Murakami Forever

The first two stories ever published by Haruki Murakami:

These two short novels, Wind and Pinball, are very enjoyable reading. I’ve long been a Murakami fan, but never read these early works, the beginning of his fascinating literary accomplishments. Murakami novels are usually very long and involved, with sometimes hard-to-follow plots and magical realism. These stories are very simple, short, and have pretty much straight-line plots. There’s no magic — only somewhat eccentric characters such as a pair of identical twins who show up and move into the narrator’s small apartment, and then just as abruptly pack up their clothes, get on a bus, and leave.

I did find that these works illustrate the author’s love of detail and his wonderful turn of descriptive phrases, especially for evoking very ordinary things like food and music. Murakami loves American jazz and popular music, which appear here as in almost all his later works. Almost every one of his works of fiction has some passages about cooking, including these early ones — as his works became more surrealistic, food was often a way that he grounded his narrative in every-day life.

Some quotes that embody what I see as pure Murakami:

“When I stuck my head out the window I thought I sniffed rain. A few autumn birds cut across the sky. The drone of the city was everywhere, a mix of countless sounds: subway trains, sizzling hamburgers, cars on elevated highways, automatic doors opening and closing.”

“My cassette tape of an old Stan Getz album was the musical background for my efforts that morning. It was a dynamite band featuring Getz, Al Haig, Jimmy Raney, Teddy Kotick, and Tiny Kahn. Whistling Getz’s solo to ‘Jumpin’ with Symphony Sid’ from start to finish along with the tape really picked me up.”

“The foghorns on the ships anchored at sea were emitting sharp, plaintive wails, like calves that had strayed from the herd. Some of the wails were brief, others long, but each had its own distinct pitch as it cut through the darkness on its way toward the mountains.”

"We pulled up next to the water and sat there in the car, drinking coffee from the thermos and munching the cookies the twins had bought. There were three kinds—buttercream, coffee cream, and maple— that we divided up into equal groups to give everyone a fair share.” (Photo: coffee cream cookies from the web).

  

“I had finished my bath and downed the last of my beer when they finished grilling the trout. There was one for each of us, with canned asparagus and a huge bunch of watercress on the side. The trout tasted like something from the good old days—a mountain path in summer. We took our time picking every last morsel from the fish with our chopsticks. All that was left on the plate was white bones and a pencil-sized watercress stalk. The twins washed the dishes right away and made coffee.”

I’ve been reading Murakami’s novels since 1989, mostly picking them up at the time they were published. He’s quirky! I appreciate his very strange sense of reality, which I think is grounded in an amazing ability to observe the details of life, as in these early novels. 

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Gods of the Underworld and Earthly Adventures

 

“The Black Road leads to Xibalba, and at its heart there sits my palace, like a jewel upon the crown of your kings. It is very large, and decorated with colorful murals. It has almost as many rooms as the year has days.” (p. 98)

Silvia Moreno-Garcia writes myths set in modern times. She brings old gods to life, using the language of ancient story-tellers. I’ve enjoyed several of her books, and this was as good as the others. Two gods of the underworld struggle violently for domination, and use a mortal girl to try to win. She emerges as her own person, not a subordinate. Are you in need of escape reading? This is a good choice.

Ordinary Life

April snow.

At the Supermarket

"Disease, Hurricane, and Trump's Tariffs Are to
Blame for Orange Juice Getting Way More Expensive" (Food & Wine)

“Compared with a year earlier, egg prices are up 60.4 percent.”

More Reading

Murakami is always so fascinating! Not to mention gently weird.
This is a short tale of a small boy’s surreal experience in a very “strange” library.
Typical Murakami: lots of food.

Quote: “The food looked scrumptious. There was piping-hot sea urchin soup and grilled Spanish mackerel (with sour cream), white asparagus with sesame-seed dressing, a lettuce-and-cucumber salad, and a warm roll with a pat of butter. There was also a big glass of grape juice. When she finished laying it out, the girl turned and spoke to me with her hands: Now wipe away your tears. It’s time to eat.”

Murakami’s book has beautiful illustrations like this.

Photos © 2025 mae sander

Shared with Readerbuzz, Eileen’s Critters, and Sami’s Murals.

Haruki Murakami: “The City and Its Uncertain Walls”

Published this week: a new book by Haruki Murakami. I've been looking forward to this, and purchased and read it as soon as it was available to me. I was captivated by the novel, which had many of the elements expressed in earlier Murakami novels, but offered a different set of events, other-worldly settings, and characters. In retrospect, I realize how very much it was like his earlier books, but I enjoyed it anyway, in the moment.

 

As in all the Murakami novels and stories I’ve read, the juxtaposition of reality as I know it (and probably also as you know it) and a very unreal not-reality is powerful and dominates the story. But there’s much more to the story than this, and the jagged edges of reality and unreality are what makes the story so readable, at least to me. 

The features of Murakami’s magical realism are very much present in this novel, and clearly, he knows it and knows the reader is conscious of it. Here’s a key conversation between the central character, who narrates the novel, and a woman who is in his life for a brief time:

“You like García Márquez?” 

