Dreaming on the page with Haruki Murakami
November 6, 2005 | 12:00am
THIS WEEK’S WINNER
Although Bernice Roldan, 26, works in corporate communications during office hours, her heart is in literature 24/7. A Creative Writing graduate of UP, her short stories, poetry, and essays have appeared in various national publications. She has attended the national writers’ workshops in Dumaguete, Baguio, and Iligan as a fellow for fiction. In 2004, she won in the Philippine Graphic-Nick Joaquin Literary Awards.
I started reading Haruki Murakami after I graduated in 2000 when a former classmate told me about his favorite Japanese writer: "He can write for pages about ironing shirts, and you’ll still end up riveted."
I borrowed his copy of Murakami’s short story collection The Elephant Vanishes and haven’t turned back since. I actually found it a hit-and-miss collection, not knowing what to make of the more mind-bending, bizarre stories. But most of it, like the delightful, modern sort-of-fairy-tale On Seeing the 100 Percent Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning, had me hooked. It was all so different from the ponderous, socially realistic prose of 20th century American writers like Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck et al. that my professors required me to read and dissect in literature classes back in college.
In Murakami’s stories, normal characters usually find themselves in abnormal situations. Here is a writer who takes huge risks and shows you the possibilities in fiction when you decide to go without the constraints of time and space. Here are narratives that are surreal, dreamlike, quirky, funny, but also deceptively philosophical and disarmingly honest. For instance, the mild-mannered male narrator in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, after coming off the strangest elevator ride when reporting for a techie side job, finds himself ruminating on women while following a plump young lady down the office corridor:
Around young, beautiful, fat women, I am generally thrown into confusion. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because an image of their dietary habits naturally congeals in my mind. When I see a goodly sized woman, I have visions of her mopping up that last drop of cream sauce with bread, wolfing down that final sprig of watercress garnish from her plate. And once that happens, it’s like acid corroding metal: scenes of her eating spread through my head and I lose control.
Your plain fat woman is fine. Fat women are like clouds in the sky. They’re just floating there, nothing to do with me. But your young, beautiful, fat woman is another story. I am demanded to assume a posture toward her. I could end up sleeping with her. That is probably where all the confusion comes in.
Suddenly, reading was enjoyable, stimulating, and compelling again, and I found a way out of the juvenilia I was churning out then, which was starting to bore me to tears. As translator Jay Rubin put it in a roundtable e-mail discussion in December 2000 with fellow Murakami translator Philip Gabriel and editor Gary Fisketjon from Knopf publishing house: "I just knew that I was not likely to find another writer anywhere in the world who spoke to me so directly and so personally, so I jumped into his world without the least hesitation."
Murakami wrote on a number of themes without losing his voice: gut-wrenching narratives that hinted at Japanese guilt after World War II (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), screwball mysteries involving Sheep Men and complicated women who had a tendency to vanish (A Wild Sheep Chase). He wrote a novel bordering on sci-fi that was sharp and refreshing enough to draw in even those who weren’t into sci-fi (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World). In Norwegian Wood, he is able to pull off an anomaly: a realistic coming-of-age love story that has touches of nostalgia and offbeat humor, and still has teeth. Now with yellowed pages and a slightly bent front flap, it’s one of the first Murakami novels I bought and remains one of my favorites. It’s also the Murakami book that everyone in Japan has read, having sold more than two million copies. The overwhelming media fuss that followed the book’s release drove Murakami to seek refuge in Europe and the US, where he lived with his wife for a number of years.
Since discovering Murakami, I ended up buying all his works translated into English. But if I were, say, going on a long trip somewhere and could only bring a few of his books along, I’d choose A Wild Sheep Chase, Norwegian Wood, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Sputnik Sweetheart. These works don’t necessarily represent the breadth of his skill and vision. Three out of four of these novels feature complicated and/or vanishing women, three out of four also have abnormal scenarios happening to normal people. All of them include touches of offbeat humor, Western pop culture references, and have a youngish self-deprecating but good-hearted male narrator caught in the middle of it all.
I recognize that despite the various genres he has explored, Murakami has a tendency to repeat himself. But I have yet to encounter another writer who could bend my mind, deal a sharp blow to my heart, and cause me to laugh out loud like this in one sitting. As for the references to jazz, classical music, and the Beatles, French cuisine, spaghetti, and Cutty Sark whiskey, I’d have to agree with Murakami that ". . . Led Zeppelin, California Merlot, and Tom Cruise are all part of our daily lives. As a matter of fact one could say that, today, there’s a very natural exchange of information between the East and West, at least on a superficial level. We are variously stimulated by these differing points of view." Indeed, whether we think we have any say in this or not, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Harry Potter are as much a part of our lives as San Miguel Beer, Edsa II, and Hello Garci. The question of where to draw the line with regard to cultural influences has long since become negligible.
