making him Japan's best-selling
novelist.
But he has yet to find a
wide following abroad. The novels that have been published in English -- A
Wild Sheep Chase, its sequel, Dance Dance Dance, and Hard-Boiled
Wonderland and the End of the World -- occupy a shadowland between cyberpunk
sci-fi, gumshoe detective fiction and hip social satire. Western critics
searching for parallels have variously likened him to Raymond Carver, Raymond
Chandler, Arthur C. Clarke, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis and
Thomas Pynchon -- a roster so ill assorted as to suggest that Murakami may in
fact be an original.
The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle, which came out in Japan two years ago, is a big, ambitious book
clearly intended to establish Murakami as a major figure in world literature.
Although his earlier books bristle with philosophical asides and literary
allusions (always Western, of course), Japanese critics treated him as a
lightweight, a wise guy who never took anything seriously. The new book almost
self-consciously deals with a wide spectrum of heavy subjects: the transitory
nature of romantic love, the evil vacuity of contemporary politics and, most
provocative of all, the legacy of Japan's violent aggression in World War
II.
The story of The
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (the title refers to a weird, unseen bird, whose cry
is a recurring harbinger of evil) is a hallucinatory vortex revolving around
several loosely connected searches carried out in suburban Tokyo by the
protagonist-narrator, Toru Okada, a lost man-boy in his early 30's who has no
job, no ambition and a failing marriage. When his cat disappears, he consults a
whimsical pair of psychics, sisters named Malta and Creta Kano, who visit him in
his dreams as often as in reality. Then his wife leaves him, suddenly and with
no explanation, and he spends his days hanging out with an adolescent girl named
May Kasahara, a high-school dropout obsessed with death, who works for a wig
factory. At one point, seeking solitude, Toru descends to the bottom of a dry
well in the neighborhood, and while he's down there, he has a bizarre
experience, which might or might not be another dream: he passes through the
subterranean stone wall into a dark hotel room, where a woman seduces him. This
experience leaves a blue-black mark on his cheek that gives him miraculous
healing powers. Eventually, he's rescued by Creta Kano, who reveals to him that
she has been defiled in some hideous, unnatural way by Toru's brother-in-law, a
politician whose rising career appears to be propelled by demonic
powers.
As the plot proceeds,
with Toru spending more and more time in the well or else in the mysterious
hotel room, it becomes harder and harder to tell what's real and what's not.
Toru's story is also interrupted at several points by characters who wander in
to tell stories of their own, and these Boccaccio-like interpolations contain
some of the best writing in the book. One, for example, is an account of a
Japanese soldier's experiences in Outer Mongolia during the war. While on a spy
mission in enemy territory, his outfit is captured by Mongolian and Russian
soldiers. He is forced to watch one of his comrades being skinned alive, and
then is left to die at the bottom of a well -- an experience that echoes or
foreshadows Toru's. This story is balanced by another, in the second half of the
book, about a soldier posted in Hsin-ching, the capital of Japanese-occupied
Manchuria. With Chinese soldiers closing in, he is ordered to kill the animals
in the zoo to prevent them from escaping. It's a terrible tale, told with icy
coolness: ''The officer gave his order, and the bullets from the Model 38 rifles
ripped through the smooth hide of a tiger, tearing at the animal's guts. The
summer sky was blue, and from the surrounding trees the screams of cicadas
rained down like a sudden shower.''
Parts of The Wind-Up
Bird Chronicle have the bluntness of Hemingway, and the characters
frequently speak to each other in noirish riddles. Yet the novel's biggest debt
is to Kafka, whose influence may have filtered down to Murakami by way of Kobo
Abe, Murakami's great category-smashing predecessor. The pervasive atmosphere of
alienation in Murakami's work bears a much closer affinity to the waking dreams
of the German Jew in Prague than it does to the belligerent angst of the
American Gen-Xers. And a resonant Kafkaesque chord is struck by another
interpolated story, about a young boy whose identity is snatched by a
doppelganger who steals into his bed at night. The next morning, ''the room
seemed unchanged. It had the same desk, the same bureau, the same closet, the
same floor lamp. The hands of the clock pointed to 6:20. But the boy knew
something was strange. It might all look the same, but this was not the same
place where he had gone to sleep the previous night. The air, the light, the
sounds, the smells, were all just a little bit different from before. Other
people might not notice, but the boy knew.''
