I noticed that Chapter 1 has these two phone calls bracketing the early part of the chapter. There is a call from Kumiko in between the two calls I’m speaking of. But the phone calls signal the start of the action, and in the second phone call, the caller memorably starts telling the narrator (“Mr. Toru Okada”) that she is wet, and moist, and she commands him to touch the lips, to open them. He hangs up in the middle of the sex scene she is painting for him; one imagines he is preventing himself from being aroused. That’s the steamy-as-hell hook for this clever-as-hell book (and I’ve got to say, a good-as-hell rhyme I just came up with about it). This woman who the narrator does not recognize, and she does not identify herself—but she knows him, proves it by telling him his age (he’s thirty “and two months”), and asserts that she just wants ten minutes of his time so they can understand each other. I don’t remember if she ever calls back; or rather, whether he ever picks up another one of her calls. Later that day, a couple of times, his phone rings and he doesn’t answer it. It rings 15, 20 times. It happens again that evening when Kumiko is back with him in the house. The phone rings, and she tells him to get it, and he tells her to get it. He’s spooked by the incident enough to not want to answer the phone.
Anyway, SPOILER ALERT: In the end, we learn that the woman on the phone is in fact Kumiko, calling from another dimension that the narrator accesses by climbing down a well and staying there at the bottom for like a couple of days; and the well visit doesn’t lead to his discovery of Kumiko immediately, but only eventually, and only after he acquires some strange scar that he then earns money by having many women touch in hotel rooms for a time, all with the aid of a young assistant who is mute, because he lost his voice in a strange incident involving the wind-up bird that took place years ago, when the assistant was a kid. Yeah, a lot of weird things happen in this book. But I suppose what I’m remembering as notable here is that one of the first weird things involved graphic sex; and it’s interesting seeing Toru’s reaction to it. He is mostly admirable and blameless throughout the events of this book, but maybe his refusal to stay on the phone call, his unwillingness to speak to the strange woman (who just so happens to be his wife) is a symbol of his own inadequacy, his failure to meet the demands of their marriage. This is, ultimately, a book about his attempts to save that marriage. In a sense, then, it shares something with the Sterling Men’s Weekend; it is quietly standing in defense of this institution, called marriage, that is so often mocked and twisted and we seem to be trying are damndest to leave it behind. I say “quietly,” because it’s not an explicit theme. The fact that Toru and Kumiko are married is not emphasized. And yet. Did Toru fight so hard to maintain his connection to his wife because she was his wife—it’s not so clear this was his biggest reason.
Chapter 2
Chapter
Chapter 3
Chapters 4 & 5
Chapter 4 is called “High Towers and Deep Wells,” or “Far from Nomonhan.” Nomonhan, the scene of horrific battles during World War II—the scene of a series of flashbacks or dream sequences in this book. The first one comes here in Chapter 4, when we flash back to Toru and Kumiko’s sessions with old Mr. Honda, a “practitioner of spirit possession,” a channeler type. Let’s stop and review the weird characters our hero meets in the opening chapters of this book:
the mysterious woman on the phone who calls in Chapter One
the 16-year-old neighbor girl who is by herself; her name turns out to be May Kasahara
Malta Kano, another “channeler type” that Kumiko’s family is connected with; Kumiko arranges for her husband to meet her in Chapter 3, so they can find out more about the cat.
The Chapter 3 meeting with Malta Kano leads to the Chapter 4 flashback about Mr. Honda. I believe there will be more flashbacks to meetings with Mr. Honda and I’m certain we haven’t heard the last of Malta Kano—although maybe it’s her younger sister who makes more appearances. She shocks Toru quite a bit by alleging, in a matter-of-fact way, that her younger sister was raped by Noboru Wataya, Kumiko’s brother and the namesake of their missing cat. This is the state of affairs we find as we start the book: Noboru Wataya, the cat, is missing; his absence causes Toru to, at his wife’s instruction, go into “the alley,” a pedestrians-only space behind his house that snakes behind other houses in the neighborhood. He doesn’t find the cat in the alley but he finds May Kasahara there.
The elements of the story may sound jumbled in this description but in my mind, they’re not jumbled; everything’s clear. Noboru Wataya; the book hasn’t gotten into it yet, but he’s a really unpleasant character—the namesake, not the cat. Toru pretty much hates his guts. However, this hasn’t really been stated. The Noboru Wataya character comes up mostly in the Malta Kano episode; he may also be alluded into in the Mr. Honda flashback, where it’s described how
Chapter 6
… is all about Noboru Wataya; what little the narrator knows about him, how antisocial he always seemed; how he got advanced degrees in economics and seemed a pedantic graduate-asssistant type; how he became a celebrity after writing a book pioneering the phrases “sexual economics” and “excretory economics,” and how he was a total jerk to Toru when Toru tried to meet him to get to know him.
Chapter 7
… opens with a visit to the dry cleaner who is known for the songs he is playing on his JVC boom box when Toru arrives. At this moment, he is playing Canadian Sunset, a song from an Andy Williams album. Toru concludes that the cleaner is an easy-listening enthusiast.
Previously, Toru had walked in on the cleaner playing Tara’s Theme, a song from the Percy Faith Orchestra. Tara’s Theme is from Gone With the Wind; next on the boom box that day was Theme From A Summer Place, with A Summer Place being a less-famous movie that Toru talks about having seen. The movie, Toru recalls, was pretty bad; but the song brings back only good memories.
Back when the book opened, on Chapter 1, what had been playing on Toru’s home stereo was the overture to Rossini’s Thieving Magpie. For more info on Thieving Magpie, go here; and here for more on Rossini. As I’m listening to it now, it’s a hell of a piece of music; seems famous. Apparently it is used memorably in Clockwork Orange, but I’m sure I’ve heard it before. What’s notable to me now is that essentially, it’s a whole opera whose title is about a bird; thus, it is a definite relative to this particular book, where we have a Wind-Up bird.
Anyway. I could imagine a more-impressive project where I tracked every mention of pop culture in this book; just going back over these musical allusions I catch quite a few other references to artists and films—I shared some of them by noting that these are many of them movie soundtracks. But I’ll stick with this for now. My Wind-Up Birds YouTube playlist is underway.
One more addition: after he gets home from the cleaners and receives another phone call from Malta Kano, Toru turns on the radio to catch Michael Jackson singing Billy Jean.
Chapter 8
… is entirely devoted to the story of Creta Kano, a woman who suffered inexplicably intolerable pain for just about every waking moment of her life until, at the age of 20, she attempted to kill herself. Though the attempt on her own life failed, the pain had stopped. So she decided to go on living. She owed a lot of money from her failed suicide attempt. “In order to pay it back, I became a prostitute.” This was how she would meet Noboru Wataya; he would be her client. But one thing I’d forgotten was that on her way to being violently raped by him, she was violently raped as a prostitute:
Chapter 9
This appears to be a three-part chapter, the first part being our hero’s wet dream about Creta Kano the day after she left. What’s notable about this particular wet dream is that it’s much more than a wet dream. It is his first visit to the alternate world where he meets Kumiko and reunites with her at the end of the book. I recognize it because at the start of the dream, he orders a scotch from a bartender and asks for the brand Cutty Sark. Then he is pulled from the drink by a faceless man who takes him to Room 208 and leaves him inside. Inside, Creta shows up and …
I can’t help but read ahead a little bit, sometimes seeing what’s happening in a future chapter. Like for instance, I know right now that the last part of this chapter is about our hero spending some time with May Kasahara. Just from having leafed ahead, half-accidentally, I would claim. Anyway, I guess that “penis” is one of those words that leaps out when you are leafing ahead and you see it. It’s like—oh, we’ve stumbled into that kind of scene, have we? But the foreshadowing is in the “Noboru Wataya will be here any minute” part. This showdown brewing between the brothers-in-law is long in the making and, the scene is being set.
The second part, which I’d totally forgotten, is about Toru’s greatest infidelity. Although he claims it’s not an infidelity at all. “I did nothing wrong,” he claims to the end. He has a female work colleague who he goes home with. Totally, he’s just being friendly, he claims. But at the end of the night, her character emerges and she asks him to just hold her; she explains that she’s “out of electricity” and needs to have her battery recharged by being held.
“Kumiko was furious, of course,” is the next line. And “he ended up confessing the truth. … the entire story from beginning to end—without the erection part, of course—maintaining that I had done nothing with the woman.” Murakami is, it seems, contrasting types of infidelity. This incident comes to mind because the dream with Creta Kano also seems a type of infidelity. Also is a type of infidelity. Given all the types of infidelity we’re finding, the extreme difficulty of maintaining fidelity in a marriage is made clear. It’s an impossibility! Of course lust will rear its head; of course there will be temptation. And that said, of course it will hurt! The story of Toru’s work colleague is told with total sympathy to the narrator, but even he seems to have to admit that his wife has a right to be furious, which she is. What he doesn’t seem to grasp is that fury must be connected with the possibility that he did do something wrong. To sit there holding another woman for hours, in the middle of the night, while married, that’s not acceptable behavior for a husband. These are my words now, Mark Dittmer speaking. I could go and locate the precise moment where he deviated from acceptable behavior; it was before he decided to hold the woman. But the story needed him to do what he did, in part because it allowed us to meet this woman and hear her own backstory. She is scared of culverts. Rivers in the country near her childhood home that go underground. When she was a child, not older than two or three, she was put in a little boat and launched into a stream. But her friends lost control of the boat and she was almost sucked into the underground … (like Persephone! Into Hades!)
Oooh, the Persephone-Hades comparison connects to marriage as well! That’s fascinating—I bet a lot of women feel this fear. Myths speak to the feelings of many people! But I also thought it worth mentioning as just a great visualization of fear as a life-dominating thing. The fear could be not of marriage but of death—that’s where we’re all headed. “And then all of a sudden I do understand—that there’s darkness lying ahead.”
*
Raced to the end of the chapter just to peak at the first page of the next chapter. But no. Kumiko’s not gone yet.