Some Murakami readers would probably not include Sputnik Sweetheart on their list of favorites. A slim novel that is partly a love story, partly a missing-person story, Sputnik Sweetheart doesn’t set out to break new ground, but it contains the best piece of advice I’ve ever come across for aspiring writers. It’s a quote that I summon whenever the dream sequences I manage to recall, or the concepts and bits of dialogue and images I’ve come across and filed away for story ideas, are now substantial enough for a new story. In Sputnik Sweetheart, the male narrator falls hopelessly for a special female friend who wears oversized dark glasses, reads Jack Kerouac, and aspires to be a novelist. One of their conversations in the first few pages of the novel goes like this:
Maybe I’m lacking something. Something you absolutely must have to be a novelist.
. . . . After a while I started to speak. "A long time ago in China there were cities with high walls surrounding them, with huge magnificent gates. The gates weren’t just doors for letting people in or out but had greater significance. People believed the city’s soul resided in the gates. . . It’s like Europe in the Middle Ages when people felt a city’s soul resided in its cathedral and central square. . . People would take carts out to old battlefields and gather the bleached bones that were buried there or that lay scattered about. . . At the entrance to the city they’d construct a huge gate and seal the bones inside. They hoped that by commemorating them this way the dead soldiers would guard their town. . . When the gate was finished they’d bring several dogs over to it, slit their throats, and sprinkle their blood on the gate. Only by mixing fresh blood with the dried-out bones would the ancient souls of the dead magically revive."
Sumire waited silently for me to go on.
Writing novels is much the same. You gather up bones and make your gate, but no matter how wonderful the gate might be, that alone doesn’t make it a living, breathing novel. A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.
In interviews, Murakami doesn’t always have clear-cut answers about his writing process or even his broad appeal. When asked what it was about Tokyo’s sarin gas attack in 1995 that compelled him to write his first book of nonfiction, the much-praised Underground, he says, "I can’t answer it very well. My most honest answer is that I felt that ‘I should do it.’ I wanted to listen to as many stories and in as much detail as possible from the people who were riding the subway that morning. I was certain that therein lay something worth knowing."
A friend of mine recently told me that according to Jenny Boully, his favorite American poet, writing is basically dreaming on the page. Writing, then, is infused with countless possibilities. And it seems that Murakami agrees. "Writing a story is like playing out your dreams while you are awake. It’s not about being inspired by your dreams, but about consciously manipulating the unconscious and creating your own dream."
Although Bernice Roldan, 26, works in corporate communications during office hours, her heart is in literature 24/7. A Creative Writing graduate of UP, her short stories, poetry, and essays have appeared in various national publications. She has attended the national writers’ workshops in Dumaguete, Baguio, and Iligan as a fellow for fiction. In 2004, she won in the Philippine Graphic-Nick Joaquin Literary Awards.
I started reading Haruki Murakami after I graduated in 2000 when a former classmate told me about his favorite Japanese writer: "He can write for pages about ironing shirts, and you’ll still end up riveted."
I borrowed his copy of Murakami’s short story collection The Elephant Vanishes and haven’t turned back since. I actually found it a hit-and-miss collection, not knowing what to make of the more mind-bending, bizarre stories. But most of it, like the delightful, modern sort-of-fairy-tale On Seeing the 100 Percent Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning, had me hooked. It was all so different from the ponderous, socially realistic prose of 20th century American writers like Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck et al. that my professors required me to read and dissect in literature classes back in college.
In Murakami’s stories, normal characters usually find themselves in abnormal situations. Here is a writer who takes huge risks and shows you the possibilities in fiction when you decide to go without the constraints of time and space. Here are narratives that are surreal, dreamlike, quirky, funny, but also deceptively philosophical and disarmingly honest. For instance, the mild-mannered male narrator in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, after coming off the strangest elevator ride when reporting for a techie side job, finds himself ruminating on women while following a plump young lady down the office corridor:
Around young, beautiful, fat women, I am generally thrown into confusion. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because an image of their dietary habits naturally congeals in my mind. When I see a goodly sized woman, I have visions of her mopping up that last drop of cream sauce with bread, wolfing down that final sprig of watercress garnish from her plate. And once that happens, it’s like acid corroding metal: scenes of her eating spread through my head and I lose control.
Your plain fat woman is fine. Fat women are like clouds in the sky. They’re just floating there, nothing to do with me. But your young, beautiful, fat woman is another story. I am demanded to assume a posture toward her. I could end up sleeping with her. That is probably where all the confusion comes in.
Suddenly, reading was enjoyable, stimulating, and compelling again, and I found a way out of the juvenilia I was churning out then, which was starting to bore me to tears. As translator Jay Rubin put it in a roundtable e-mail discussion in December 2000 with fellow Murakami translator Philip Gabriel and editor Gary Fisketjon from Knopf publishing house: "I just knew that I was not likely to find another writer anywhere in the world who spoke to me so directly and so personally, so I jumped into his world without the least hesitation."