The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle, in Jay Rubin's polished translation, marks a significant advance
in Murakami's art. He has stripped away much of the fussy pop ornamentation that
in his earlier novels veered perilously near to product placement. The
difference is immediately apparent if you compare the first chapter with an
earlier version, published as a short story called The Wind-Up Bird and
Tuesday's Women (later included in the collection The Elephant
Vanishes). In the short story, Toru reads a Len Deighton novel, listens to
Robert Plant on the radio and has a McDonald's cheeseburger for lunch. (How many
readers of serious fiction today can identify Robert Plant, the lead singer for
Led Zeppelin?) All these references are eliminated in the novel, along with ones
to Cartier, Adidas, Allen Ginsberg and Penthouse magazine.
The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle does have its flaws, principally in its uneven design. Murakami
has said that he does not plot his novels beforehand but lets the story reveal
itself to him as he writes: it shows, especially in the way that neither Toru
nor the novelist seems to know or care whether Toru's adventures are real or
illusory. And the juxtaposition of the harrowing, all-too-real war stories with
the marvelous, supernatural events in Toru's quest feels contrived. The war
narratives were almost certainly composed separately and then inserted into the
novel to support its grand aspirations.
Yet what Murakami lacks
in finesse is more than compensated by the brilliance of his invention. As it
floats to its conclusion, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle includes an almost
Joycean range of literary forms: flashbacks, dreams, letters, newspaper stories
and transcripts of Internet chats. And no matter how fantastical the events it
describes may be, the straight-ahead storytelling never loses its propulsive
force. By the book's midway point, the novelist-juggler has tossed so many balls
into the air that he inevitably misses a few on the way down. Visionary artists
aren't always neat: who reads Kafka for his tight construction? In The
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Murakami has written a bold and generous book, and
one that would have lost a great deal by being tidied up.
Jamie James - East Meets West
Jamie
James
East
Meets West
November 2 1997, The New York
Times Book Review
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle By
Haruki Murakami. Translated by Jay Rubin. 613 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
One of the preoccupying
themes of Japanese literature in this century has been the question of what it
means to be Japanese, especially in an era that has seen the rise and fall of
militarism and the decline of traditional culture. But from reading the books of
Haruki Murakami, one of the country's most celebrated novelists, you'd never
know he was Japanese at all: his characters read Turgenev and Jack London,
listen to Rossini and Bob Dylan, eat pate de foie gras and spaghetti, and know
how to make a proper salty dog. In Murakami's early books, the references to
Western pop culture were sometimes so obscure that they even flew over the heads
of many Americans. Murakami's protagonists are soft, irresolute men, often
homebodies with dynamic girlfriends or wives, who go through long, inert periods
of ennui -- a blatant renunciation of the frenetic, male-dominated ethos of
modern Japan. Perhaps for that reason, his books are huge successes there: a
two-volume novel called Norwegian Wood (taking its title from the Beatles
song) has sold more than four million copies, making him Japan's best-selling
novelist.
But he has yet to find a
wide following abroad. The novels that have been published in English -- A
Wild Sheep Chase, its sequel, Dance Dance Dance, and Hard-Boiled
Wonderland and the End of the World -- occupy a shadowland between cyberpunk
sci-fi, gumshoe detective fiction and hip social satire. Western critics
searching for parallels have variously likened him to Raymond Carver, Raymond
Chandler, Arthur C. Clarke, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis and
Thomas Pynchon -- a roster so ill assorted as to suggest that Murakami may in
fact be an original.
The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle, which came out in Japan two years ago, is a big, ambitious book
clearly intended to establish Murakami as a major figure in world literature.
Although his earlier books bristle with philosophical asides and literary
allusions (always Western, of course), Japanese critics treated him as a
lightweight, a wise guy who never took anything seriously. The new book almost
self-consciously deals with a wide spectrum of heavy subjects: the transitory
nature of romantic love, the evil vacuity of contemporary politics and, most
provocative of all, the legacy of Japan's violent aggression in World War
II.
The story of The
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (the title refers to a weird, unseen bird, whose cry
is a recurring harbinger of evil) is a hallucinatory vortex revolving around
several loosely connected searches carried out in suburban Tokyo by the
protagonist-narrator, Toru Okada, a lost man-boy in his early 30's who has no
job, no ambition and a failing marriage. When his cat disappears, he consults a
whimsical pair of psychics, sisters named Malta and Creta Kano, who visit him in
his dreams as often as in reality. Then his wife leaves him, suddenly and with
no explanation, and he spends his days hanging out with an adolescent girl named
May Kasahara, a high-school dropout obsessed with death, who works for a wig
factory. At one point, seeking solitude, Toru descends to the bottom of a dry
well in the neighborhood, and while he's down there, he has a bizarre
experience, which might or might not be another dream: he passes through the
subterranean stone wall into a dark hotel room, where a woman seduces him. This
experience leaves a blue-black mark on his cheek that gives him miraculous
healing powers. Eventually, he's rescued by Creta Kano, who reveals to him that
she has been defiled in some hideous, unnatural way by Toru's brother-in-law, a
politician whose rising career appears to be propelled by demonic
powers.