Chapter 10
She’s still not gone! She even reappears and chats for a bit. One thing is cleared up, though. I was thinking after the Creta Kano craziness, that all this stuff that’s happened to our hero, his wife’s disappearance must happen soon because I don’t recall he and her ever discussing it. A lot of stuff’s happening to him, and he and his wife aren’t talking about any of it. This is explained at the end of this chapter, when he ruminates on how and why he is keeping the Creta Kano story, and his dealings with May Kasahara, secret from her. Now, a few more foreshadowings of her disappearance: one of the next chapter’s titles is Eau de Cologne, which I’m pretty sure is an expensive gift he finds that someone clearly gave to his wife. And it wasn’t him. Or expensive makeup that she’s wearing for someone, clearly not him. Or something. Up till now, we have no sense that she’s with someone else, but just that she’s been working late more often, and there’s nothing wrong with it or weird about it. The interesting thing about that angle, when it does come into existence, is that it never prevails. It’s a red herring. It’s not the main plot, it’s not where the story wants to focus. The temptations of sex are never that compelling, even when they’re told most compellingly.
But anyway. The other foreshadowing is that she speaks of having been contacted by her brother, who wants to run for the Diet. And she tells our hero an ugly memory of him—she walked in on him masturbating with the clothes of their deceased sister. We learned in the previous chapter about Noboru Wataya that their sister had died “of food poisoning”—that chapter had only one title: “On the Births of Kumiko Okada and Noboru Wataya.”
I guess it’s actually good that the above link is not from Chapter 10 but rather from Chapter 6—because that’s how this book is, how Murakami is. Nonlinear. Kumiko had a horrible childhood framed by narcissistic parents who sent her away to be with her grandmother for a crucial part of her life; when she got back to living with her parents and siblings, her sister was her only solace. But then she died. Noboru Wataya was the prince of the family, spoiled and destined for great things. But he was aloof and there is not much to do with their relationship in these pages. It is a mystery in the heart of this book, so it wouldn’t help that mystery to go on writing directly about it, is what I imagine Murakami decided. So anyway, in Chapter 10 we have this news that Noboru will run for the Diet, and this ugly memory from their past, of his masturbating with the clothes of their dead sister—who was only 11 (or thereabouts) when she died. There is the temptation to judge our hero now; if only he might have opened up what the Kano sisters had told him about Noboru Wataya. But he’s too nervous, too caught up in uncertainty; he doesn’t want to cause his wife any stress, he says. Seems like bullshit. It’s inexplicable, in a way. And yet it speaks to the difficulties in their relationship. They’re not telling each other things. In Chapter 10, with these secrets on his mind, he goes to see his wife in the bathroom and starts talking to her about this other topic, his wondering about when he’ll decide to get a job. It’s like, not the point. He’s talking about trivialities. But she doesn’t know that. He doesn’t even know it.
Chapter 11
At the start of this chapter, we hear that three days later Lieutenant Mamiya phones our hero and makes an appointment to see him. He reports this to Kumiko and she is somewhat interested; she suggests that they ought to pay their respects to Mr. Honda’s family. He notices the cologne—he smells it on her, then he sees the wrapping paper in the trash can after she’s left. So he’s keeping his secrets and now he knows she has hers, and they’re somewhat inexplicable by anything else other than infidelity. Infidelity. That would be interesting to have a wedding where you did nothing but talk about infidelity; you could have strippers march through the middle of it or something. Because the whole thing, the whole big deal about the promise, is the ideal of avoiding infidelity—promising to do so. Such a big promise! Kind of like promising, committing, to register a man for the Men’s Weekend.
So we get that his wife’s probably cheating, and in the midst of that narrative contained blast, we get another call from the mysterious woman who we hadn’t seen since Chapter 1. It’s an almost-inconsequential call, but … here it is:
“You must have some kind of blind spot in your memory,” comes up again a moment later, when she teases him for not having had sex with his wife for over two or three weeks. “Just go around the corner,” she says, “and there it is: a world you’ve never seen. … Look around. Look all around you and tell me what’s there. What is it you see?”
Then Mamiya arrives, and on page 134 he begins his story. It ends on page 172, and here’s a peak-ahead premonition from leafing forward … the item that Mamiya took so much time to deliver was an empty box; and with the end of his story comes the end of “Book One: The Thieving Magpie: June & July 1984.” I’m positive at the start of Book Two, we’ll see that Kumiko has disappeared from our hero’s life
.
Chapters 12 & 13
These are Mamiya’s story, and Chapter 12 is kind of the elaborate set-up. By the end of Chapter 12, I kind of fooled myself into believing that nothing much had happened. He was out there on the Khalka River, with three other soldiers, one of whom was mysteriously pretending not to be a soldier—or who was assigned as unofficial leader of the group despite having this civilian backstory. Of the other two, one was Honda. There was doubt in my mind whether it was the same Honda until the end of Chapter 12, when he dabbles for a minute in prophecy—tells Mamiya that he’s going to survive whatever horrific events are coming in Chapter 13.
But that’s the thing about Chapter 12, I realized as I was reading those horrific events. The events are horrific, but the surprise isn’t total—Chapter 12 slowly puts Mamiya in this horrible position, I realized. It’s like the frog being in water that’s slowly getting heated up. Mamiya is drafted into the war, but okay, so were all his compatriots. At first, he gets light duty that keeps him away from the fighting; he does map-making and land surveying … easy stuff, no problems. But then, this detail comes along with this mysterious intelligence officer by the name of Yamamoto; and they’re out in the furthest reaches of Manchukuo, near the Khalka, on the border with Outer Mongolia. And then, the intelligence guy informs Mamiya, they’re going to be fjording the river and moving their little mapmaking exercise into enemy territory. “Looks like a tough spot we’ve got ourselves in,” is what the fourth soldier, Sergeant Hamano, says to Mamiya when they have a minute later on. In that conversation, they reflect on how—as Murakami had explained moments before—Yamamoto is probably trying to make contact with rebellious elements of the Outer Mongolian territory. Here’s some more of that political background
At that point, they’re actually missing Yamamoto; he tells them to stay out of sight for 36 hours while he makes off on his own secret mission. When he gets back, he leads them back to the river, but there’s now a camp of Mongolians blocking their exit. They plan to sit quietly and surprise the Mongolians at night, and Yamamoto tells Mamiya privately to guard this satchel containing secret documents.
It’s during watch that night that Honda makes to Mamiya that prophecy. And then I closed the book, and I thought—not much really had happened. But in fact, I realized as I was reading the ultra-disturbing events of Chapter 13, a lot had happened, and I thought of a game of poker. I mean, you might start out with okay cards, but then wind up with a shit hand. You don’t know what kind of cards you’re going to get—you don’t know what fortune has in store for you. But as Chapter 12 becomes Chapter 13, it’s quite apparent that Mamiya has just been dealt a horrible hand. In this modern world we act as if we are in total control of our lives, like such horrors could never befall us. But this serious of events that befalls Mamiya, it’s so awful because it happens in such unexpected ways. Ill fortune, I realize, is delivered in the form of this colleague Yamamoto. I think the first time I read this, I just vaguely thought of him as sinister, and this he may well have been. We don’t really know. He’s certainly a representative of a sinister body, whose militaristic goals and attitudes have Japan in a war which claims many innocent lives—as is remarked upon by Hamano here:
Might as well hear it from Hamano, because his throat is summarily slit at the start of Chapter 13, while he’s standing guard that night, and while Mamiya and Yamamoto are asleep. Honda must have snuck off, perhaps taking the secret documents with him; what happened to the documents, in particular, has not yet been divulged halfway through the chapter. But what does happen is memorable. A Russian officer deplanes and confronts Yamamoto; they speak Russian, which Mamiya does understand but pretends not to. Basically the Russian is telling Yamamoto that he’s going to have to torture him, and what they then do is nail four stakes in the ground for each of Yamamoto’s limbs. They then take a curved knife and slowly and deliberately skin the man alive. Now this is weird—I just got through telling you that this Yamamoto is by no means a likable character. He is the personification of all these things getting worse for Mamiya. He entered Mamiya’s life and that life got worse, much worse. He dragged Mamiya over to enemy territory; he took him from an easy part of the war to a much harder part. Laughably, I just thought of how at my school, currently, when I agreed to be there for “Advisory” or home room, my job went from easy to hard. I wouldn’t have made the connection but I remember thinking that since the whole school operates with Advisory as part of it, there’s no reason I should be excused from the hard part; that somebody had to take on this difficulty. So anyway. Mamiya finds himself tied up naked while his fellow prisoner is skinned alive. He himself isn’t skinned alive; he remains a prisoner, they spare him because they don’t think he knows anything, and for some reason, the Russian officer decides not to kill him. But he is of course scarred forever by having seen what he saw—he now has a greater idea of the possible cruelty and evil that exist in the world.
I pause here to wonder how large this incident looms in my memory of this book. Murakami novels are, in some sense, a bunch of stories loosely placed together. Mamiya’s story does not seem deeply interconnected with the story of the novel’s narrator and his wife Kumiko. Maybe they will get more interconnected in the coming chapters. But it is no doubt a compelling story, chillingly compelling. I’ll connect this with another story that, like my story about “Advisory,” doesn’t really measure up when it comes to drama, but possibly it helps illustrate my understanding. See, I’m wondering if maybe what is so memorable about this novel is the horrible cruelty contained within it. Certainly, being unafraid to take on the subject of horrible cruelty is something you can find elsewhere in Murakami’s work—my other favorite of his nobels, Kafka on the Shore, starts off with this horrible incident with a character who apparently has been collecting and killing neighborhood cats, in order to take their skulls and to make with them some kind of flute. When a Murakami novel is taken as a whole, the cruelty’s not the centerpiece. But now I recall myself thinking, “how does he think of this stuff?” just with regard to his imagination. It didn’t occur to me to specifically ask that with regard to the cruelty of some of his. characters and situations. This cruelty may be necessary, a key ingredient of great drama.
I mentioned having another story to connect this to. I was thinking of Louis CK. He has a comic bit where he wonders if slavery, a very cruel thing, is also a necessary ingredient to certain human achievement. This is said as part of a comedy bit, so maybe we shouldn’t take it seriously—but that’s not the actual Louie story I wanted to bring up. Rather, I was thinking of how he has spent quite a bit of time on stage talking about Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, and a character in that novel named “Nigger Jim.” Basically, Louie relates, it’s kind of tough to reconcile the greatness of Mark Twain with the fact that his work is filled with the n-word. And during one of Louie’s monologues about this fact, it occurred to me that perhaps the main source of humor about the bit was simply Louie’s saying the n-word several times throughout the act. Now, this is not meant to be accusatory—and in fact I see this actually plunges me into this whole controversial debate about whether the n-word can in fact be quoted or used or spoken of academically. I need to avoid this conversation, because I’ve got to go to Advisory, I kid you not.