“I think so. I’ve read most of his books, but I especially like this one. This is the second time I’ve read it. What about you?” …

“In his stories the real and the unreal, the living and the dead, are all mixed together in one,” she said. “Like that’s an entirely ordinary, everyday thing.”

“People often call that magical realism,” I said. 

“True. But I think that although that way of telling stories might fit the critical criteria of magical realism, for García Márquez himself it’s just ordinary realism. In the world he inhabits the real and the unreal coexist and he just describes those scenes the way he sees them.” (Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls  p. 601-602)

 

The reader will no doubt accept this as a comment not just on García Márquez but on the author’s own way of seeing reality and not-reality in his many novels. In this novel, a parallel world exists in a mysterious town with a self-sustaining wall that keeps its inhabitants imprisoned, as well as a gatekeeper who tends a flock of golden-furred unicorns. The narrator, when he is in this surreal town, works in a library; he also works in a library in the maybe-real world (though this world also has some magical elements). The thing about the narrator is that he’s a pretty ordinary guy who just has surreal experiences. He had an ordinary education, a fixation on a lost love from adolescence, an unimaginative job in Tokyo, and then a move to a more unreal mountain town with a mysterious library. I like this. 

Every Murakami novel that I can think of has at least one long description of a man cooking dinner for a woman. I was beginning to fear that this element was missing, but finally, on page 504 out of 690, the narrator invites a woman to dinner. The cooking scene is almost a replica of such scenes from other Murakami novels right down to the spaghetti and salad, but I liked it anyway —

“In the kitchen I sipped my wine while tossing together the salad and spaghetti. She watched curiously as I buzzed around the kitchen. As I waited for the water to boil for the spaghetti, I minced a clove of garlic and sautéed calamari and mushrooms, then minced some parsley. I shelled the shrimp, sliced a grapefruit into even pieces, tossed soft lettuce and herbs together, and added a dressing of olive oil, lemon, and mustard. 

“‘You really look like you know what you’re doing. Very efficient.’  She seemed impressed.” (p 504)

 

I wondered if this novel will appeal to readers who aren’t deeply immersed already in the works of Murakami, so I looked up the New York Times review by Junot Díaz— published this week — which put it this way:

“If you’ve read any Murakami, this will seem very familiar. All the author’s standards are here, from the classic Murakami male narrator — described perfectly by Hari Kunzru as ‘a listless, socially isolated guy whose interests tend to circle around music, books, home cooking and cats, and whose lack of anchor in the everyday world often precipitates a sort of slippage into a netherworld of ghosts and spirits’ — to the apocalyptic disappearance and the reality-confusing shenanigans.” (source)

Unless you are already a hard-boiled fan of this author, if you want to read Murakami I would suggest beginning with one of his earlier novels. I’m sorry to say this.

Review © 2024 mae sander

Murakami Manga

Haruki Murakami is definitely one of my favorite authors, and I’ve read most of his novels, which tend to be quite long. I’ve read quite a few of his short stories also — so I decided to read this graphic version of some of them.

“Super Frog Saves Tokyo” is a Kafkaesque story of an ordinary office worker named Katagiri, who is enlisted by a tormented giant frog. His mission: to save Tokyo from a disastrous earthquake that is about to be caused by a hideous worm that lives underground beneath the office building where he works. 

Like most of Murakami’s magical realism, you can’t be sure what’s happening in some literal sense, and what’s only in the imagination or hallucinations of a character. And of course it doesn’t matter. The poor office worker has to save Tokyo.

Here are a couple of panels where the frog introduces himself to Katagiri:

I looked up the text version of the story (here). The description given has different details from what you see in the art wor:

“Katagiri still had his briefcase jammed under his arm. Somebody's playing a joke on me, he thought. Somebody's rigged himself up in this huge frog costume just to have fun with me. But he knew, as he watched Frog pour boiling water into the teapot, humming all the while, that these had to be the limbs and movements of a real frog. Frog set a cup of green tea in front of Katagiri and poured another one for himself.”

I always find it hard to read graphic novels, because I rely so heavily on reading, and I forget to look carefully at the images. In reading this version of stories which I also have read as text, I made an effort to find the details of the narrative in the pictures, not in words. I tried to see the ordinary house, the teapot and cups, the flat pillow that the man kneels on, the steam from the teacup, the posture of the frog, and many other details. Afterwards, when I reread the story as originally published, I was struck by the very different way that details were presented. Very interesting.

Review ©  2024 mae sander

 

Food in Literature (Don’t Miss This!)

The Atlantic today featured a wonderful article from the past (I don’t know how I missed it then). I’ve included the covers of some of the books from which the author quoted amazing food passages. In my reviews, I often select paragraphs that describe food, and in the past, I’ve done so with some of these books. This is really a wonderful collection!

THE 12 MOST UNFORGETTABLE DESCRIPTIONS OF FOOD IN LITERATURE

Haruki Murakami’s stir fry, Maurice Sendak’s chicken soup with rice—only the most gifted writers have made meals on the page worth remembering.

By Adrienne LaFrance

Nobody can write about food in literature without quoting Proust’s famous passage about the madeleine.