Murakami wrote on a number of themes without losing his voice: gut-wrenching narratives that hinted at Japanese guilt after World War II (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), screwball mysteries involving Sheep Men and complicated women who had a tendency to vanish (A Wild Sheep Chase). He wrote a novel bordering on sci-fi that was sharp and refreshing enough to draw in even those who weren’t into sci-fi (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World). In Norwegian Wood, he is able to pull off an anomaly: a realistic coming-of-age love story that has touches of nostalgia and offbeat humor, and still has teeth. Now with yellowed pages and a slightly bent front flap, it’s one of the first Murakami novels I bought and remains one of my favorites. It’s also the Murakami book that everyone in Japan has read, having sold more than two million copies. The overwhelming media fuss that followed the book’s release drove Murakami to seek refuge in Europe and the US, where he lived with his wife for a number of years.
Since discovering Murakami, I ended up buying all his works translated into English. But if I were, say, going on a long trip somewhere and could only bring a few of his books along, I’d choose A Wild Sheep Chase, Norwegian Wood, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Sputnik Sweetheart. These works don’t necessarily represent the breadth of his skill and vision. Three out of four of these novels feature complicated and/or vanishing women, three out of four also have abnormal scenarios happening to normal people. All of them include touches of offbeat humor, Western pop culture references, and have a youngish self-deprecating but good-hearted male narrator caught in the middle of it all.
I recognize that despite the various genres he has explored, Murakami has a tendency to repeat himself. But I have yet to encounter another writer who could bend my mind, deal a sharp blow to my heart, and cause me to laugh out loud like this in one sitting. As for the references to jazz, classical music, and the Beatles, French cuisine, spaghetti, and Cutty Sark whiskey, I’d have to agree with Murakami that ". . . Led Zeppelin, California Merlot, and Tom Cruise are all part of our daily lives. As a matter of fact one could say that, today, there’s a very natural exchange of information between the East and West, at least on a superficial level. We are variously stimulated by these differing points of view." Indeed, whether we think we have any say in this or not, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Harry Potter are as much a part of our lives as San Miguel Beer, Edsa II, and Hello Garci. The question of where to draw the line with regard to cultural influences has long since become negligible.
Some Murakami readers would probably not include Sputnik Sweetheart on their list of favorites. A slim novel that is partly a love story, partly a missing-person story, Sputnik Sweetheart doesn’t set out to break new ground, but it contains the best piece of advice I’ve ever come across for aspiring writers. It’s a quote that I summon whenever the dream sequences I manage to recall, or the concepts and bits of dialogue and images I’ve come across and filed away for story ideas, are now substantial enough for a new story. In Sputnik Sweetheart, the male narrator falls hopelessly for a special female friend who wears oversized dark glasses, reads Jack Kerouac, and aspires to be a novelist. One of their conversations in the first few pages of the novel goes like this:
Maybe I’m lacking something. Something you absolutely must have to be a novelist.
. . . . After a while I started to speak. "A long time ago in China there were cities with high walls surrounding them, with huge magnificent gates. The gates weren’t just doors for letting people in or out but had greater significance. People believed the city’s soul resided in the gates. . . It’s like Europe in the Middle Ages when people felt a city’s soul resided in its cathedral and central square. . . People would take carts out to old battlefields and gather the bleached bones that were buried there or that lay scattered about. . . At the entrance to the city they’d construct a huge gate and seal the bones inside. They hoped that by commemorating them this way the dead soldiers would guard their town. . . When the gate was finished they’d bring several dogs over to it, slit their throats, and sprinkle their blood on the gate. Only by mixing fresh blood with the dried-out bones would the ancient souls of the dead magically revive."
Sumire waited silently for me to go on.
Writing novels is much the same. You gather up bones and make your gate, but no matter how wonderful the gate might be, that alone doesn’t make it a living, breathing novel. A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.
In interviews, Murakami doesn’t always have clear-cut answers about his writing process or even his broad appeal. When asked what it was about Tokyo’s sarin gas attack in 1995 that compelled him to write his first book of nonfiction, the much-praised Underground, he says, "I can’t answer it very well. My most honest answer is that I felt that ‘I should do it.’ I wanted to listen to as many stories and in as much detail as possible from the people who were riding the subway that morning. I was certain that therein lay something worth knowing."
A friend of mine recently told me that according to Jenny Boully, his favorite American poet, writing is basically dreaming on the page. Writing, then, is infused with countless possibilities. And it seems that Murakami agrees. "Writing a story is like playing out your dreams while you are awake. It’s not about being inspired by your dreams, but about consciously manipulating the unconscious and creating your own dream."
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