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The six-minute point in the clip above is the relevant part. Another place where I know this is discussed in greater detail is here:
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Anyway, my point is not to discuss the “controversy,” as I really don’t think there should be any controversy. Rather, my point was that I wondered, during this other Louie CK bit that I can’t take time to find right now, whether the whole way he accomplished his comedy was by finding ways to insert this word. Like, comedy involves stirring people’s discomfort around; finding a tension and then playing on it. Maybe that’s all he was doing; he knew that word had a uniquely unsettling effect, and so he would tell stories involving it just to push that limit, because comedy is about pushing limits.
And so I wonder if Murakami does the same thing. And not just Murakami! The other connection I made while reading this was with Breaking Bad. I mean, there’s Jesse, at the end of Breaking Bad, being made to live in a cave, being penalized for trying to escape, having his girlfriend killed and … just unspeakable horror done to him in the final episodes. And I wonder: is this great cruelty again a necessary component of great drama? I suppose I’m increasingly suspicious that this is the case. This time it’s not to get a laugh, not in Murakami nor in Breaking Bad. Rather it’s to tell a true and serious story. To tell a true and serious story, we have to come up against real evil. Real evil has to play a part. Welp, here we have it. In Chapter 13. Real evil.
Book 2, Chapter 1
What a jarring transition back to our hero. His wife is gone, and he’s realizing this. He’s realizing that she appears to have left him, appears to have left for another man, or with another man. However, he has only a few clues now. The clues are going to keep trickling in for the rest of the novel, the mystery of all this. Noboru Wataya’s going to be involved. That’s going to form this central conflict; his sort of competitive relationship with this man with whom he’s almost never going to talk. I think the only place where they really interact is in that strange dream world, the place he first accessed in the dream of getting-it-on he had with Creta Kano. That strangely accessible dream space. She’s there, Noboru Wataya is there, and our hero somehow learns he needs to, and is able to, get there. But not yet.
For right now, he’s very much stuck in this world. Stuck and forlorn. Who does he have to talk to? Well, in Chapter One, he speaks with Malta Kano, and he speaks with the guy at the cleaners. Malta Kano has little to tell him. She tells him that he’s just going to have to wait—general-sounding advice that leaves him frustrated. Then he goes to the cleaner to pick up some of his wife’s things, and he learns that she picked them up the previous morning—which helps him decide that she must have known she was going to leave. Still, this is only somewhat helpful in how much it adds to the picture of what has happened. See, the most memorable clue I am anticipating, from having read previously, is this letter he’s going to receive allegedly from Kumiko, where she speaks plainly of the passionate affair she has with this other man—the sex is just so incredible, the sexual attraction is just so incredible, that she is powerless to resist it. That is the alleged story, and her picking up the clothes at the cleaners supports that story. But in the long run that story proves to be false. But is it?! It’s false in the sense that it’s not the whole story. But we don’t know, I don’t know, if it’s actually fabricated. I mean, it might be true—I just don’t know. This trip to the dry cleaners and the cologne support its being true. Where the machinations of Noboru Wataya are involved I don’t know. Does he facilitate the affair, create the attraction for his sister? Or does he fabricate it? Or does he have nothing to do with it, only he exploits it to step into her life and capture her somehow?
I think these are very much live questions that we may end up asking at the end of the book. But it’s fun to raise them now, during this second reading.
I might also add that the end of Chapter 13 of Book One also contributed something to what we’ll know at the end of the book. Mamiya, taken prisoner, is in short order thrown down a well. He is badly injured (knee and shoulder) but he survives, and stays there for about two days before Honda shows up and rescues him. The end of this story does not include his time at a Russian camp in Siberia—because that’s a different story that he’ll relate to our hero later. The climax of this story—the second climax, after the gruesome torture he had to witness being the first—is his experience in the well of experiencing something like God in the moment when the sun was directly above the well. In that moment, he, well … I’d better let Murakami say it:
Chapter 2
Noboru Wataya makes his appearance at the very end of this chapter—it’s a phone call from Malta Kano, letting our hero know that she’s going to be brokering a meeting between the three of them at the tea room. Other than that, our hero mostly relies on his friendship with May Kasahara this chapter. It’s interesting. He’s a little inappropriate; of course no adult man should be confiding in and getting all this life help from a 16-year-old girl. The fact that they never do anything sexual is sort of beside the point. Although I suppose, to really like the narrator and the novel, one has to stay beside the point; one must take cover in the fact that nothing happens between them. He takes this older-brother type role. But the inexplicability of sexual feeling is all around them. I mean, in between his visits with May, he’s having sex dreams that he can’t explain. They’re about Creta Kano, but the point is, sexual urges arise inexplicably—that’s one of the themes here, throughout. But yet, we are (no doubt) called on to repress some of them, if we are going to be in a marriage. Perhaps the narrator would say that he trusts himself around May. Yeah she’s pretty, but she’s also a weirdo, a strange kid with a strange sorrow. So in the moral universe of this book, his friendship with her is allowed, a blessing. Why not have it be an elderly woman? To banish the spectre of his “getting off” on this friendship? Somehow, it must be more honorable this way? To make it plausible, the growth or uncertainty of May herself, her own arc? It’s not certain; what is certain is that someone out there will have managed to be offended by it.
Anyway, I’m digging into it more now because in this chapter more than any other, our hero shows up to May’s house with a needy vibe. He doesn’t need sex, but he does need a feminine type of care, sympathy. And she provides it. Oh, you look terrible, Mr. Wind-Up bird. Lie down! Have a glass of water! Go home and take a shower! And he goes to her for that; he sits out and waits for her, and sort of low-key complains that it took her so long to come out of the house. I don’t know; I’m guessing he makes these daring narrative choices because it’s more interesting that way. It’s more interesting having this sidekick character, this supporting friend, being a fuck-able 16-year-old rather than an old grandma. Maybe because of the mean turn May takes later in the novel, maybe that’s why—the character had to be a young person. And then having it be a woman rather than a man … I mean, hard to even argue that’s controversial. You’re going to make a character, you’re going to have to make it some gender. Men could just abstain from writing about women, but how friendly would that be to women? That’s a good formulation for why I like Murakami’s writing about women: because it is friendly to women. He’s not afraid to include them, and he gives them chances to be positive and negative.
But yeah. He gets May to call his wife’s office, and she finds the information that his wife didn’t show up to work the previous day or the current one. So she left her apartment, picked up the dry cleaning, and then disappeared, and now we’re two days into her disappearance. And then the dream: our hero is pulled into a sleep, and he’s back in the room with the Cutty Sark—now there’s actual whisky in the room. And there’s Creta Kano, sucking his dick again, except now she’s wearing Kumiko’s dress. In fact she starts out as Kumiko—he is zipping up her dress, as he was when he last saw her. But then it’s CK, and this time she fallates him while wearing the dress. Then, this time, he gets to fuck her too—she puts his hand to her pussy, and then mounts him and starts riding … Again he worries about the eminent arrival of Noboru Wataya. But then the lights go out, and the shape-shifting woman shifts again, and now it’s the mysterious woman from the phone. He can’t see her face, but he can hear her voice: “Forget about everything. You’re asleep. You’re dreaming. You’re lying in nice, warm mud. We all come out of the warm mud, and we all go back to it.”
Just before he comes, a white flash went through the darkness … “it might have been the glint of a sharp blade.”
After he gets the call from Malta Kano, he gets an end-of-the-evening call from May, asking for updates—any good news? No, he says pointedly, no good news. That Noboru Wataya has anything to do with this is not good news at all.
Chapter 3
This chapter wastes no time in getting the hero and the villain together for their little chat; sort of reminiscent of the DeNiro-Pacino coffee shop meet-up in Heat. Now at the end of their talk, or after NW leaves, Malta Kano stays around for a minute and speaks with our hero. And she says that though he might not like it, our hero will have to encounter NW many more times in the future. I mention this because, I don’t recall if they ever actually do meet again in the pages of this book—except in that hotel room, with the Cutty Sark. But enough foreshadowing, a favorite pastime of mine here, the glee of someone reading a book they’ve already read before. Let’s burrow into something I noticed on the opening page of the chapter, at the outset of the conversation.
What’s the word for this today: ubiquitous? Endemic? Since the Zoom-fest of 2020, are we all more like this; glazed-over, living our whole lives intermediated by screens? Who is this character like? He is an aspiring politician, a TV pundit, in the book. We have many of these today: Scott Adams is one! There are many others. We all have our favorites. The most successful may be running the world: Elon Musk, Justin Trudeau, Gavin Newsom, Donald Trump. They are all creations of television, in many ways, masters of that domain. The weird thing is, I live most of my life not on a screen, but in actual person-to-person interactions. There is this idea that the most successful of us not-famous people might rise to the world of television—as if televised success is bestowed upon those who are the most successful. And there is truth to this. Of the figures above, Musk most notably has some real-world accomplishments to speak of that did not require great investments of TV time. The others, politicians, did need to rely heavily on television to become successful. They may be said to be creations of this age of screens. In any case, Murakami appears to posit this, that there is a different way of being for television that misses some essential ingredient. That appears to be the very nature of this character Noboru Wataya. He is corrupt in his soul, sexually deviant and evil. But here we get him interacting in the real world; if there is any attempt by him to clarify his values, it occurs here, in this chapter. It occurs on the very next page.
After bluntly informing our hero that Kumiko has taken a lover and wants to end the marriage, NW gets personal. There is no sympathy, nor is there any lamentation over Kumiko having taken a lover; rather, the lamentation is that she ever married our hero in the first place. And then, an attack: “From the first day I met you, I knew better than to hope you might amount to anything … There’s nothing inside that head of yours but garbage and rocks.” That is the climax of the attack. And then a warning: “We want you to back off. And don’t try to find her. You’ve got nothing to do with her anymore.”