The Setting Sun

About the corrupt and idle noble family, whose life in 1947 is portrayed in his book The Devil’s Flute Murders, mystery writer Yokomizo wrote:

"This was all before Osamu Dazai wrote his work Setting Sun, about the decline of the aristocratic class after the war, so we did not yet have ready terms like 'the sunset clan' or 'sunset class' to describe these people, newly bereft of their noble privilege and falling into ruin. But, if we had, then I think it likely that this case would have been the first to see the term used." (The Devil’s Flute Murders, p. 17).

I quoted this in my review of  Yokomiso’s book earlier this week, and then decided to read Osamu Dazai’s very famous book The Setting Sun, which in a way defined the postwar era as Yokomizu said. Luckily, I already owned this book, along with many other classic Japanese novels. 

Wonderful Japanese classics that I might read again, based on Haruki Murakami’s list.

In reading both Yokomizo’s detective novel and Dazai’s work of literary fiction, I learned that Japan before World War II had a class of titled aristocrats as well as an Emperor, and these aristocrats had much inherited wealth and did not perform productive labor. Noble families lived on large estates with a number of houses, sometimes designed in both Japanese and Western style. Like European aristocrats, the Japanese nobility relied on numerous servants, who cooked for them, served their meals, took care of their beautiful silk kimonos and other clothing, aired and folded their bedding in the morning, and filled their large bathtubs in the evening. The new Japanese constitution outlawed titles and hereditary peerage. The constitution took effect in May of 1947: the characters in both novels are highly aware of this official loss of status that they have experienced, or are experiencing during the events of the two books.

Also in 1947, conditions in bombed-out, burned-out cities were disastrous for rich and poor Japanese people. All necessities, including food, were very scarce for everyone, with black marketeers creating even more problems. Neither of these authors describe the plight of poor people, though one knows they existed, and in fact many lacked not only food but also shelter. Despite being somewhat better off than the poorest citizens (to whom they were suddenly equal before the law), the aristocrats in the novels felt very deprived: their former unearned standard of living simply could not be maintained. In both stories, the noble families include one relative with a bit of his fortune remaining — and the entire family wants to depend on this person. However, that doesn’t last long. 

In The Setting Sun, Dazai’s narrator is a 29 year old woman, Kazuko, who has formerly lived a completely idle and undemanding life with her mother and her recently deceased father. Her brother is missing in action somewhere in Pacific theater after the war, and when he appears, he’s quite a mess. 

Kazuko suddenly finds that she and her mother must move from their rather luxurious home in Tokyo to a small house far from the city they knew. At the insistence of her uncle, who more or less takes responsibility for them, she and her mother, and later her brother, must figure out how to live with no servants, and how to cope with postwar food shortages and other challenges. Her mother is good-natured, very passive, and doesn’t even try to understand what has happened, but assumes that she will continue to be cared for, fed, nursed, and be handed whatever she needs despite her sudden loss of status, money, and servants. She loves her son and her daughter, but fails to understand what they are going through.

Kazuko tries to insulate her mother by doing heavy farm labor to keep them supplied with vegetables, and by selling their valuables one by one: clothing and jewelry, etc. While her uncle tries to help them, he too is rapidly losing his sources of income (the details are vague: we don’t really ever know where their wealth came from previously). Her brother, after being repatriated from the former war zone, spends most of his time drunk; he becomes addicted to opium, takes any money they have, and often goes to Tokyo where he has disreputable friends with artistic careers but little moral character.

Choices are limited, and Kazuko descends into self-destructive behavior, attempting to become the mistress of a dissolute artist who maintains a Bohemian and corrupt lifestyle. Quite a bit of the short novel consists of the long letters she writes to this man, attempting to explain her position in society (or her lack of a position). It’s a very dark book, with an even darker ending. Her efforts to find herself are very fascinating, and I haven’t really captured the spirit of the book in these few paragraphs. It’s a portrait of a person deprived of the environment she had been accustomed to expect. At the same time it is a portrait of a society that has changed drastically and for the complacent aristocracy, has changed catastrophically.

My impression, based on both The Setting Sun and The Devil’s Flute Murders, is that Japan was lucky to be rid of the idle and unproductive nobles, who were effectively living as self-indulgent parasites. This impression is based solely on the two books, and I think this was the intention of both authors. It’s amazing to imagine this long-ago and very alien era compared to dynamic and democratic life in Japan today — if I am not misinformed! I wonder if the few nations on earth that still maintain such an idle class would be lucky if some catastrophe had rid them of these parasites. Finally, I wonder about our own billionaires and how their excessive lifestyle will be able to continue!

Review © 2023 mae sander.

More Murakami

What I’ve been reading: Two early novels by Haruki Murakami.

After the Quake, published as a collection in 2002.

South of the Border, West of the Sun, first published in Japanese in 1992.

I enjoyed them, but don’t feel like writing about them.

His style changed a great deal in his later works.

