Haruki Murakami, page 4 of 4

I was prompted to buy In Search of a Distant Voice because Amazon recommended it to me and, for once, they seemed to have actually found the sort of thing I might like. The recommendation came because of the Haruki Murakami books I’d bought from them, and I thought Yamada’s novel sounded a bit Murakami-ish, so gave it a go.

I was wrong about that “a bit”. It feels totally Murakami-ish, right from the start:

“Tsuneo got up at four-thirty in the morning. He was in the Otemachi Multi-Office Government Complex in Tokyo, in the rest station on the third floor of Building One. Four-thirty was pretty early, it’s true, but that’s how it goes.” (p. 1)

The studied casualness of that “pretty early, it’s true, but that’s how it goes” sounds almost like a parody of the sort of stylistic tic Murakami employs, like a doctor’s bedside manner, to set his readers at ease, as if he’s trying to let you know that he’s just this, you know, normal kind of guy who somehow had this plain weird thing happen to him. In his homeland, Murakami is known for his casual tone. Though not the first to do so, he’s noted for using the most informal Japanese word boku, rather than the traditional, and more literary, watashi, as his narrator’s word for “I”. (I can’t speak Japanese; this comes from Jay Rubin’s book, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words). I don’t know how much of an impact Murakami has had on the culture of his homeland, aside from being very popular, so it’s difficult to tell if Yamada, in writing like this, is simply adopting a commercial style. Of the few other contemporary Japanese writers I’ve read, Banana Yoshimoto (yes, that’s a name, not a fruit drink) is another one who sounds very Murakami-ish. (Funnily enough, the only other contemporary Japanese author I’ve read, and the only one who doesn’t sound like Haruki Murakami, is the unrelated Ryu Murakami.) But aside from the style, one thing that links Haruki Murakami with these two is the dreamy strangeness of their plots, which was what I was after anyway, so I’m not going to complain about Yamada’s Murakami-ness. (The translator, Michael Emmerich, has also translated the aforementioned Banana, so maybe that has something to do with it.)

In Search of a Distant Voice is about Kasama Tsuneo, a young man working for Japanese immigration, who one day starts to hear a woman’s voice in his head. Tsuneo has a bit of a mystery in his past — something happened eight years before, in Portland, Oregon, which sent him running back to Japan desperately determined “to be normal”. Once he’s got over the shock of hearing this voice, and once he’s decided he’s not mad, he tries talking to it.

There are a few moments in the book which tread that wonderful line between dark and comic, moments both excruciating and disturbing, as Tsuneo tries to work out if the woman’s voice belongs to a real person (and not a dead or hallucinated one), but this dangerous tone isn’t kept up, and for most of the time the book doesn’t quite know (or let the reader know) what sort of story it’s telling. For instance, there’s an obvious mystery about Tsuneo — just what happened to him in Portland? — as well as about the woman — who is she? — and as, at the end, all is revealed about Tsuneo’s past, I expected to have the other mystery resolved, too. I don’t want to give the ending away by saying this, but I think I’d have enjoyed the book more if I had been prepared for the way it leaves some things unresolved. Now, I don’t mind unresolved. It can create quite a subtle and emotional depth to a story. But if you get unresolved when you’ve been led to expect resolved, that emotion tends to be frustration, which isn’t either subtle or enjoyable.

Having said that, I liked the book enough (after mentally readjusting my view of what it was, having finished it). At worst, it suffers from being a short novel with only the depth of a short story — though in that it could have been worse: too many books nowadays are much longer and don’t even have that depth (grumble, grumble, where’s my cardigan…) Read for atmosphere alone, as a sort of mood piece, or as a sort of Kafka-esque portrait of modern man in search of a soul, it has nevertheless intrigued me enough to give Yamada’s other novel, Strangers, a go.

I remember feeling rather cheated the first time I realised the writer of the book I was reading was making the plot up as he went along. It may have been Jack of Shadows (which I read because of the excellent Hawkwind song of the same name), but it was definitely Roger Zelazny. Zelazny, for me, has always been a bit of a variable writer, a little too pleased with his own facility to really knuckle down and tell a story properly, though he does occasionally tell a good one. (“Tower of Ice” from Divlish, The Damned, for instance.)