It occurs to me that the nature of television and screens for many of us includes low self-esteem. In between transmitting beautiful stories, screens transmit advertisements which often tell us we aren’t good enough. So it’s very much that kind of message that Noboru Wataya transmits here. It is also though some kind of assertion of value—Noboru Wataya values success. This must, I imagine, be measured in terms of money or prestige. But there is certainly no interest on his part in religion, spirituality, nor virtue. I know people with this value system, and it is attractive in that it is not sentimental. Let’s get down to brass tax, he seems to be saying. You’re a loser. We are well rid of you.
Our hero appeals to value and decency. We are two human beings talking, he seems to be saying in the following lines. NW is not easily deterred from his soul-destroying objectives. He says the narrator’s arguments are incredibly stupid, and not worth his time. “I might as well be throwing my time into the gutter.”
So then our hero makes his own retort, using this story of “the monkeys of the shitty island.” It’s a very weird story, in part because the word “shitty” must be used so many times to tell the story. In that sense, it’s a very low-class story.
What he’s trying to say is, “ … a certain kind of darkness goes on propagating itself with its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it—even if the person himself wants to stop it.”
I guess the use of the word “shitty” makes me dismiss the story as low-class, but the timing of it makes it effective, the way he very slyly, at the end, indicates that the island is in fact a person, and Noboru Wataya is that person. Then he goes on: “To you, with your values (emphasis added), I may well be nothing but garbage and rocks.” He then makes his own threat, and he re-claims his own bond with Kumiko. We know about you, he says, we know what’s underneath you. We can take you down by exposing your secrets.
It’s sort of a bluff, the narrator admits to us, the audience. But it’s not entirely a bluff; he knows about the Kano sisters’ accusations; he knows that recently, just maybe a week earlier, Kumiko told him about catching NW masturbating with his dead sister’s clothes—his younger, inappropriately young sister—her age making a bad thing worse. Anyway, in the story, our hero’s effective timing has a desired effect: Noboru Wataya loses his composure not with rage but rather by turning oddly red and being unable to say a single word. He simply puts on his glasses and leaves.
It’s interesting: after he leaves, there is a short post-mortem with Malta Kano. Our hero asks her—whose side is she on? What he doesn’t say, but we must wonder (as he must) is why she isn’t more clearly on his side. I mean, NW raped her sister, isn’t that correct? So why is she here seemingly helping NW? She helped him by claiming that Kumiko talked to her, verifying NW’s story that Kumiko has had this lover for some time—two-and-a-half months, they say.
But Malta Kano is a creation of the story, and so her need to remain neutral is sort of just the rules as Murakami sets them out. We may suspect she is actually on our hero’s side, but she knows things must take a certain course. These are the arbitrary rules of this novel. She has her arbitrary set of how the game must be played. Interestingly, it is played with no violence whatsoever. Our hero alludes to it distantly in his final warning to NW: “I may be a nobody, but at least I’m not a sandbag. I’m a living, breathing human being. If somebody hits me, I hit back. Make sure you keep that in mind.”
One of the miracles of this book is how important that value winds up being. “Winds up” … Lol! In the face of this grand proclamation of success and worship of money and power, our hero simply states the value of being a human being. You don’t get to just erase a human being, or treat him as a non-entity. Maybe that’s what TV and screens put us all in danger of doing.
Chapter 4
This is kind of a settling-down chapter, in that no new characters are introduced. Rather, two of the characters who have been recently-introduced, and who have been a part of our hero’s life even since his wife left him re-appear and simply reaffirm their existence.
The action takes up the latter part of Day Three of life with no Kumiko. Note that Day One was not really covered; we pick up early in the morning of Day Two with the news that Kumiko didn’t come home last night. So Day Two involves him going to the cleaners and finding out she went there; then going to May’s house (because May is, in the end, his support system—it’s kind of who he goes to as a friend) and having her find out for him that Kumiko has missed work both days. At the end of that day, he gets the call from Malta Kano. Day Three then leads off with the Malta Kano-mediated meeting between himself and Noboru Wataya. And now he gets home from that meeting in the afternoon, and there is a letter from Mamiya waiting for him. It takes up 3.5 pages of the novel, this letter. There is nothing really big in the letter. It’s more like, “Yeah, that story I told you a few days ago was true! I am really a person, and this really is my life.” To be a little more specific, the letter more-elaborately explains why he feels his story is a sad one—how his life has been disappointing or surreal since he fell down the well. It is, he hypothesizes, because something about that moment in the well, especially those 15-20 seconds of light followed by 23.99 hours of darkness and pain … it was a sense of divine grace that was obtained and then lost, and then could never again be fully realized. “When the revelation and grace were lost, my life was lost.”
So that’s the letter. After reading it, our hero walks down to May’s house, but she doesn’t come out. So he goes home and finds Creta Kano waiting for him. The whole house smells like that cologne, because he poured all of it down the sink in the bathroom earlier. Creta doesn’t add to her story here, nor does she do a sexual act with him. However, she confirms that his dreams about her were not normal dreams, in this sense—she knows about them, both of them. She was there. She says that while she was in the past defiled by Noboru Wataya, there was nothing wrong or defiling about the in-the-mind sex they shared, on two occasions, in the room with the Cutty Sark. “It was fabricated consciousness,” she says. “Still, the two of us share the consciousness of having had relations with each other.”
“What’s the point of doing something like that?” he asks.
“To know,” she said. “To know more—and more deeply.” She goes on: “You should have no sense of guilt about having had relations with me … I used to be a prostitute of the flesh, but now I am a prostitute of the mind. Things pass through me.” And then she leaves her seat and “went down on her knees besisde me, clutching my hand in both of hers. She had soft, warm, very small hands. ‘Please hold me, Mr. Okada. Right here and right now.’”
And then she spends several minutes crying into his chest while he holds her. Then, after “a very long time,” she pulls away and says ‘Thank you so much.’ And before she leaves, she extracts a promise that he ought to “have faith in her,” that he should not “be afraid of me or feel you must be on your guard where I am concerned.”
So she also sort of becomes more real, in that she explains that the dreams he has been having about her are sort of not just dreams. She has fabricated some consciousness for him; or her sister Malta is fabricating the consciousness. We don’t know. Do we?
Chapter 5
Our hero was afraid to go to sleep after Creta Kano left. I guess that the thought of having sex with her again, while perhaps not entirely bad, is mostly unwelcome to him in that moment. He is scared of what it means that she’s showing up this way. So he stays up all night on the sofa—and is woken at the beginning of this chapter by a phone call. It is May Kasahara, but she doesn’t identify herself, and so he assumes it’s the anonymous woman and says, “No sex talk before breakfast, please.”
Their conversation, then, is quite animated and interesting. There is definite sexual tension—as May explains that she saw him the previous evening, didn’t come out because she was “being nasty” in her words, deciding to “make him really wait.” But then I guess that backfired because she went over to his house afterward …
“And I was holding the woman.”
Her role is something I’ve seen in other Murakami books; she is a counterweight to these characters that seem more mystical. The Kano sisters, they are full of strange omens and prophecies; they are as if from another world. May is the opposite. In Kafka on the Shore, there is a similar dynamic with the long-haired truck driver who picks up the talks-with-cats guy and gives him a ride. He is fascinated by the strange things that are going on with the talks-with-cats guy, but he himself is just a normal guy, blue-collar. These characters tend to be humorous; because they follow these prophet-types, they get on stage and say of the prophet, “Hey that guy was kind of weird, amirite!?” May is kind of like that.
And here she tells our hero, Mr. Wind-Up Bird (her giving him that name is of a piece with how she is, who she is), that he’s got a problem. He’s having a tough time, she knows, but she “can’t help thinking it’s something you brought on yourself.”
And indeed, what he did at the end of Chapter 4, holding Creta Kano like that—well his doing that with a co-worker on a previous occasion did indeed infuriate his wife, and cause her to promise that one day she would do a similar thing to him. So yeah, he does have a problem. His idea of what fidelity is may be the problem.
Anyway after that bit of comic relief, that quick bit of dialogue, our hero does fall asleep. When he wakes up, he advances the plot more than I expected he would—he grabs a knapsack with a flashlight in it, goes to the store and buys a rope-ladder, and heads over to that dry well in back of May Kasahara’s! It says he’s hoping she won’t see him go into the adjacent property with the well in it. But that’s what he does.
There’s no place where it says why he does it. Nobody told him to—well, nobody with the exception of Mr. Honda, who had said years before that sometimes you just need to wait. When you need to go high, climb to the top of the highest mountain; when you need to go low, climb to the bottom of the lowest well. Apparently, he needs to be low. It’s quite a remarkable thing he decides to do. The thing is, I don’t know what he’s going to find down there. Or I mean, I do know. I know exactly what he’s going to find. But I forget the sequence of events that leads to him finding it. I know, for example, that May Kasahara’s going to pull up his ladder so that he really has to face the scary possibility of starving down there. But that’s not going to happen yet, is it? That’s an end-of-the-book thing that happens—isn’t it? I also know that, while down there, he’s going to be able to cross over into that strange room, that fabricated consciousness with the Cutty Sark in it. He’s going to be able to go in there where he’s going to meet the anonymous woman—and maybe then he’ll find out it’s Kumiko. But again, that doesn’t happen to the very end. It’s going to take him a while to understand the importance of that room and what goes on there, and the importance of the well and how that’s going to be an access point for him to get into that dimension. But we just started Book Two! I have to imagine this is going to be just a quick trip into the well. But I’m not sure. Maybe he spends most of Book Two down there, having interesting dreams … I know Mamiya has a longer story for him, but when is he going to appear to tell it?
I have a lot of questions. Our hero takes 20 steps into the well and then is overcome by fear and has to stop descending—but then he regains his resolve and descends again, and on Step 23, he hits the bottom of the well, and eventually he sits down. It is Day Four.
