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David Leavitt - As Japanese as Burt Bacharach
David
Leavitt
As
Japanese as Burt Bacharach
March 28 1993, The New York Times
Book Review
THE ELEPHANT VANISHES Stories. By
Haruki Murakami. Translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin. 327 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
Few cultures excite or
upset the American imagination as tenaciously as Japan's. News of life on that
leapfrog of islands streams relentlessly through our televisions and newspapers,
alternately offending and enthralling us. What kind of country is this, we
wonder, that can produce Noh drama and cram schools, zen gardens and Nintendo
games? American writers can't seem to get enough of Japan, which has become for
some -- Jay McInerney, Brad Leit hauser and John Burnham Schwartz among them --
a magnet for expatriate adventuring. For writers like Michael Crichton, on the
other hand, Japan is a predator nation out to destroy the American way of
business -- a convenient scapegoat in a melodrama of economic
espionage.
The Japanese novelist
Haruki Murakami provides a different point of view in The Elephant
Vanishes, his first collection of stories. (He is also the author of the
novels Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and A Wild
Sheep Chase.) These stories, ably translated by Jay Rubin and Alfred
Birnbaum, show us Japan as it's experienced from the inside. What is exotic to
foreigners -- oyster hot pot or pillows filled with buckwheat husks -- is here
the stuff of ordinary life; but so are McDonald's, steak and Julio Iglesias.
Indeed, Mr. Murakami's Japan is such an unquestioned hybrid of tradition and
export that one has to read 11 pages into the first story before the most casual
reference to a "Tokyoite" signals that we aren't in America. His narrators --
young, urban, downwardly mobile -- are as likely to eat spaghetti as soba
noodles. They listen to Wagner and Herbie Hancock, but disdain "stupid Japanese
rock music. Love songs sweet enough to rot your teeth." They read Len Deighton
novels and War and Peace, not Kobo Abe and The Tale of Genji.
Their universe is Japanese, but their cultural reference points are almost
exclusively Western.
This is a Japan
characterized by a peculiar spiritual torpor. Bizarre events take place
regularly, but fail to generate much reaction or curiosity. In The Wind-Up
Bird and Tuesday's Women, for instance, a young man's search for a missing
cat leads him into a closed-off alley that passes between the backyards of
parallel houses, a path "neglected and untrafficked, like some abandoned canal."
There he encounters a sunbathing teen-age girl who, like the alley itself, seems
both of the ordinary world and strangely apart from it. But their rambling
conversation is too lazy to be truly flirtatious.
Similarly, in A
Window, another young man, this one a writing teacher who works for a
correspondence school, pays a visit to one of his pupils, a married woman in her
early 30's. Their few hours together eating hamburger steak and listening to
Burt Bacharach linger for years in the narrator's memory. "The weather was
lovely that day," he recalls, "and over the railings of the building's verandas
hung a colorful assortment of sheets and futons drying in the sun. Every now and
then came the slap of a bamboo whisk fluffing out a futon. I can bring the sound
back even now. It was strangely devoid of any sense of distance." Again, nothing
happens. The wife and the teacher are "like two would-be passengers who had
missed the same train," linked not so much by a shared passion as a shared sense
of absence.
Most of Mr. Murakami's
stories have a fabulistic edge. The Dancing Dwarf takes place in one of
those impressively efficient Japanese factories we're always hearing about, only
in this case the factory manufactures elephants: "Assigned to the ear section
that month, I worked in the building with the yellow ceiling and posts. My
helmet and pants were also yellow. . . . The month before, I had been assigned
to the green building, where I wore a green helmet and pants and made
heads."
In TV People,
human mutants "reduced" by 20 or 30 percent -- "figures that look far away even
close up" -- invade the narrator's home and office. "From the time the TV People
come into the apartment to the moment they leave," he tells us, "I don't budge.
. . . Not to excuse myself, but you have people right in front of you denying
your very presence like that, then see if you don't doubt whether you actually
exist."
And in the haunting
title story, another elephant mysteriously disappears, along with its keeper,
from the enclosure where it has been kept as a kind of mascot for a Tokyo
suburb. Again, the solution to the mystery hinges on questions of perspective
and proportion.
In fact, all the stories
in The Elephant Vanishes take place in parallel worlds not so much remote
from ordinary life as hidden within its surfaces: secret alleys that afford
unexpected -- and unsettling -- views. Mysteries are offered that defy solution
or analysis. Their purpose, rather, is to point out not only how much we don't
know but how much we can't know. As a result, the tendency of certain people and
situations to defy description -- to most writers a bane -- becomes for Mr.
Murakami something to revel in.