 

Fiction and NonFiction: Haruki Murakami

“I’m sometimes asked, ‘Why don’t you write novels with characters the same age as yourself?’ I’m in my mid-sixties now, in 2015, so the question is, why don’t you write stories with characters that age? Why don’t you write about the lives of those kinds of people? Isn’t that a natural job of a writer? But there’s one thing I don’t understand, which is, why is it necessary that a writer write about people the same age as him? Why is that a ‘natural job’? As I said before, one of the things I enjoy the most about writing novels is being able to become anyone I want. So why should I, on my own, give up such a wonderful right? When I wrote Kafka on the Shore I was a little past fifty years old, yet I made the main character a fifteen-year-old boy. And all the time I was writing I felt like I was a fifteen-year-old. Of course these weren’t the ‘feelings’ a present-day fifteen-year-old boy would be feeling. Instead I transferred the feelings I had back when I was fifteen onto a fictional ‘present.’” — Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation, p. 164-165.

 

Novelist as a Vocation is a collection of essays by Haruki Murakami about why he writes, how he writes, how he interacts with publishers and translators, and the development, in general, of his craft as a novelist. Originally published in Japanese in 2015, this interesting work has just been translated and published here; some of the essays have been published in American magazines recently, as well. (Earlier this month, I wrote about one excerpt about how he creates characters, here.)

Murakami’s qualifications as a novelist as he sees them? He doesn’t present them as all that amazing:

“The first time I sat down to write a novel, nothing came to mind—I was completely stumped. I hadn’t been through a war like my parents, or endured the postwar chaos and hunger of the generation directly above me. I had no experience of revolution (I had experienced a kind of ersatz revolution but didn’t want to write about that), nor had I undergone any form of brutal abuse or discrimination that I could remember. Instead I had grown up in a typical middle-class home in a peaceful suburban community, where I suffered no particular want, and although my life had been far from perfect, neither was it steeped in misfortune (in relative terms I was fortunate). In other words, I had spent a mundane and nondescript youth. My grades weren’t the greatest, but they weren’t the worst, either. There was nothing, in short, that I felt absolutely compelled to write about. I possessed some measure of desire to express myself, but had no intrinsic topic at hand. As a result, until I turned twenty-nine I never considered writing a novel of my own. I lacked material, I thought, as well as the talent to create something without it. I was someone who could only read novels. And read them I did, piles and piles of them, never supposing for a moment that I could write one.” (p. 81)

A few days ago, I read through this recently-published book of essays. After reading about the creation of the novels he wrote, I decided to go back to reread some that I have enjoyed in the past. I started with Kafka on the Shore, a very complex book that weaves among two sets of characters. As is usual with Murakami, magical realism is the genre of this book, so the two sets of characters are linked by inexplicable forces. Having read so many of his books, I did not expect everything to be explained, and not having this expectation made it much more readable! 

The mysterious power of music (especially Beethoven’s Archduke trio) is an impressive part of the atmospheric tale, as well as a man who can talk to cats, a woman who wrote a mystic song and then disappeared for years and who appears as a ghost while she’s still alive; a stone that links to a mysterious “entrance;” a strange episode where a number of children fall asleep, and one never regains his former identity… there’s so much mystery. Two non-human apparition-like characters claim to be Colonel Sanders and Jack Daniels lead a bit of bizarre humor to the weirdness. 

I find it striking that in talking about his writing process and style, Murakami basically did not mention the magical elements in his novels. Nor did he discuss another very special feature of his work that always fascinates me: the use of detailed food descriptions as part of his narrative. In Kafka on the Shore, the characters frequently stop for meals at low-end diners or small inexpensive restaurants or cook from a pantry that’s been stocked for their use. The author always tells you exactly what they ate. For breakfast one morning it’s “rice, miso soup with eggplant, dried mackerel, and pickles,” for example. Or foods like eel, chicken-and-egg over rice, or omelet with “salt-grilled mackerel, miso soup with shellfish, pickled turnips, seasoned spinach, seaweed.” (p. 359, p. 189, p. 209)

Unfortunately, Murakami never mentions the rather famous food-centered feature of his narratives in his rather general descriptions of how he writes. I liked the parts of Novelist as a Vocation where he talks about his history as a writer. I was less enthusiastic about the parts where he gave advice. And I wish he had discussed some of the ways that he uses food to create characters and to ground the magical side of the work in a baser reality.

Blog post © 2022 mae sander.

 

Creativity by Haruki Murakami

"Most of the time, the characters who appear in my novels naturally emerge from the flow of the story. I almost never decide in advance that I’ll present a particular type of character. As I write, a kind of axis forms that makes possible the appearance of certain characters, and I go ahead and fit one detail after another into place, like iron scraps attaching to a magnet. And in this way an overall picture of a person materializes. Afterward I often think that certain details resemble those of a real person, but most of the process happens automatically. I think I almost unconsciously pull information and various fragments from the cabinets in my brain and then weave them together." -- Haruki Murakami

Reading fiction is one of my favorite pastimes, and Haruki Murakami is one of my favorite authors, so I was fascinated to read his account of how he creates his characters. I find it hard to imagine myself into his brilliant brain or into the process he describes. In the article, titled "Where My Characters Come From: I don't choose them, they choose me," published last week in The Atlantic, he reveals a situation that's totally beyond me -- and fascinating, especially observations like this:

"When a novel is on the right track, the characters take on a life of their own, the story moves forward by itself, and the novelist ends up in a very happy situation, just writing down what he sees happening in front of him. And sometimes a character takes the novelist by the hand, leading the way to an unexpected destination."