Chapter 6
His memories acquire an extra vivid-ness in the dark, and we go with him to a memory of his meeting Kumiko. He had begun his go-for law job, apparently, and he met her in a university hospital waiting room; she was visiting her mother and he a wealthy client. Weird, use of the word “university” there is somewhat misleading, maybe intentionally? They are no doubt both young, but no longer attending university I think. Anyway. The University of Science. Ha, well. This first memory seems innocuous. It goes on to detail their first day together, on which they visit the jellyfish exhibit at the local aquarium. The visit triggers our narrator, who is brought back to a still earlier memory when he swam out into the ocean into a sea of jellyfish. They didn’t sting him, but they scared the shit out of him and he gulped down a lot of seawater.
At the tail end of this flashback, Kumiko makes the cool observation that the world that we see, live in, and appear to inhabit is a tiny cross-section of the whole thing. The ocean, and the jellyfish, help illustrate that. “We get into the habit of thinking, This is the world, but that’s not true at all. The real world is in a much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things.
The chapter goes on to detail the first time the two of them made love. He talks about how, when she decided to make love to him, after he kind of prods her by weirdly asking her if she has a boyfriend—just a hunch he has, that she has a boyfriend … come on, man, don’t tell her about that dumb hunch!—she seems to be a little bit not-present in the moment of love-making. But he convinces herself that this was just something about the first time. It was, allegedly, her first time. Except … was she abused by Noboru Wataya? It’s possible, I forget. Anyway, her behavior as described here matches with somebody who’s been a victim of sexual abuse before. That she would need to go some place else, mentally, when making love. And then, there is this unromantic change in their relations … They had always been seeing each other every weekend, up till that point. Now they continue to do so, but now they stop at our hero’s place to have some sex as part of their weekly get-togethers. I suppose I say this is unromantic because this is pretty much how I have done it, with women I have dated. Sex is for some unspoken reason initiated … “for some unspoken reason”—as if it’s not what I want. It’s initiated because it’s exactly what I want. Just like it’s what our hero wanted; I reacted to his hinting at it in this passive-aggressive way, but that probably I’m criticizing because it’s exactly the kind of thing I might have said, too!
The end of the chapter finds our hero checking his watch while sitting at the bottom of the well. It’s still 3 p.m. on Day Four, Day One in the well. It looks like he might spend all of Book Two in the well. A sneak peak at the next chapter indicates that this day-dreaming, reminiscing back to the beginning of their relationship, is going to continue for a bit.
Chapter 7
He fell asleep at 3 p.m. at the end of the last chapter; now he wakes at 7:30 p.m. It’s still Day Four. Noticeably, he didn’t wake up having dreamt, having visited the Cutty Sark room … So. More daydreaming:
So again, flashbacks within flashbacks. This time the first flashback is to the beginning of their marriage. They’re two introverts, but they’re both doing making efforts to “devote our bodies and minds to this newly created being we called ‘our home.’ We practiced thinking and feeling about things together … we enjoyed the fresh, new process of trial and error.”
Then in the third year of marriage, Kumiko became pregnant. I have not gotten to the end of this story yet, because what happens is that in the middle of it, we have the flashback within a flashback: back when he was in college, our hero had gotten his then-girlfriend pregnant, and he went with her to the abortion clinic. I don’t yet know how the Kumiko pregnancy will resolve (don’t remember) but this flashback-within-a-flashback starts with, “I did not want Kumiko to have an abortion.” That’s kind of sad. “I guess we’ll have to pass, this time,” Kumiko said to him in an “expressionless” voice the day the doctor gave her the news. But our hero had been on this train ride with this previous girlfriend out to a suburb where there was an abortion clinic. It’s a weird ride out to a weird place. Will he revisit this place later in the novel? Maybe.
Not when Kumiko gets her abortion; he’s not there for that. His “argument” against the abortion is sincere but, I notice on this second reading, it lacks a certain something. He is full of uncertainty in his whole outlook; Kumiko says she appreciates his position but let her decide this one. And then, while he’s out of town on this company trip, she gets the procedure done, tells him about it over the phone. He gets off the phone with her and then goes out into the evening, just for a walk. Out on this walk, he has this insane little experience. He’s in a bar and there’s a guitar player playing. And then, out of nowhere, the guitar player says he wants to “do something.” He gets the bar manager to bring the lights down, and then he holds a candle. He says something about how when you appreciate someone’s art, you are really feeling their pain. This is why artists create, he says, to share their pain. So he’s going to do that in another way. He takes his hand and he just lets the candle burn it; his flesh is being seared; our hero is disgusted. Then he stops, he speaks to the audience again. So you see, he says, you got to experience the meaning of art just now. And then he shows off that his hand was not burned at all—it was magic!
I think we’ll see this guitar player again; I think he becomes a devil-type character, perhaps in a dream, or in some world. But he is rather devil-ish in this scene as well, I think, because he makes these claims about art and empathy, which all sound rather pretty, but they’re ultimately false. Maybe what he says about art is true; maybe it is an attempt to communicate and share a certain personal feeling, and that feeling is often pain. But to short-circuit the process, to show the experiencing of literal pain—it almost seemed like a parody of art. And the false-ness of it in the end. It’s troubling, isn’t it? What it has to do with Kumiko’s abortion, and our hero’s experience of that—I’m not sure. But there was some emptiness in him; it is referred to at various junctures. … I am incapable of really analyzing this right now, I am just vaguely reporting some sensation I felt when reading the end of the chapter, just a bit earlier. Anyway … I should add that by peaking ahead at the first page of the next chapter, I know that our hero dreamed again. The Cutty Sark dream. By the time he wakes up from that dream, it’s Day Five.
Chapter 8
“I had a dream. But it was not a dream. It was some kind of something that happened to take the form of a dream.”
He was in the lobby of that hotel where the Cutty Sark was. And Noboru Wataya was being projected on a big TV screen, and everybody was listening. He says the above. It enrages our hero, since he’s being specifically called out, and yet in a way that masks the personal nature of the assault. (It probably also disturbs our hero that NW seems to know where he is—in the bottom of that well—but he doesn’t outwardly react to that specific detail.) And so the narrator cuts across the lobby and heads “straight for a corridor that connected with the guest rooms.” At this point he sees the faceless man, but rather than escort him, the faceless man tries to get in his way. “This is the wrong time,” he says, “You don’t belong here now.”
But our hero, experiencing “deep slashing pain” from the experience of seeing all these people listening to Noboru Wataya insult him, is past civility; he actually pushes the faceless man aside; “he wobbled like a shadow and fell away” but not without an ominous warning: “I’m saying this for your sake. If you go any farther, you won’t be able to come back. Do you understand?” Then lost in the corridor, our hero seems totally beyond help but then sees a waiter delivering the Cutty Sark—a waiter who is whistling The Thieving Magpie overture, and doing a damn good job whistling it. So he follows him to Room 208: “Of course! Why hadn’t I been able to remember it until now?” And after he waits for the waiter to take an unusually long time in the room, before he finally leaves, our hero takes three knocks at the door and enters. Before we know it, he is speaking with the woman from the telephone. He cannot see her face.
Okay from sneaking a peak ahead, I see that May Kasahara’s about to cover up the well; I’m guessing she also pulled up the rope ladder. The weird part of this is that I remember that happening at the end. But then, let’s get back to Chapter 8, because there’s more stuff happening that I also thought only happened at the end.
“Don’t turn on the light,” she tells him. I should just copy all her comments. All the substantial ones, anyway. “I figured I’d find you here,” is what our hero says, and he explains that he knows that she, the woman with the mysterious voice, is at the bottom of all the mystery he’s been enfogged in, especially about the mystery of his wife.
But I should back up to describe the fog, because Murakami does. Outside when he’s hiding in the corridor, waiting for the waiter to exit, our hero notices flowers in the vase he’s hiding behind—extremely fresh flowers. “A tiny winged insect had worked its way into the core of a red rose with thick, fleshy petals.” The aroma of flowers permeates the room … “Somewhere in this room was a vase full of flowers. Somewhere in this same darkness they were breathing, swaying. In the darkness filled with their intense fragrance, I began to lose track of my own physicality. I felt as if I had become a tiny inspect. Now I was working my way in among the petals of a giant flower. Sticky nectar, pollen, and soft hairs awaited me. They needed my invasion and my presence.” Man, talk about a description of sex!
At the woman’s request, he pours her a drink. Her lines:
Do you really want to know who I am?
You came here specifically to learn my name, didn’t you?
You want to know my name, but unfortunately, I can’t tell you what it is. I know you very well. You know me very well. But I don’t know me.
Toru Okada, I want you to discover my name. But no: you don’t have to discover it. You know it already. All you have to do is remember it. If you can find my name, then I can get out of here. I can even help you find your wife: help you find Kumiko Okada. If you want to find your wife, try hard to discover my name. That is the lever you want. You don’t have time to stay lost. Every day you fail to find it, Kumiko Okada moves that much farther away from you.
Then, suddenly, “as if she had suddenly recalled what she was doing:
You have to leave now. If he finds you here, there’ll be trouble. He’s even more dangerous than you think. He might really kill you. I wouldn’t put it past him.
And then pornographic again
In the chapter’s final moment, because it’s the only way to escape, with her having taken his hand, the two of them “slipped into the wall. It had the consistency of a gigantic mass of cold gelatin. I clamped my mouth shut to prevent its coming inside. The thought struck me: I’m passing through the wall! … as it was happening, it seemed like the most natural thing to do.”
He felt the woman kiss him while they are together in the wall together. “The heavy smell of flower petals stroked the walls of my lungs. Down in my loins, I felt the dull need to come. … I fought it.”
And then the scar which has a major role in the plot of this book when our hero gets out of this jam, this well—he “felt a kind of intense heat on my right chek. It was an odd sensation. I felt no pain, only the awareness that there was heat there. I couldn’t tell whether the heat was coming from the outside or boiling up inside me. Soon everything was gone: the woman’s tongue, the smell of flowers, the need to come, the heat on my cheek. And I passed through the wall. When I opened my eyes I was on the other side of the wall—at the bottom of a deep well.”
Holy shit!