As the plot proceeds,
with Toru spending more and more time in the well or else in the mysterious
hotel room, it becomes harder and harder to tell what's real and what's not.
Toru's story is also interrupted at several points by characters who wander in
to tell stories of their own, and these Boccaccio-like interpolations contain
some of the best writing in the book. One, for example, is an account of a
Japanese soldier's experiences in Outer Mongolia during the war. While on a spy
mission in enemy territory, his outfit is captured by Mongolian and Russian
soldiers. He is forced to watch one of his comrades being skinned alive, and
then is left to die at the bottom of a well -- an experience that echoes or
foreshadows Toru's. This story is balanced by another, in the second half of the
book, about a soldier posted in Hsin-ching, the capital of Japanese-occupied
Manchuria. With Chinese soldiers closing in, he is ordered to kill the animals
in the zoo to prevent them from escaping. It's a terrible tale, told with icy
coolness: ''The officer gave his order, and the bullets from the Model 38 rifles
ripped through the smooth hide of a tiger, tearing at the animal's guts. The
summer sky was blue, and from the surrounding trees the screams of cicadas
rained down like a sudden shower.''
Parts of The Wind-Up
Bird Chronicle have the bluntness of Hemingway, and the characters
frequently speak to each other in noirish riddles. Yet the novel's biggest debt
is to Kafka, whose influence may have filtered down to Murakami by way of Kobo
Abe, Murakami's great category-smashing predecessor. The pervasive atmosphere of
alienation in Murakami's work bears a much closer affinity to the waking dreams
of the German Jew in Prague than it does to the belligerent angst of the
American Gen-Xers. And a resonant Kafkaesque chord is struck by another
interpolated story, about a young boy whose identity is snatched by a
doppelganger who steals into his bed at night. The next morning, ''the room
seemed unchanged. It had the same desk, the same bureau, the same closet, the
same floor lamp. The hands of the clock pointed to 6:20. But the boy knew
something was strange. It might all look the same, but this was not the same
place where he had gone to sleep the previous night. The air, the light, the
sounds, the smells, were all just a little bit different from before. Other
people might not notice, but the boy knew.''
The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle, in Jay Rubin's polished translation, marks a significant advance
in Murakami's art. He has stripped away much of the fussy pop ornamentation that
in his earlier novels veered perilously near to product placement. The
difference is immediately apparent if you compare the first chapter with an
earlier version, published as a short story called The Wind-Up Bird and
Tuesday's Women (later included in the collection The Elephant
Vanishes). In the short story, Toru reads a Len Deighton novel, listens to
Robert Plant on the radio and has a McDonald's cheeseburger for lunch. (How many
readers of serious fiction today can identify Robert Plant, the lead singer for
Led Zeppelin?) All these references are eliminated in the novel, along with ones
to Cartier, Adidas, Allen Ginsberg and Penthouse magazine.
The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle does have its flaws, principally in its uneven design. Murakami
has said that he does not plot his novels beforehand but lets the story reveal
itself to him as he writes: it shows, especially in the way that neither Toru
nor the novelist seems to know or care whether Toru's adventures are real or
illusory. And the juxtaposition of the harrowing, all-too-real war stories with
the marvelous, supernatural events in Toru's quest feels contrived. The war
narratives were almost certainly composed separately and then inserted into the
novel to support its grand aspirations.
Yet what Murakami lacks
in finesse is more than compensated by the brilliance of his invention. As it
floats to its conclusion, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle includes an almost
Joycean range of literary forms: flashbacks, dreams, letters, newspaper stories
and transcripts of Internet chats. And no matter how fantastical the events it
describes may be, the straight-ahead storytelling never loses its propulsive
force. By the book's midway point, the novelist-juggler has tossed so many balls
into the air that he inevitably misses a few on the way down. Visionary artists
aren't always neat: who reads Kafka for his tight construction? In The
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Murakami has written a bold and generous book, and
one that would have lost a great deal by being tidied up.
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