Editions of Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase, which I've enjoyed reading more than once.

In his article, Murakami describes how his feelings about people contribute to his creativity with the characters in his novels, and how his process evolved over decades of writing novels. To me, this is amazing. In his early novels, for example, he wrote in the first person, and he mainly did not give names to his characters:

"Why couldn’t I give them actual names? I don’t know the answer. All I can say is that I felt embarrassed about assigning people names. I felt that somebody like me endowing others (even characters I made up) with names seemed kind of phony. Maybe in the beginning I felt embarrassed, too, by the whole act of writing novels. It was like laying my naked heart out for everyone to see."

Murakami talks in detail about some of his books and how the characters came to life while he was writing. I can't imagine ever being able to do what he does, despite the fact that he writes some of his article as advice to aspiring writers. I find it exciting to read what he says, and impossible to imagine doing it. I'm in the middle of reading Dickens' David Copperfield, which has scores of vivid characters, and I wonder if Dickens' experience in writing was anything like the process Murakami documents here.

I especially liked Murakami's final sentence:

"Whenever I begin writing a new novel, I get excited, wondering what kinds of people I’m going to meet next."

I'm looking forward to reading whatever novel this process will bring next! 

Blog post © 2022 mae sander 

 

“First Person Singular: Stories” by Haruki Murakami

“My mother had drummed it into me from childhood that you shouldn’t bother people at home when it was time to have a meal. For better or for worse, this had seeped into my being and become a reflexive habit.” — Murakami, First Person Singular, (p. 59)

Haruki Murakami — always a favorite. I couldn’t resist this small collection of stories (published last week) even though some of the stories weren’t new to me. I had read around half of them when originally published in the New Yorker. 

I enjoyed reading or re-reading them, especially the one about the elderly monkey that could speak, wore clothes, worked as a bath-house attendant in a traditional Japanese inn, and stole the names of women that he would have liked to link up with. In other words, here’s Murakami’s habit of starting with something unbelievable and building it into something uncanny. 

Murakami has been a Beatles fan for a long time (remember his book titled Norwegian Wood). The story titled “With the Beatles” contains memories of Beatles music from the narrator’s adolescence, when the Beatles were releasing their famous songs. But it’s a very sad story about growing old — to summarize it quite crudely. And it doesn’t even have any magical realism, just sadness. The strangest thing is that I recognized my own past just a bit in the story, which I usually don’t do in Murakami. For example, the sentence at the top of this review about his mother’s principle of leaving when someone is about to eat: my mother drummed exactly the same thing into my head when I was growing up.

The New York Times reviewer, David Means, writes of this collection:

“Whatever you want to call Murakami’s work — magic realism, supernatural realism — he writes like a mystery tramp, exposing his global readership to the essential and cosmic (yes, cosmic!) questions that only art can provoke: What does it mean to carry the baggage of identity? Who is this inside my head in relation to the external, so-called real world? Is the person I was years ago the person I am now? Can a name be stolen by a monkey?”

Murakami’s novels are often too long. This collection is too short. 

Review © 2021 mae sander. 

“The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”

"When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta." 

Haruki Murakami's books are fascinating and very weird! For a long time I have thought I had read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (I have owned it since its publication), but when I read it this week, I did not remember anything at all -- not even the first sentence, which I quoted above. Of course this sentence fit my expectations, as Murakami novels are always full of food descriptions, especially descriptions of the central character cooking for himself in his kitchen. 

The surreal atmosphere that one also expects from Murakami combines here with a huge number of characters, sub-plots, flashbacks to World War II in Manchuria, and very strange violence. Most of the book is narrated by a thirty-year-old unemployed paralegal worker named Toru Okada, with occasional quotations of letters from some of his acquaintances, and then with memories in the heads of these people. At first, he seems to live in the usual, normal world, looking for his lost cat, breaking up with his wife... but slowly this tips into a fantasy world that merges dreams and half-real events. His fantasy world and dreams may be shared with others (and may not) -- just what you expect from Murakami. Bewildering.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, published 1994

Many details seem important -- but I'm not sure what they mean. For example, Cutty Sark whiskey is mentioned often. Why? I don't know. Another repeated image: the singing of the wind-up bird, which perhaps is a real bird that sings a creaky song like a toy being wound up. A wind-up bird appears in the gardens of the protagonist's neighborhood, and also in a few other places where maybe only some people can hear it. The overture to The Thieving Magpie is also heard at various times during the book besides in the opening paragraphs. Quite a few other similar details recur with a meaningful vibe, but I was never sure if a specific meaning was intended in the midst of constant dreams and magical transformations of reality. Or if it was just the creation of unreality.

