Two Authors' Stories: Haruki Murakami and Ocean Vuong

This week I read two autobiographical works: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, a novel by Ocean Vuong, a writer whose career has just begun, and "Abandoning a Cat: Memories of my father,"
by Haruki Murakami, the extremely famous author of at least 30 well-received publications. Murakami is seventy years old. Vuong is thirty, and has published only one other work, a volume of poetry.

I have been reading Murakami's novels and stories for many years, quite a few in The New Yorker where this new work was just published. I eagerly await each new Murakami novel, and have read many of them as soon as they became available. I have just heard of Ocean Vuong because he received a MacArthur grant this week.

Illustration for "Abandoning a Cat: Memories of my father,"
by Haruki Murakami, The New Yorker, September 30, 2019.

Murakami writes in the genre known as magical realism, which he does in his own unique way. "Abandoning a Cat," however, is a completely realistic autobiographical sketch about his relationship with his parents and his early life. It documents his efforts to understand his father, who was a soldier in World War II, and who participated in some of the Japanese wartime activities that are now seen as shameful. Murakami describes what he knows in a very matter of fact way, not elaborating on the judgement of history, only on his own childhood memories. Consider this:

"My father had been studying, no doubt conscientiously, to become a priest. But a simple clerical error had turned him into a soldier. He went through brutal basic training, was handed a Type 38 rifle, placed on a troop-transport ship, and sent off to the fearsome battles at the front. His unit was constantly on the move, clashing with Chinese troops and guerrillas who put up a fierce resistance. In every way imaginable, this was the opposite of life in a peaceful temple in the Kyoto hills. He must have suffered tremendous mental confusion and spiritual turmoil. In the midst of all that, writing haiku may have been his sole consolation. Things he never could have written in his letters, or they wouldn’t have made it past the censors, he put into the form of haiku—expressing himself in a symbolic code, as it were—where he was able to honestly bare his true feelings.

"My father talked to me about the war only once, when he told me a story about how his unit had executed a captured Chinese soldier. I don’t know what prompted him to tell me this. It happened so long ago that it’s an isolated memory, the context unclear. I was still in the lower grades in elementary school. He related matter-of-factly how the execution had taken place. Though the Chinese soldier knew that he was going to be killed, he didn’t struggle, didn’t show any fear, but just sat there quietly with his eyes closed. And he was decapitated. The man’s attitude was exemplary, my father told me. He seemed to have deep feelings of respect for the Chinese soldier. I don’t know if he had to watch as other soldiers in his unit carried out the execution, or if he himself was forced to play a direct role. There’s no way now to determine whether this is because my memory is hazy, or whether my father described the incident in intentionally vague terms. But one thing is clear: the experience left feelings of anguish and torment that lingered for a long time in the soul of this priest turned soldier."

Vuong's novel is highly poetic, but everything in it is very real. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is written in the form of a letter to Vuong's mother, a Vietnamese immigrant to the US.  He offers her rather detailed descriptions of his adolescent sexual experiences with another boy, and how he felt years later when that boy died of a drug overdose. He writes:

"They have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, 'It’s been an honor to serve my country.'"  (p. 232). 

Vuong talks quite a lot about the terrible damage that addictive painkillers were doing to his community, both immigrants and long-term Americans. He also depicts the poverty and desperation of his mother and grandmother, such as his mother's painful job as a manicurist in a Vietnamese nail salon. Consider this:

"The salon is also a kitchen where, in the back rooms, our women squat on the floor over huge woks that pop and sizzle over electric burners, cauldrons of phở simmer and steam up the cramped spaces with aromas of cloves, cinnamon, ginger, mint, and cardamom mixing with formaldehyde, toluene, acetone, Pine-Sol, and bleach. A place where folklore, rumors, tall tales, and jokes from the old country are told, expanded, laughter erupting in back rooms the size of rich people’s closets, then quickly lulled into an eerie, untouched quiet. It’s a makeshift classroom where we arrive, fresh off the boat, the plane, the depths, hoping the salon would be a temporary stop— until we get on our feet, or rather, until our jaws soften around English syllables— bend over workbooks at manicure desks, finishing homework for nighttime ESL classes that cost a quarter of our wages." (pp. 99-100).

Murakami addresses his millions of readers, informing them of his background which he can be sure they want to know. Vuong addresses only his mother, hoping that he can make her understand two things about him: what it means to him to be a writer, and what it means to him to be a gay man. Murakami assumes that his millions of readers will understand him. I think Vuong fears that his mother will not understand him; however, since his book is "a novel" he tacitly assumes that another audience is reading and learning about his life and his pain.

Murakami has many memories of his father, though many of the memories are incomplete or paradoxical. Vuong has almost none:

"I remember walking with you to the grocery store, my father’s wages in your hands. How, by then, he had beaten you only twice— which meant there was still hope it would be the last. I remember armfuls of Wonder Bread and jars of mayo, how you thought mayo was butter, how in Saigon, butter and white bread were only eaten inside mansions guarded by butlers and steel gates. I remember everyone smiling back at the apartment, mayonnaise sandwiches raised to cracked lips. I remember thinking we lived in a sort of mansion." (p. 246). 

I appreciated the open and direct way that these two authors shared their lives with readers. It is sheer coincidence that I read both works in the same week, but somehow I find that they resonate in my mind as revealing much more than I would think I could understand about two men so utterly different from me.