Let me disadvantage myself from the start–me the author, you the reader. I have rarely enjoyed reading. There, now you’ll have some leverage over me as you skim these pages, since I’m asking you to read what I have to say when I only read others’ work as a chore. I make myself do it and even then I fail, giving way to the faster pleasures of life always beckoning from the corner of my eye. There have been exceptions to this rule, of course, times when I read with genuine love and interest–recently Knausgaard’s first volume of you know what, couldn’t be bothered to start the second. It will come in time. I can boast a few real bouts of obsession with Kafka, Kundera, Murakami, and a few other writers who inexplicably tighten the loins of depressed men in their twenties.
One such bout has just begun, kicking into gear last week when I picked up South of the Border, West of the Sun from the library, only to read the majority of the little black book on a pdf at work. It was Murakami’s first novel while living in the United States, or something like that, probing loneliness, suicide, women from the past, unsatisfied bourgeois men, and a jazz bar. Another Murakami book. Deeply auto-biographical, you must think.
Murakami, like no other, always reinvigorates something dead within me–it’s most dead when I have the least control over myself, scrolling before bed, smoking too much. I can intellectually justify these periods of empty consumption by styling myself as a Mishima acolyte, marveling at myself in the mirror without reservation much like Gen Z can enjoy an absolutely empty work of art so long as it’s explicitly in tune with their own ideological bent: the hard work of consumption is already taken care of, so we can simply give in to what’s easy.
And Murakami is indeed easy to read, in style and content–but with something especially appealing for the American in me. He doesn’t have to try to attract American readers. His sensibilities, as a ‘lost soul’ from a lost place, Americanized to the point of cultural cannibalism, are impossibly close to our own. More American than we could ever be, since we would love to see ourselves as an outsider would, as if we were visiting this strange land for the first time. His aimless beaches, chainsmoking young women and sexually stifled boys, they’re all realer to us Americans than anything we could dream up ourselves.
Just as his writing has inspired me to read again on more than one occasion, his sexually stifled boys have injected me with virility at times when I was sure I’d ‘dried up,’ so to speak. Ah, as an introspective young man down on his carnal luck, I had convinced myself that I was doomed to celibacy for the rest of my days–who can say they haven’t–and that my dick would only work in my own company. I had tragically imposed a case of bad dick upon myself–this was some time ago, now.
Only real desire can move a soul from this stupor: real interest in a real person, not some Instagram shit, but desire strong enough to make us forget our inhibitions. And while Murakami alone can’t arouse this desire, he asks if I can recall once feeling this way. I am without a doubt aroused at the description of sex in a great many works, but Murakami offers a certain feeling of adolescence and confusion. Some readers find this quality to be predatory. On the contrary, I don’t find that his sexual desire is directed towards young women, but, in the truly auto-biographical fashion, Murakami longs for the desire he felt when he himself was young, raw, and full of feeling. And maybe this can explain why his descriptions of unconcerned bureaucrats sting so deeply, since they can be neither satisfied nor frustrated with life when they’ve been so emptied of it by middle age (more on this in a moment). This is how it feels when I read these passages in Murakami, how it feels to be erotically reawakened: frankly, a shiny new body will not make my meaningless life complete. After all, there is a reason that I’ve forgotten! A reason that I need to wake up! There is no continuity in love, there is nothing which can both satisfy me and make my present life complete. Real reawakening forces me to recall the rawness of youth, forces me to identify the meaninglessness of the present which has emptied me to this point.
I came across the following tweet some time ago. The pain of being misunderstood has stuck with me. From @racecard_driver on 9/23/22:
what if Murakami was a totally normal dude and it was just his English translator who was really weird about women
ha ha
Let’s move on.
How many of his characters passively consume entire worlds of classical and jazz records? I choose to see myself in these characters, although in truth I can’t be bothered to sit through that kind of discography. Sure, maybe I have a few records under my belt, even fewer albums. But what’s the real difference between us? How am I to believe that they’ve amassed so many? The reason is the true source of their dreaminess: their essential boredom. A believable yet unattainable contentedness allows a select few of his actors to remain charmingly stagnant, at least until some greater force moves them into action like a marionette.
There’s nothing easier to read as an American–all the pieces of ourselves we find in Murakami. We could analyze his Hemingway-factor, writing in simplified English before translating back to Japanese in order to cut away the fat. We could linger on his obsession with the crime genre, or on postwar Japan more broadly. But it’s this otherworldly contentedness, a little postmodern, which always brings me back to him, pointing an accusatory finger at those of us who are numb to life.