Chapter 9
One of those strange little chapters where not as much happens; it’s kind of a down beat. Well, then again—May Kasahara pulling up the ladder is a pretty big deal. So in a way, we are in a narrative climax. He just went through the wall, was just able to escape Noboru Wataya, got himself that mark on his cheek, and fresh off of being saved from that, he has his lifeline to the real world removed, and is looking at the very real possibility that he could be left to die in this well. There’s something very understated about his character, and about the characters of many other Murakami characters. Like if this were an action movie, the hero would be like, “Come back here! How dare you! You’ll pay for this!!” But our hero is just kind of muted. How does it make you feel is what May asks him, and he answers, “Scared,” but she says, rightly, “You don’t sound scared.” To which he responds that, “It hasn’t really hit me yet.”
Man, can I relate to that! I’m never angry in the moment I’m supposed to be angry in. I’ll just lamely let something happen and then after the fact think, “Hey, I should have been angry right there!” Worse I will go through a month of stupid, impotent angry utterances that just bum everybody out. I don’t know, anger can be real and in that case it’s not impotent; there’s a catharsis that can happen with it. Our hero was angry when he was in the Cutty Sark lobby, angry enough to push the Faceless Man out of the way. He doesn’t get angry at May, though. Tactically, of course, this is wise. Clearly, he has no actual hold on her. He is at her mercy. He is at the bottom of a well. To attempt to exercise control over her would just exacerbate, or call attention to, this power imbalance. At least, that’s one way of thinking. She might feel resentful at his attempt to control her from down below, with any kind of emotional manipulation.
This all seems very tied to my work; I am constantly engaged in this type of emotional manipulation vis-a-vis my students, trying desperately to control them but unable to do so. The weird part is this situation where they’re talking while I’m talking. That’s the ultimate problem, the existential crisis at the core of all my teaching. They talk over me, and I am pressed to meet that challenge, to stop them from talking. But my main weapons involve other adults, which seems … to render me impotent, and pathetic.
As if to hammer this home and make it into a spiritual experience (possibly), it occurred to me that my cat’s seeming inability to stop meowing seems to reflect the same kind of impotence at issue. Like he wants me to do something, but he clearly is powerless. And this just makes him ridiculous. But then swinging to the other side, there is this strategy to not yell, to not show anger, to refuse to rail at one’s own impotence. And yet to respectfully interact with those who have power, to give them neither deference nor scorn. It is kind of this impressive deference to the universe that “our hero” is practicing—that my dad also practices? But this metaphor is only woo-woo “interesting” to a point; it gets dangerous. My cat manifested his impotent frustration this morning by pissing on my bed. And like, man, that puts his very survival at stake. If his impotent desire to change me gets too loud and frustrated, he himself becomes a absolute menace, a problem, a danger to himself and others. The same ought to apply to my own crazy impotence directed at my students. The same may have applied to Mr. Wind-Up Bird’s impotence toward May Kasahara … had he reacted as a cliche action hero would, with anger and sobbing, with rage or grief, he might have gotten himself killed. I guess that in our men’s weekends we allow ourselves to rage and grieve because we know those emotions are not useful to us—are dangerous to us—if expressed in society. So, there’s that.
On the other end of things, May reflects a different swirl of emotions. I forgot how dangerous she was, how close she comes to being the absolute evil of this book, as evil in her way as Noboru Wataya. She is, what, mildly annoyed at Mr. Wind-Up Bird? I had forgotten, over the years, that they came up with this nickname for him; it provides an interesting source of intimacy and levity. And she is also mildly annoyed with life; she occasionally has given voice to this anger in previous chapters. Most memorably at their first meeting, when he falls asleep in her lawn chair and she whispers into his ear a bunch of these deep thoughts of hers. She is, in a way, similar to the women who have come to Mr. Wind-Up Bird needing to be held. But she is not as well-adjusted, dos not know herself well enough to ask for this, properly. Instead, she thinks, maybe she wants to watch something die. To kill something, to see what that feels like. In a way, though, she seems not evil but innocent. Like, it’s an experiment—in a way she is being brave, daring to look at this part of herself. Maybe Noboru Wataya is like that, too.
I think the Christian idea of the devil is likely correct, and that when we are evil we are possessed by the devil. Because we are, in a way, each of us innocent. Children of God. And yet when we do evil things, there appears to be nothing innocent about us. We are not, in these moments, acting as ourselves. Rather, we are giving voice to evil that has existed and will exist for perhaps eternity. I suppose the doctrine says it will not be for eternity. Rather eventually, God will come on stage victorious. The devil’s time is short. That is why he is so angry.
To close, please note that this back-and-forth from italics to “normal” is a technique very much employed by Murakami. The italics are quite beautiful in the font that he uses; and I like the Substack default font here as well. Anyway, it’s Day Five. Day Four was eventful as hell. Oh, I think part of what made me say this chapter was almost uneventful was that—it’s 2-3 pages of him sort of observing the well—the rock wall, the stars above, that he can see even during daylight. And then there is a two-to-three page flashback to his life with Kumiko, the denouement of their abortion story. Kumiko and him go on a three-day weekend trip, and there, for the first time in six weeks, she is able to cry long and hard about what happened. For two days she cries while he holds her. But she also says that there is something that she just can’t explain to him. She wants to … “but I just can’t do it. I. can’t tell you exactly how I feel. … I’m not hiding it from you. I’m planning to tell you sometime. You’re the only one I can tell. But I just can’t do it now. I can’t put it into words.”
He reflects then, just before May Kasahara shows up, that this thing she had been unable to put into words is related to her disappearance. And he wonders about another instance of this impotence—could he have “tried dragging it out of her then?” He doesn’t think so: “I never could have forced her.” Had he tried, I suppose there is the possibility he might have found himself actually potent. But more likely, he wasn’t—and then there is the danger of making oneself a mess by being caught up in one’s own impotence—like my cat, peeing on the bed. The other image I associate with impotence is the image that comes from some book, of each of us having a plot of land that is our “sphere of influence.” Maybe this is from Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I’m not sure. But the idea is, if we focus on our sphere of influence, we till the land, we harvest what is in it, then we can live rich lives. But if we are forever on the fence looking out at what is outside our sphere, focused on how unfair it is that our sphere is so small, well then we will live barren lives. And in fact, if we do the latter, our sphere will shrink, while in the former case it will grow.
I suppose this all has a lot to do with the Serenity Prayer. Mr. Wind-Up Bird decides in the end he was better off attempting to accept the thing he could not change: “Whatever it was, it was more than she had the strength for.”
Chapter 10
Now it’s 3 p.m. on Day Five; it’s fun paying attention to how little time is passing in the novel. I know that Book Two goes from like July to October so I guess we’ll flash forward in a few chapters when he gets out of the well. Anyways. Anyways, Mr. Wind-Up Bird notices himself slipping away from his own physical body. Instead, he sees himself as the wind-up bird. It was easy, he says, to fly. “Once you were up, all you had to do was flap your wings at the right angle to adjust direction and altitude.” His body “mastered the art in a moment. … For a long time—how long could it have been?—I remained the wind-up bird. But being the wind-up bird never got me anywhere …. I stopped being the wind-up bird and returned to being myself.”
That seems like a flight of fancy if there ever was one. But as a Murakami reader, you know not to just ignore that. You’ve got to recognize that might mean something. He didn’t say he imagined that flying was really easy. He said it was easy. Meaning he really was the wind-up bird. He might have gone and had real interactions; his fantasies were, and are, of consequence. So it goes. We’ll come back to that, I’m sure. Anyway, he spends the rest of the chapter in conversation with May Kasahara.
A thought that occurred to me here. His main enemy, the antagonist, is clearly Noboru Wataya. NW declares his enmity when they meet for coffee with Malta Kano. It’s like, not only is Noboru Wataya unsympathetic about how the disappearance of Kumiko might affect him, but we have reason to believe NW has something to do with it. He seems to possess prior knowledge of the situation in a way that is somewhat unbelievable. I don’t believe that Kumiko would go to you with something so important. You’re the last person she would consult on such a matter. And yet, Malta Kano backs him up; says yes, Kumiko told her about the affair that had started, the lover she had taken. That seems more believable, that Kumiko had confided in her. But was she turning around and confiding in Noboru Wataya? The takeaway is that Noboru Wataya knows something. He knew about the lover before he did; he might know more, about where she disappeared to. Then now, in the other pace, with the Cutty Sark, Noboru Wataya is speaking on the television. But he is also expected to show up; the strange woman warns Mr. Wind-Up Bird, he’s more dangerous than you think—he would kill you, he wouldn’t think twice. So Noboru Wataya is an enemy, who may be responsible for Kumiko’s disappearance, and who is deadly serious.
But May Kasahara is a more immediate enemy right now, is she not? She might kill him; she is openly pondering doing so. Our hero has no anger for her, though. Now, it’s true he was previously disposed toward hating NW, who is basically a lousy character. Meanwhile he was previously disposed toward liking May, who spends time with him and is vulnerable, and allows him to be vulnerable. Just this act of being nice, of being open and vulnerable and laying down one’s arms in this act of conversation, it means a lot to Mr. Wind-Up Bird. So he does not really see May as an enemy. If she does let him die, he will view it as friendly fire.
The question I found myself asking is, could Noboru Wataya have something to do with May’s behavior? Our hero seems to doubt it. NW is lurking in the other world; out here, in this world, he is far away, nowhere close. NW’s plan seems to be to attack and kill Mr. Wind-Up Bird in that hotel room, with the Cutty Sark. Worse still, NW seems to have that woman held hostage there. And that woman, she saved Mr. Wind-Up Bird. That said, it doesn’t seem impossible that NW could also access the mind of May Kasahara. Like, it’s great for him to have our hero die in a well. I guess I’m just struck by how they’re both villains, but in very different ways, at this point in the story. NW is not even human. MK is very human, but is experimenting. Maybe she does want to try killing someone. But the enmity isn’t there; it’s more like, just trying on nihilism as a philosophy. She’s just a nihilistic kid. Meanwhile, NW is like, an evil MWUB has been dead set against his whole life. An elite selfish authoritarian.
