Equivocality

This is the second Murakami book I’ve read. I found this book intriguing, certainly, and it kept my attention, but it was also a little empty for me somehow, not quite as substantive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. Imaginative, but a little too predictable I guess. In particular, the way his characters think or say very deep things in sometimes very trite words annoys me. To take a concrete example, see first few pages of book. “A dark, omnipresent pool of water,” he writes. Or see the climatic moment when Kafka forgives his mother. “Mother, you say, I forgive you. And with those words, audibly, the frozen part of your heart dissolves.” Of course, both of these lines were actually spoken by a character called The Boy Named Crow, who is “a theorizing crow,” who perhaps has license to say such melodramatic things.

Yet this spirit overlaps with something I do like about the book, the central dreaminess of it, best summed up when someone quotes Goethe: “Everything’s a metaphor.” (Now I’m going to have to read Goethe. And Kafka.) The love scene between Kafka and Miss Saeki on the beach is very much in this vein, and absolutely beautiful, Murakami at his finest.

“What are you thinking about?” Miss Saeki asks me.

“About going to Spain,” I reply.

“What are you going to do there?”

“Eat some delicious paella.”

“That’s all?”

“And fight in the Spanish Civil War.”

“That ended more than 60 years ago.”

“I know,” I tell her. “Lorca died, and Hemmingway survived.”

“But you want to be a part of it.”

I nod. “Yep. Blow up bridges and stuff.”

“And fall in love with Ingrid Bergman.”

“But in reality I’m here in Takamatsu. And I’m in love with you.”

“That’s your tough luck.”

I put my arm around her.

You put your arm around her.

She leans against you. A long interval of time passes.

Did you know that I did this self same thing a long time ago? Right in this same place?”

“I know,” you tell her.

“How do you know that?” Miss Saeki asks, and looks into your eyes.

“I was there then.”

“Blowing up bridges?”

“Yes, I was there, blowing up bridges.”

“Metaphorically?”

“Of course.”

You hold her in yout arms, draw her close, kiss her. You can feel the strength deserting her body.

“We’re all dreaming, aren’t we?” she says.

All of us are dreaming.

“Why did you have to die?”

“I couldn’t help it,” you reply.

…

She leaves behind her a damp pillow, wet with her tears. You touch the warmth with your hand and watch the sky outside gradually lighten. Far away a crow cars. The earth slow keeps on turning. But beyond any of those details of the real, there are dreams. And everyone’s living in them.

Of course, all this works even better after Murakami’s setup, all the previous discussion of metaphor and the right to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and the complicated backstory of these two characters. But the point remains: he manages to make “All of us are dreaming” beautiful. He does the Cameron Crowe trick and makes puts the meaning back into the trite, makes us cry. Or at least me. For this reason, I feel I have a lot to learn from this author.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 at 5:57 am and is filed under Book Reports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.