Little reflections add up to a big, if confused picture of modern life for the protagonist. A few examples:

"Does money have a name?" ... Money had no name, of course. And if it did have a name, it would no longer be money. What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability." (p. 355)

"Something strange was happening to my sense of time. I decided not to look at my watch for a while. Maybe I didn't have anything else to do, but it wasn't healthy to be looking at a watch this often.... The pain was like what I had felt when I quit smoking. From the moment I decided to give up thinking about time, my mind could think of nothing else. It was a kind of contradiction, a schizoid split. The more I tried to forget about time, the more I was compelled to think about it." (p. 265)

"I simply did what I was told. This reminded me of several so-called art films I had seen in college. Movies like that never explained what was going on. Explanations were rejected as some kind of evil that could only destroy the films' 'reality'; That was one way of thought, one way to look at things, no doubt, but it felt strange for me as a real, live human being, to enter such a world." (p. 380)

I think I like some of Murakami's other works better, such as A Wild Sheep Chase, Dance Dance Dance,  Killing Commendatore, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage, and some short stories. I think they end in a slightly more satisfying way, for one thing, maybe not always. I've written better reviews of some of them. Somehow I can't quite get my head around this one. 

Anyway, I tried listening mindfully to Rossini's familiar overture to The Thieving Magpie and I don't see quite why it's perfect for cooking spaghetti. However, the Youtube recording that I listened to (link) had a long discussion by 27 responders in the comment section, which began this way:

ivanaa b3 years ago

why would this music be good for cooking spagetti?

This must mean something about Murakami's popularity! And about how some people spell spaghetti.

Blog post © 2021 mae sander for mae food dot blog spot dot com.

Two Japanese Stories

I don’t really see any relationship of the
cover image to the novel.
Publication date is 2012.

Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami is a strange novel. You could view it as simple tale of love between a woman in her late thirties — the narrator — and her vastly older former high-school teacher, whom she calls Sensei, that is, a very respectful word for teacher. But it’s really more of a story of loneliness, with a sense of not belonging in the modern world while not longing for any other world in particular. And a story of a middle-aged woman who feels that she's still a child.

Almost all the interactions in the book take place in a bar that serves Japanese food, and the food plays a big role. As a non-Japanese reader I suspect I am missing a lot of the subtlety of the many traditional dishes and their meaning. For my particular interests the fascination with food that the characters show in this book is wonderful.

A few of the many food descriptions include these:

Sipping saké side by side in the dimly lit bar while we used our chopsticks to carve away at either chilled or warm tofu, depending on the season— that was how we usually saw each other. (Kindle Locations 167-168).

“One kimchi pork special,” Sensei said to the girl at the counter. He prompted me with his eyes, “And for you?” There were too many things to choose from on the menu— it was bewildering. Bibimbap with egg appealed to me at first, but I decided I didn’t want a fried egg, which was the only option. (Kindle Locations 205-207).

That night we drank only beer. We had edamame, grilled eggplant, and octopus marinated in wasabi. (Kindle Location 302).  

Many of the foods and preparations were entirely unfamiliar to me. The following passages, for example, are a bit baffling. I could look up all the Japanese names, but I haven't done so.

Daikon, tsumire, and beef tendons, please, Sensei ordered. Not to be outdone, I followed with Chikuwabu, konnyaku noodles, and I’ll also have some daikon. The young man next to us asked for kombu and hanpen. We left off our conversation about fate and past lives while we focused on eating our oden for the moment. (Kindle Locations 935-938).

The flying fish’s head shone on the plate. Its wide-open eyes were limpid. With renewed determination, I seized a piece of the fish with my chopsticks and dunked it in gingered soy sauce. The firm flesh had a slightly peculiar flavor. I sipped from my glass of cold saké and looked around the bar. Today’s menu was written in chalk on the blackboard. Minced bonito. Flying fish. New potatoes. Broad beans. Boiled pork. If Sensei were here, he would definitely order the bonito and the broad beans first. (Kindle Locations 1294-1297).

Or a little familiar. like this reference to one of my favorite condiments, ponzu sauce:

Dipped in ponzu sauce, the sweetness of the octopus melted in your mouth with the ponzu’s citrus aroma, creating a flavor that was quite sublime. (Kindle Locations 1693-1694).

Sometimes there are long conversations about food, such as this:

“There are many varieties of mushrooms.”
“I see.”
“For instance, you can pick murasaki shimeji mushrooms and roast them on the spot. Drizzled with soy sauce— my goodness, so delicious!”
“Yes.”
“And iguchi mushrooms are quite savory as well.”
“I see.”
As our conversation went on, the owner of the bar had poked his head out from his side of the counter. (Kindle Locations 441-445). 

I've only included the food descriptions that characterize the narrator's relationship with Sensei. She has a brief relationship with another man, one her own age, and they also talk about food and eat together -- but the food is entirely different.

In sum, Strange Weather in Tokyo is an appealing and rather complex novel that masquerades as simple. I think Hiromi Kawakami is an interesting author, and I hope to read one of her other books.

The other story I read is  from the current New Yorker, "Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey.” It's by the very much more famous writer Haruki Murakami. It's a coincidence that I read it immediately after finishing Strange Weather in Tokyo because the two stories had some eerie similarities. I was especially intrigued because both stories included a character wearing an unexpected t-shirt printed with the motto:

“I♥NY” 

In Strange Weather in Tokyo the wearer was Sensei, who normally wore clothing appropriate for the retired high school teacher that he was (and teachers dress pretty formally in Japan). In "Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey” it was the monkey who wore the shirt. The monkey also served as a bath-house attendant and shared beer and Japanese snacks with the narrator, who seems to have been a fictional version of Murakami. If you are a Murakami fan, a monkey who does things like this will not surprise you -- in fact, I think you will love the story.