Chapter 11
This will be the last bit of time in the well—Day Five becomes Day Six. MWUB’s ability to think disintegrates; he doesn’t have any more dreams. Rather there is quite a bit of narration about little things. His need to look at his watch; his resolution not to; his success at keeping that resolution for what—11 hours? Or 23? Without checking his watch, the giant ocean liner of time and society seems to go without him; there is FOMO, I suppose. He describes the pain of hunger. Hunger pangs, they come and they go. At 7:30 p.m. on Day Five, he thinks it would be the 3rd or 4th inning of the baseball games at this hour. He reminisces to going to baseball games with his dad, and just watching the sunlight give way to artificial light. Later he reports just having a lot of vivid memories coming by in fragments. Old apartments he lived in, details like their light fixtures. Teachers he used to have. He then remembers an argument he got into with a work colleague, and he gets all worked up about it! He lets rage cause him to tremble physically. “Then, all of a sudden, the possessing demon fell away, and none of this mattered anymore.”
***
Noon passed, then afternoon. It is night when Creta Kano opens the well cover, and then the ladder appears, as if magically. He doesn’t see her throw it down, but the flashlight did reveal it, “as if it had been there all the time.” The time is 1:07 a.m.; I assume that Day Six has become Day Seven, but of course it’s possible it’s been even longer than that. So he climbs the roap ladder, and he feels the touch of the earth, and breathes in the fresh air, and is … well, the word “joy” is never used, but it seems like that might be the appropriate label here. Interesting little detail about Creta Kano here; after appearing to have saved him, she disappears and is nowhere to be found when he surfaces. So he walks back down the alley and climbs into his house. Everything feels different now. His home doesn’t really feel like home. But there is water in it, and food, and he eats and he drinks.
And then he checks the mail!
That’s when he has the long letter from Kumiko, which I remembered; except I had thought that perhaps NW delivered it to him. After all it was so humiliating; perhaps it was humiliating in the same way having NW insult him over tea was humiliating, and so I lumped them together. Whatever; it’s humiliating for a number of reasons. The main one, though, is the sheer carnal desire she expresses in the letter, and her having had it for this other man.
A lot has happened since the first time I read this book. Maybe 15 years have passed. Since reading this, I’ve gotten sober, and I’ve done several male initiations. A lot of re-reading any book is about revisiting oneself from years before. Yes, really the person I’m visiting with is Murakami—he’s the one that wrote the book. But especially a memorable book, yes it’s Murakami I’m encountering, but I’m also encountering memories of our first encounter, and those memories were my memories, but they were a different me, a me without all those experiences.
So I have a different filter to view this stuff with. Fifteen years ago, my filter was basically that being in a relationship, or finding love, is difficult but an awesome undertaking that we all ought to strive for. Today, I still more or less agree; however, rather than saying “it’s difficult” and therefore rubber-stamping any actions in pursuit of a relationship, today I have a framework that some actions are well-known to be smart and others well-known to be stupid. So I may be a little more discerning. That said, while MWUB could use some men in his life (no doubt!), he is still pretty relatable. But maybe he took on the status of hero 15 years ago and today, he’s just a guy, a guy who makes mistakes.
Also, perhaps I’m less naive and therefore less thunderstruck by infidelity. So when I read this letter from Kumiko 15 years ago, I was scandalized. I probably jerked off to it; it was such a sizzling depiction of good, scandalous sex. Now, 15 years later, I am less emotionally attached to MWUB and more able to read the letter as an instrument of Murakami’s. He has strategically decoupled love and sex; in the letter Kumiko describes feeling all the lust but none of the love. This is underlined by the fact that eventually, the guy proposes leaving his own family, and suggests she do the same, since “we were so perfectly matched.” This dispels her attraction entirely. Her desire for him “was gone without a trace.”
I feel somewhat like I ought to go back to some of the highlights of the lust; just after touching this guy incidentally while having dinner: “It was a totally irrational, overwhelming charge of electricity that passed between us. I felt as if the sky had fallen on me. My cheeks were burning, my heart was poun ding, and i had a heavy, melting feeling below the waist. I could hardly sit straight on the barstool, it was so intense. … I had such a violent desire for him that I could hardly breathe. … we walked to a nearby hotel and went wild with sex.”
That’s not exactly “some highlights”—it’s the moment that really got my attention, though. That’s the opener, the big hook. That same language “wild,” “violent,” it continues resurfacing throughout the letter. You know it’s very interesting. She says the sex was so good: “It was absolutely miraculous. It was one of the most wonderful things that had ever happened to me.” This, I just realized, parallels Mamiya’s story of the well. That sun shining on him in that moment, it was such an amazing thing that it threw his whole life in shambles; he was never the same again. Kumiko seems to have experienced something similar.
Murakami didn’t just de-couple love and sex here. He also basically wrote a sex fantasy; he wrote about lust in the most graphic way he knew how. So I find myself asking what the purpose of this was. Because it’s a red herring, in a way. Like, in a traditional story, or for many men, this letter would be enough to earn Kumiko MWUB’s eternal enmity. He’d have every right to feel pissed, indignant, offended. Of course that would be my reaction. Just burned, so devastatingly burned. She had incredible sex with him? And she expects me to forgive her, because this impulse didn’t come from within her; rather it came from outside her. She said of their relationship: “I destroyed it. Or more accurately, some kind of something made me destroy it. I am terribly sorry it ever happened … I hate the thing that caused all this to happen. You have no idea how much I hate it. I want to know precisely what it is. I have to know precisely what it is. I. have to search out its roots and judge and punish it. Whether I actually ahve the strength to do so, I cannot be sure.”
It’s a red herring, but it’s not. I remember that as I sped-read through this book 15 years ago, as I finally got to the ending, it was exciting to find out that someone else other than Kumiko really was responsible. But it’s hard to assess where NW’s responsibility begins, or began. My hazy memory of the book was such that I thought this final discovery, the victory MWUB eventually scores, may have cancelled out this letter. Possibly it was entirely a fabrication! Now I see that this appears clearly not to be the case. That I even imagined it suggests my own facility for wishful thinking. And my tendency to rush things; my own emotional bias affecting my understanding and causing me to rush to judgements.
But one thing I share with my self of 15 years ago is a pathological addiction to fiction, an avoidance of reality, a reliance on these stories to save me from my own life. So, I have been reading more than four pages a day; more like 14. This little daily book report has become like the number-one priority in my life. So I am again reading in a rush. Still, this time at least I read slow enough to notice this first hint that Kumiko is the woman MWUB met in the Cutty Sark room. She says of the sex she had with the man that it went beyond just feeling good. “My flesh was rolling in hot mud.” This is something the woman has been saying to MWUB from the start. The fact that she started saying it to him at the very outset of this novel suggests something like the following:
Somehow, Kumiko’s sexual self was isolated and manipulated against her will. Probably by NW. He instigated this somehow, just as he somehow instigated something in Creta Kano that we’ll hear at greater length in a few chapters, an event that the Kano sisters refer to as her being raped and defiled. It’s weird; it’s unexplained what NW’s powers are exactly. Some of the things he causes to happen hardly sound like what we traditionally think of as being raped and defiled. We’ll get into that later; what exactly Murakami thinks, what his characters think of as evil will tell us perhaps what he himself thinks of as evil, when it comes to sex. In any case, the fact that some part of Kumiko was already trapped, and was trying to reach MWUB, tells us that NW was already involved, at this part of the timeline a month or two before. So there’s that.
I just peaked. There are approximately 55 pages left in Book Two. The plan for the next few chapters is something like this:
Chapter 12: Our hero discovers the wound on his cheek
Chapter 13: Creta Kano shows up and renews telling her story
Chapter 14: Creta Kano talks to him a bit longer, then leaves
Chapter 15: May Kasahara resurfaces and we hear a bit from her—I was wondering if this was going to even happen. After she tried to kill MWUB, I didn’t know they were going to even talk again. I thought she might just write him one more letter. Edit: That might in fact be what happens.
Then comes Book Three. I remember that in Book Three, I think May Kasahara and the Kano sisters take a bit of a back seat. Our hero has new companions. He meets this lady, and becomes a prostitute, and she is like his pimp. He performs the odd service of letting these women touch his wound. They pay money for this; he has it deposited to his accounts. This is perhaps pro-sex work? I have become more Christian in the last 15 years; I might be inclined to judge this. Of course, I have not lived up to these Christian values myself, so I would be a total idiot to judge. Alas, I am a total idiot. Anyway, another main character in that Book Three is the woman-pimp’s assistant, a guy who never speaks. And in one amazing flashback, I think the Wind-Up bird itself shows up at his house when he was a child, and does some sneaky thing and steals the kid’s voice. And we are to understand that is the kid that became this assistant. This assistant who is, by all accounts, beautiful. But who or what is the wind-up bird?
Lieutenant Mamiya will be back, under I don’t remember what pretext. And our hero will make his return to the well, eventually. Still, there’s a lot of pages left. We’ll see how it all goes. How many other recollections of World War II? There is one that takes place on submarines or boats. I can’t remember.
In my little glimpse ahead, at the end of Chapter 14 or 15, our hero was considering his options—and one of them, apparently, was the option of running away with Creta Kano. He decides against that option. Is it male wish-fulfillment that he had that option? Nah, that’s just men—they have options.
I should end with something else that Kumiko wrote; the guilt she started to experience after her affair was over. During the affair she had lied to him “without a twinge of regret. … That very fact is what started to torment me. It made me feel as if I were an empty, meaningless, worthless person.” I suppose I could identify with that. By failing to fill myself up with purpose, do I make myself a vulnerable vessel for evil spirits to inhabit? They poured lust into Kumiko, somehow, some way. What might they pour into us, if we’re not careful?
Chapter 12
Very tame start to this chapter; it ends with how the last one ended. Malta Kano has called at 2 in the morning, in large part to check up on her sister. But she gives away, on this call, that her “powers” kind of allow her to know the location of MWUB, and her sister, at all times—but that when he goes to the bottom of the well, he evades her scrutiny. And we are about to learn that Creta does the same thing. We are about to, in the coming pages, find that Creta has snuck down the wall right after MWUB vacated it; and the inescapable conclusion is she’s hiding from her sister—she’s happy to have found a place where she can hide from her sister. And MWUB somehow intuits this; not all this, but just … he intuits that it will be good for him not to tell Malta what Creta is up to. This is perhaps his reptile instinct for getting pussy kicking in; maybe he can sense that he might get fucked by Creta Kano here in a minute if he plays his cards right. He’s not even tripping on the morality of such a thing; he mentioned earlier in the chapter that he hadn’t fucked for like two months! The whole time Kumiko was having the greatest sex of her life, she wasn’t having sex with him. She invented a bladder infection. She felt not even a twinge of regret! Crazy how lust takes over … Malta’s “senses” also tell her that something has changed about MWUB’s physical appearance—but he doesn’t know about that yet.