In the story called
Sleep, for example, a young woman suddenly discovers that she no longer
needs it. Awakened literally and figuratively, she observes that there is
something strange about her husband's face, but finds herself at a loss to
articulate the source of this strangeness. "Honestly," she observes, " 'strange'
is about all that fits. . . . The one thing I could remember was that his face
looked strange."
Likewise, in The
Second Bakery Attack a young man discovers that his wife keeps a shotgun and
ski masks in the car, even though "neither of us had ever skied. But she didn't
explain and I didn't ask. Married life is weird, I felt." One recalls the maxim
given by the correspondence-school writing teacher in A Window, who says
to his student: "Don't try so hard to be the penetrating observer. Writing is,
after all, a makeshift thing."
Makeshift indeed. Yet
even in the slipperiest of Mr. Murakami's stories, pinpoints of detail flash
out: pull tabs from beer cans lying in an ashtray "like scales from a mermaid";
shotgun shells rustling "like buckwheat husks in an old-fashioned pillow";
melted ice working its way through a cocktail "like a tiny ocean
current."
"After I gave up
sleeping," the narrator of Sleep observes, "it occurred to me what a
simple thing reality is, how easy it is to make it work. . . . Like running a
simple machine. Once you learn to run it, it's just a matter of repetition." In
this observation she reveals her kinship with the narrator of The Elephant
Vanishes, who continues, after the disappearance, "to sell refrigerators and
toaster ovens and coffee makers in the pragmatic world, based on afterimages of
memories I retain from that world." Yet he, like his sleepless contemporary,
doesn't live there anymore.
It's as if a kind of
social schism has taken hold in this culture so intent on efficiency and
productivity, a schism between the visible street and the hidden alley that
resists simple resolution. In Mr. Murakami's view, "people are looking for a
kind of unity in this kit-chin we know as the world. Unity of design. Unity of
color. Unity of function." The problem, as he notes in a story called The
Last Lawn of the Afternoon, is that "no matter how hard you try to put
everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until
finally the context isn't even there anymore. You're left with this pile of
kittens lolling all over one another."
No metaphor could suit
more exactly these stories in which animals -- elephants, kangaroos, windup
birds, even a tragically mistreated "little green monster" -- figure so
crucially. These stories, like the kittens themselves, are "warm with life,
hopelessly" -- and, I would add, wonderfully -- "unstable."
David Leavitt - As Japanese as Burt Bacharach
David
Leavitt
As
Japanese as Burt Bacharach
March 28 1993, The New York Times
Book Review
THE ELEPHANT VANISHES Stories. By
Haruki Murakami. Translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin. 327 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
Few cultures excite or
upset the American imagination as tenaciously as Japan's. News of life on that
leapfrog of islands streams relentlessly through our televisions and newspapers,
alternately offending and enthralling us. What kind of country is this, we
wonder, that can produce Noh drama and cram schools, zen gardens and Nintendo
games? American writers can't seem to get enough of Japan, which has become for
some -- Jay McInerney, Brad Leit hauser and John Burnham Schwartz among them --
a magnet for expatriate adventuring. For writers like Michael Crichton, on the
other hand, Japan is a predator nation out to destroy the American way of
business -- a convenient scapegoat in a melodrama of economic
espionage.
The Japanese novelist
Haruki Murakami provides a different point of view in The Elephant
Vanishes, his first collection of stories. (He is also the author of the
novels Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and A Wild
Sheep Chase.) These stories, ably translated by Jay Rubin and Alfred
Birnbaum, show us Japan as it's experienced from the inside. What is exotic to
foreigners -- oyster hot pot or pillows filled with buckwheat husks -- is here
the stuff of ordinary life; but so are McDonald's, steak and Julio Iglesias.
Indeed, Mr. Murakami's Japan is such an unquestioned hybrid of tradition and
export that one has to read 11 pages into the first story before the most casual
reference to a "Tokyoite" signals that we aren't in America. His narrators --
young, urban, downwardly mobile -- are as likely to eat spaghetti as soba
noodles. They listen to Wagner and Herbie Hancock, but disdain "stupid Japanese
rock music. Love songs sweet enough to rot your teeth." They read Len Deighton
novels and War and Peace, not Kobo Abe and The Tale of Genji.
Their universe is Japanese, but their cultural reference points are almost
exclusively Western.
This is a Japan
characterized by a peculiar spiritual torpor. Bizarre events take place
regularly, but fail to generate much reaction or curiosity. In The Wind-Up
Bird and Tuesday's Women, for instance, a young man's search for a missing
cat leads him into a closed-off alley that passes between the backyards of
parallel houses, a path "neglected and untrafficked, like some abandoned canal."