I♥Murakami!

This review © 2020 by mae sander for mae food dot blog spot dot com.

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.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki

Having just read and enjoyed Haruki Murakami's latest novel, Killing Commendatore, I decided to reread Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his years of Pilgrimage (published in English in 2014). While superficial similarities between events and characters in the two books are numerous, I feel as if it's a totally different type of book.

Reading it just after Killing Commendatore makes me realize that the magical realism in most of Murakami's books is what makes me so enthusiastic about them. Magical realism is absolutely not a part of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki. Rather, it's a totally realistic novel about a man who lacks something... who seems to be waiting for life to happen to him... to seem unable to seize the moment when something might happen to him. (Reminds me a little of Henry James, but that's not important now.)

I've noted how wonderful many details are in Murakami's books, especially food details (though I'm just more aware of food details). Tsukuru's diet is mostly plain:

"When he felt hungry he stopped by the local supermarket and bought an apple or some vegetables. Sometimes he ate plain bread, washing it down with milk straight from the carton. When it was time to sleep, he’d gulp down a glass of whiskey as if it were a dose of medicine." (p. 3). 

It's often someone else, like his girlfriend Sarah, who eats the good-sounding food while he watches.

"The waiter brought over the lemon soufflé and espresso. Sara dug right in. Lemon soufflé seemed to have been the right choice after all. Tsukuru looked back and forth between Sara, as she ate, and the steam that rose from her espresso." (pp. 233-234). 

At the very end of the book, he finally prepares a whole meal, which I think is a faint signal that he's becoming more than colorless:

"He grilled salmon with herbs in the oven, drizzled lemon over it, and ate it with potato salad. Tofu and scallion miso soup rounded out the meal. He had half a cold beer and watched the news on TV. Then he lay down on the sofa and read." (p. 345)

Every character in the novel seems to have some color word in their names, beginning with Tsukuru's four best friends in high school. At one point, there's a conversation in which a character is noted as especially vivid (this is in a story told by a friend of Tsukuru, not about anyone he actually knows) -- has a "certain glow." And the meaning of this vividness is that the character is suited to choose an early and certain death -- though he doesn't choose it. That's complicated, but I think it points to how colorless Tsukuru is. (p. 92-94)

In this section, there's another clue in a conversation between these people in the story his friend tells:

“Every person has their own color. Did you know that?” he [the character in the story] said. 

“No, I didn’t.” 

“Each individual has their own unique color, which shines faintly around the contours of their body. Like a halo. Or a backlight. I’m able to see those colors clearly.” (p. 93). 

I keep looking for clues about what the real subject of this book might be. The title of the book comes from Franz Liszt’s Years of Pilgrimage Suite -- Tsukuru is somewhat obsessed with one vignette from the suite, called "Le mal du pays," which could be translated homesickness, or maybe nostalgia or longing, and it's this feeling that most characterizes him. It's a kind of colorless feeling, which doesn't inspire him to much in the way of action, or lend him any vividness. It's not a bad novel, but maybe Murakami just succeeded too well in making a colorless character.

I still like Haruki Murakami: Killing Commendatore

Killing Commendatore, the latest novel by Haruki Murakami, was published last week. Despite many similarities to Murakami's earlier novels, the plot and characters surprised me as compelling and fascinating.

The narrator (whose name we do not learn) is an ordinary man to whom out-of-the-ordinary things happen. Elements of magical realism are strong here: there are events that the reader is expected to believe in the course of the novel, but which are impossible in the world that the rest of us inhabit. The narrator presents them in a completely matter-of-fact way: they happened. Slowly the narrative moves from realistic description to magical and uncanny.  The mysterious parts of the novel are deeply connected to the Japanese experience of World War II, but I don't feel that it's an allegory. It just happens.

Matter-of-fact details are the core of what I like in this and other Murakami novels. His powers of observation are amazing, and when he tells you what he sees (or his narrator sees) you can grasp that it's something that has always stood before you but you never quite saw it before. Or heard, smelled, tasted, felt, or feared it.

The principal identity of the narrator is that he's a portrait painter. He describes with amazing clarity how he evaluates a subject for a portrait, sketches a likeness, prepares his canvas for a portrait, and how he completes the work. We also share the narrator's discoveries about the life and artistic accomplishments of the famous painter who owns the house where the narrator is living: a kind of a reverie on the differences between Japanese and Western painting.

The narrator hears and describes the sensations he gets when listening to grand opera (such as Mozart's Don Giovanni, in which the Commendatore is a character) or to jazz recorded on LPs and played on an old stereo system. He notices the different sounds that car doors make when the driver closes them -- sounds from a Jaguar, an old Peugeot, and others. He's intrigued by a mysterious rustling in an attic that turns out to be a horned owl making its way in and out of a broken vent.