I’ve nothing against writers making their stories up as they go along, it’s when it’s obvious, when they’re just noodling on the page because they don’t know where to take the plot next. The trouble is, in fantasy, it’s all too easy to get away with this by simply throwing a few monsters at the heroes, or, in the case of horror, just providing a scary moment which doesn’t really move the plot along.

But there’s one writer who really can pull off a good bit of noodling, and that’s Haruki Murakami. Murakami seems to write by just starting with an intriguing beginning and following it along till it goes somewhere. If it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, he doesn’t throw exciting but empty events at the reader in the hope it’ll keep them occupied till he thinks of something. Instead, he sticks with it, paying minute attention to his characters carrying out some quiet but concentrated task, such as preparing spaghetti or building a fire out of driftwood. His is the pressure-cooker approach to writing: he’s content to sit back and write till he, and his reader, are fully adjusted to the tone and pace of his imagination. And then, when that connection is made, something happens. Dance, Dance, Dance is the book where this is most evident — a book he says is his least satisfactory but was the most fun to write, and which I quite enjoyed simply because of that very adjustment to a slower, quieter pace. Murakami’s tales are often about a tense, quirky build-up to a sudden, sometimes violent, event — or sometimes just the suggestion of an event, as in “UFO in Kushiro” (from After the Quake) where, after a rather rambling conversation between a man and a woman, we get, right near the end, and out of pretty much nowhere: “For one split second, Komura realised that he was on the verge of committing an act of overwhelming violence.” And then it’s over, the moment’s past, and after all that tension, there’s a feeling of something frightening and mysterious having been averted, or having happened entirely hidden away in his character’s psyche, just as you get in the best moments with David Lynch.

I think with any sort of creative activity (and that includes reading as well as writing), there’s a transition you have to make from your everyday mode of thinking to that slower, quieter mindset in which things start to flow. Sometimes part of the transition is made actually on the page, but even still there are writers who can carry it off, and writers who can’t.

Tony Takitani is a shortish (1 hour 16 minutes) adaptation of a story by one of my favourite writers, Haruki Murakami. It’s not one of his best or most characteristic stories, nor is it particularly cinematic. It is, though, less explicitly weird than most of his stuff, so perhaps that’s why it has been chosen to be filmed (or that’s why it has been successful, anyway, winning the Grand Jury Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival).

It’s basically a story about loneliness. (Spoilers ahead.) Because of his western-sounding name, Tony Takitani gets used to receiving odd looks from people as a kid, and so stays away from them. But he doesn’t mind the solitude till he grows up and suddenly falls in love with a woman who is perfect for him in every way except for her uncontrollable obsession with buying clothes. Their married life is blissful till Tony suggests she might try to not buy so many. Tragedy ensues, and Tony is left alone once more. There is then a very Murakami-esque “transaction” in which a woman comes along and, left alone in the large wardrobe room with all of Tony’s dead wife’s clothes, she becomes a sort of conduit for the sadness of the whole situation and cries for no real reason she can understand.

The tone of the film is a lot more bleak than the written story, perhaps because it doesn’t have Murakami’s easy-going, lightly humorous prose to buoy it up, but other than that the adaptation is very faithful — perhaps too much so, as most of the film is carried along by an overdubbed narration. There’s only one really cinematic moment where the film does something the story can’t, and that’s where a scene of Tony lying on the floor of the now-empty wardrobe room cuts to the image of his father lying in an identical position in a prison cell where he was held in China, making you see the parallels between the father’s and son’s lives, and also pointing out how Tony’s loneliness is a prison as limiting as the physical cell in which his father was held.

Would I recommend it? Well, I went into the plot of the film pretty thoroughly because I doubt anyone who isn’t into Murakami will really want to see the film, and anyone who is into Murakami will probably have read the story (it’s in his latest collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman) so there’ll be no surprises anyway. Basically, not bad, quite moody if you’re up for a quiet, sad film, but otherwise, for Murakami completists only.