There he encounters a sunbathing teen-age girl who, like the alley itself, seems
both of the ordinary world and strangely apart from it. But their rambling
conversation is too lazy to be truly flirtatious.
Similarly, in A
Window, another young man, this one a writing teacher who works for a
correspondence school, pays a visit to one of his pupils, a married woman in her
early 30's. Their few hours together eating hamburger steak and listening to
Burt Bacharach linger for years in the narrator's memory. "The weather was
lovely that day," he recalls, "and over the railings of the building's verandas
hung a colorful assortment of sheets and futons drying in the sun. Every now and
then came the slap of a bamboo whisk fluffing out a futon. I can bring the sound
back even now. It was strangely devoid of any sense of distance." Again, nothing
happens. The wife and the teacher are "like two would-be passengers who had
missed the same train," linked not so much by a shared passion as a shared sense
of absence.
Most of Mr. Murakami's
stories have a fabulistic edge. The Dancing Dwarf takes place in one of
those impressively efficient Japanese factories we're always hearing about, only
in this case the factory manufactures elephants: "Assigned to the ear section
that month, I worked in the building with the yellow ceiling and posts. My
helmet and pants were also yellow. . . . The month before, I had been assigned
to the green building, where I wore a green helmet and pants and made
heads."
In TV People,
human mutants "reduced" by 20 or 30 percent -- "figures that look far away even
close up" -- invade the narrator's home and office. "From the time the TV People
come into the apartment to the moment they leave," he tells us, "I don't budge.
. . . Not to excuse myself, but you have people right in front of you denying
your very presence like that, then see if you don't doubt whether you actually
exist."
And in the haunting
title story, another elephant mysteriously disappears, along with its keeper,
from the enclosure where it has been kept as a kind of mascot for a Tokyo
suburb. Again, the solution to the mystery hinges on questions of perspective
and proportion.
In fact, all the stories
in The Elephant Vanishes take place in parallel worlds not so much remote
from ordinary life as hidden within its surfaces: secret alleys that afford
unexpected -- and unsettling -- views. Mysteries are offered that defy solution
or analysis. Their purpose, rather, is to point out not only how much we don't
know but how much we can't know. As a result, the tendency of certain people and
situations to defy description -- to most writers a bane -- becomes for Mr.
Murakami something to revel in.
In the story called
Sleep, for example, a young woman suddenly discovers that she no longer
needs it. Awakened literally and figuratively, she observes that there is
something strange about her husband's face, but finds herself at a loss to
articulate the source of this strangeness. "Honestly," she observes, " 'strange'
is about all that fits. . . . The one thing I could remember was that his face
looked strange."
Likewise, in The
Second Bakery Attack a young man discovers that his wife keeps a shotgun and
ski masks in the car, even though "neither of us had ever skied. But she didn't
explain and I didn't ask. Married life is weird, I felt." One recalls the maxim
given by the correspondence-school writing teacher in A Window, who says
to his student: "Don't try so hard to be the penetrating observer. Writing is,
after all, a makeshift thing."
Makeshift indeed. Yet
even in the slipperiest of Mr. Murakami's stories, pinpoints of detail flash
out: pull tabs from beer cans lying in an ashtray "like scales from a mermaid";
shotgun shells rustling "like buckwheat husks in an old-fashioned pillow";
melted ice working its way through a cocktail "like a tiny ocean
current."
"After I gave up
sleeping," the narrator of Sleep observes, "it occurred to me what a
simple thing reality is, how easy it is to make it work. . . . Like running a
simple machine. Once you learn to run it, it's just a matter of repetition." In
this observation she reveals her kinship with the narrator of The Elephant
Vanishes, who continues, after the disappearance, "to sell refrigerators and
toaster ovens and coffee makers in the pragmatic world, based on afterimages of
memories I retain from that world." Yet he, like his sleepless contemporary,
doesn't live there anymore.
It's as if a kind of
social schism has taken hold in this culture so intent on efficiency and
productivity, a schism between the visible street and the hidden alley that
resists simple resolution. In Mr. Murakami's view, "people are looking for a
kind of unity in this kit-chin we know as the world. Unity of design. Unity of
color. Unity of function." The problem, as he notes in a story called The
Last Lawn of the Afternoon, is that "no matter how hard you try to put
everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until
finally the context isn't even there anymore. You're left with this pile of
kittens lolling all over one another."
No metaphor could suit
more exactly these stories in which animals -- elephants, kangaroos, windup
birds, even a tragically mistreated "little green monster" -- figure so
crucially. These stories, like the kittens themselves, are "warm with life,
hopelessly" -- and, I would add, wonderfully -- "unstable."
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