Though the narrator says he doesn't care much about food, he describes it often (though not in as much detail as in other Murakami books). He notes, for instance, that his estranged wife's name, Yuzu, is the same as the name of the citrus fruit. When he's bothered, we learn how he absent-mindedly, of necessity, eats things like Ritz crackers with catsup or vegetables with mayo. If he's less bothered, he shops and cooks:

"When it began to get dark, I went to the kitchen, cracked open a can of beer, and began preparing dinner. In the oven, I broiled a piece of yellowtail that I'd marinated in sake lees, then sliced pickles, made a cucumber-and-seaweed salad with vinegar, and fixed some miso soup with radishes and deep-fried tofu. Then I sat down and ate my silent meal." (pp. 364-365) 

Although the narrator can remember what he ate at various places, he says he has no ability to recall the flavors of his food -- he's a painter, he says, so he can only recollect exactly what something looked like. In the course of the novel we see many examples of this memory and how it serves his portrait painting. (p. 292)

Sometimes the narrator notes pleasant aromas or putrid smells, but often, he remarks on the absence of smells. Certain locations strike him as creepy because they have no smell. Another of his sensations is a vivid claustrophobia, associated with the long-ago death of his little sister and his unending grief for her. He notes the details of clothing that characterize a man or a woman, and describes their facial features, beauty or lack of beauty, and body types (though I have trouble creating my own mental image from these descriptions). He explains what it's like to look through powerful binoculars. He evokes the strong visual element of Japanese landscapes: the mountains, the sea coast, the deep forest.

Several times, the reader is told of the significance of the Japanese characters with which people's names are written -- this may be more meaningful to one who knows Japanese. One example:

"My name is Menshiki," says an important character when introducing himself to the narrator. "The men is written with the character in menzeiten -- the one that means 'avoidance' -- and the shiki is the character iro, for 'color.' ... 'Avoiding colors' is what it means. ... An unusual name. Other than my relatives I rarely run across anyone who shares it." (p. 80)

Is there a possible connection to Murakami's 2014 novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage? I'm not sure about this and many other parallels to his earlier novels. I wonder, in fact, what it all means. Details. Details!

What Other People Say about Killing Commendatore

Up to this point, I have presented my very subjective description of how I reacted to descriptions and characters in Killing Commendatore. I wrote the above account without having read a single review of the novel. Now for some quotes that I found after what I've written so far:

In the Guardian: "Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami review – a rambling voyage of discovery" reviewer Xan Brooks writes --

"Who are the spirits? Who are the real people? The hero’s married lover amounts to little more than a dispenser of expository dialogue and sexual favours (indirectly responsible for the book being classed as “class two indecent” in Hong Kong). Worse, the gnomic, fantastical Commendatore turns out to be a more rounded character than Menshiki’s reputed daughter, a preternaturally self-possessed 13-year-old who speaks as though she’s been fed through Google Translate. Significantly, Murakami’s painter likes to leave some of his portraits unfinished. One has the sense that the author does, too. 

"Paradoxically, it’s this incompleteness that this beguiling, confounding – and yes, sometimes infuriating – novel is concerned with: the sense that everybody is unfinished, a work in progress, and that any clear-cut resolution is therefore a lie. Murakami’s mountainside setting is full of wormholes and blind spots, arrivals and exits. His plot, such as it is, unfolds as the narrator experiences it, which means that it’s thick with loose ends and cul‑de-sacs. His character is casting about for the correct way forward. He’s attempting to script a fresh adventure that will give his battered life meaning and distract him from his divorce, so his story sets forth as a tale of creative rebirth. Then it switches lanes to become a study of male friendship; then a haunted house story; then a father-daughter mystery yarn. Each route is valid but it can only take him so far. 'In this real world of ours,' he explains, 'nothing remains the same for ever.'"

Hari Kunzru at the New York Times wrote a review titled "In Haruki Murakami’s New Novel, a Painter’s Inspiration Is Supernatural." He points to some of the influences and parallels to other Japanese culture:

"The 18th-century ghost stories of Ueda Akinari (most familiar outside Japan through Mizoguchi’s 1953 film “Ugetsu”) and the demonological compendiums of Toriyama Sekien hover in the background of “Killing Commendatore,” as they do in so much contemporary Japanese horror and fantasy, notably the anime of Hayao Miyazaki (“Spirited Away,” “My Neighbor Totoro”). Though “Killing Commendatore” does not address authenticity in specifically national-cultural terms, the novel is preoccupied with the possibility of making art infused with depth or spirit. The mechanical painter of commissioned portraits comes under the influence of the man whose house he’s living in, and is moved to make works with real expressive power. 'What I’d created was, at heart, a painting I’d done for my own sake.'"

"Haruki Murakami turns his gaze toward middle age" is the title of the review by Charles Finch in the Washington Post. Finch writes of the book's "exhilarating portrayal of how it feels to make art. In long, powerful passages, Murakami describes painting with the intensity of what seems like just-concealed autobiography." The reviewer connects connects this to the way that "only in the calm madness of his magical realism can Murakami truly capture one of his obsessions, the usually ineffable yearning that drives a person to make art."