The next morning, MWUB goes down the block to check his theory—is Creta Kano in the well? Indeed she is. She’s like—what am I doing down here? I’m thinking, just like you were! It is a good place to think. No, she doesn’t want to get out to talk yet. He could come down and join her in the well if he wants to. She’s glad he didn’t tell Malta. He goes to sleep; gets up and goes back to check on her at 9 a.m. and she’s gone. The ladder’s gone too. He figures she’s probably okay; goes back home, and … SHAVES! Thus discovering the new blue mark on his cheek. He’s thrown by it. It’s as if perhaps he wasn’t sure how real the Cutty Sark hotel world was, but now there’s no denying it. Because, yeah, he has a mild panic attack. But he composes himself. He sits on the couch and watches the rain outside.
In the early afternoon, he calls his uncle, for some small talk. Seems odd; but then he’s trying to get connected to the world again, after all the weirdness he’s been through. He doesn’t let on about Kumiko’s disappearance. … After their conversation, he thinks about going shopping, but feels weird going out of the house with the blue mark on his face. He decides not to. He goes to bed early. In the middle of the night, he wakes up to go to the bathroom, and notices there’s a woman in bed next to him, and that it’s Creta Kano. So there we are. Day Seven finally becomes Day Eight
Chapter 13
So Creta Kano was absolutely naked in his bed beside him. So I’m thinking, “Damn how forward of her; she really wants to partner up with him.” He puts a comforter on her, then goes into the living room and sleeps on the couch. There is one mini-failure in the narration. It says he opened up a book about the Russo-Japanese war, that he had gotten it at the library in the time that’s passed since he met Lieutenant Mamiya … and he reads a few paragraphs of it before passing out. But the book has described his entire life, every day of it, since he met Mamiya. He met Mamiya on the day that Kumiko left. Every day since has been described; no trips to the library were included in those descriptions. I suppose that Murakami might claim that MWUB went to the library the day he met Mamiya. That day isn’t totally described; he goes home, finds that Honda left him an empty box, and then, nothing else. The next chapter is talking about the next day. Still, I would describe this as an error. He is writing as if he’s had months pass, but he never has. He’s been describing events day-to-day, with no room for “interpretation” around this. This is Day Eight. Mamiya met him on Day One. The style of narration hasn’t included any leaps forward, not yet. Mistake Number One!
Anyway. He wakes up the next morning and she’s cooking breakfast, wearing Kumiko’s clothes. Again—very forward. However, we find out that she wasn’t really all that forward, insomuch as … she hadn’t showed up and taken off her clothes. Rather, she had been magically removed from the well and re-constituted in bed next to MWUB, naked. She didn’t know how to answer the question, “Where are your clothes?” Actually, her total lack of concern over this seems another author error. She should have been freaked the fuck out … instead she gets up and makes breakfast. Likely? Unlikely. Anyway, it’s all kind of nice for our hero, who gets to have breakfast with this beautiful woman who has some supernatural relationship with his wife, we are starting to realize.
We start to realize this a little bit more in the second half of the chapter, in which we return to Creta Kano’s story. Of what NW did to her. The chapter ends mid-story, so I hesitate to state conclusions. But some things are clear. When she met NW, she was in this really fucked up state, of being a prostitute in the service of the mob, practically a slave; she was depressed beyond belief and couldn’t feel anything. NW changed all that, with what he did to her. But I don’t know how yet; I haven’t gotten to the end. At the end of this chapter, she is lying in bed naked, where he left her, totally enveloped in darkness. NW has made her feel “as is my physical self were splitting in two from the inside out.” She says it was extremely painful and pleasurable at the same time … “Do you know what I mean?” No, not really, Creta, but it’s an entertaining-as-hell description. “Then … Out from between the two cleanly split halves of my physical self came crawling a thing that I had never seen or touched before. How large it was I could not tell, but it was as wet and slippery as a newborn baby. I had absolutely no idea what it was. It had always been inside me, and yet it was something of which I had no knowledge. This man had drawn it out of me.”
This is actually the second allusion to a foreign object … that is unresolved. Murakami is the king of unresolved mysteries. The first one was when the sensations started—after he had awakened a lot of her feelings but the pain-pleasure hadn’t yet begun … “he put something inside me from behind. What it was, I still have no idea. It was huge and hard, but it was not his penis. I am certain of that. I remember thinking that I had been right: he was impotent after all. … Whatever it was that he put inside me, it made me feel pain for the first time …”.
Chapter 14
The story continues … it’s somewhat denouement, her attempting to explain how she then settled into her life as a channel or medium working for Malta. She was (somehow) able to quit prostitution with no pushback from her mob-bosses. Before she re-unifies with Malta, she spends time doing what sounds like total bliss: spending entire days sitting at a park, or going to a library, or riding around the city on the train, or spending all day in a movie theater. (Actually the train idea no longer sounds palatable since the conditions on trains have degraded quite a bit.) This was time she was taking to “get used to my new self.” There seems a little discrepancy between her finding her new self due to the NW incident but then her not being able to use it, or not ready for it—like she still now we’re about to find out in five years of working with Malta not entirely sure she has a new self yet. Like it’s some long transition period.
She describes having this ability to separate herself from her body; she did it at first to avoid feeling pain. Can she do it any time she wants, MWUB wants to know? No, not any time. But she can do it more than most. This sense of being in some transition place is partly due to what Malta tells her when they meet up again. Malta says “The worst is over for you, and will never come back.” But a couple caveats: “Without a true self, though, a person can not go on living. It is like the ground we stand on.” That’s not exactly a direct quote—it’s paraphrased from Creta. But then this is Creta quoting Malta directly: “There is one thing, however, which you must never forget, and that is that your body has been defiled by that man. It is a thing that should never have happened. … The defilement … remains inside you, and at some point you will have to rid yourself of it.”
MWUB is like, wait so you were sent into my mind to have sex with me in my dream, by your sister, during which time NW was a client of hers. Meaning that Malta Kano used you as a medium to hunt around inside my mind. What was she looking for? This is like, good, MWUB is asking good questions. Creta has no answers for him; she seems kind of rube-like, assuming her sister’s innocence—but then it’s Murakami who trained me to doubt Malta’s innocence by having him help Creta hide from her sister at the bottom of the well. “She did this for your sake, Mr. Okada. That is what I believe.” Anyway … the rest of the chapter is about her plans to go to Crete. She has abruptly decided upon them while she was thinking in the well. In discussing it she says her time as a medium has been to help her … or she believes Malta would see it that way. “She believes that by passing the minds or egos of a variety of people through me, she will make it possible for me to obtain a firm grasp on my own self. Do you see what I mean? It works for me as a kind of vicarious experience of what it feels like to have an ego.”
She invites MWUB to come to Crete with her … and then, after they have a stroll in the neighborhood, she wants to have physical sex with him. Separately from the Crete invite. She wants him to pay for it too; so that it’s a clear point of demarcation ending her time as a prostitute. At first he says he doesn’t pay for flesh, but then she suggests he could pay with some of his wife’s clothing, which he no longer wants or needs. So they agree on this, and he has sex with her “Quietly and gently.” The sex is marked by his own feeling of surreal-ness. The fact that her body is very similar to Kumiko’s is part of that. The fact that he fucks her “quietly and gently” strains credulity a little bit—who has sex gently? But then I guess, if he wasn’t wearing a condom, I guess maybe he could come without riding hard, hard, hard … If I had to guess, I’d guess he wasn’t wearing a condom. Which makes this sex of theirs pretty damned consequential. He claims he’s not ready to go to Crete because he hasn’t spoken to Kumiko—that situation isn’t resolved yet. But he is not above being pretty damned disloyal to her. His proclamation of loyalty is: “The one thing I need to do is talk to Kumiko. Until we meet face-to-face and she tells me our life together is finished, I can’t do anything else. How I’m going to go about finding her, though, I have no idea.” So that’s a kind of loyalty, I guess. My own emotions are getting all into this; my own feelings about sex, and what amount of it is enough of it, and have I had enough of it? So I’m begrudging him the sex he’s getting; I have a resentment against the world. It’s the I haven’t had enough sex resentment, and now I resent fictional characters for getting too much of it. Does it feel like wish-fulfillment that this author is giving his character some sex? It is free sex—the one illusion … the persistence of this illusion is astonishing LOL.
One other note from earlier in the chapter. As she’s relating how she saw NW a second time at Malta’s house, when he showed up to hire Malta … MWUB jumps in to be like, all I know is we hate each other. Why does he hate me so much? And she simply answers, “(NW) is a person who belongs to a world that is the exact opposite of yours. In a world where you are losing everything, Mr. Okada, (NW) is gaining everything. In a world where you are rejected, he is accepted. And the opposite is just as true. Which is why he hates you so intensely.” I suppose this helps explain her attraction to MWUB; she is, after all, possessed of her own reason to hate NW. This is actually at the end of the chapter, when they are about to have sex. They are negotiating the price for the sex, and Creta says, “Then I will be saved.” Saved—liberated from the defilement … She says that hatred is very dangerous. “It is like a two-edged sword. When you cut the other person, you cut yourself. The more violently you hack at the other person, the more violently you hack at yourself.”
Their last exchange before they have sex is about how it was that hatred of NW’s she was able to feel that split her flesh into two and defiled her.
Their last exchange after sex is her prophecy that she’d better go with her to Crete or something bad, very bad, is going to happen to him. Day Eight is over
Editor’s Thought: I wonder if Creta Kano’s idea to go off to Crete with MWUB was planted in her mind by her sister? Like—NW basically wants to get rid of this jerk his sister has married. Not because he cares about her sister in a normal brotherly way; if that were it, it’d be nothing. No, he cares about his sister in an evil way: he has his own deep shame over what he did to their other late sister; and he knows she knows it, and so he wants to deprive her of agency, to snuff her out. He wants to snuff out the whole world, really. Wants to snuff out their ability to love and be intimate, in particular. He would rather reduce sex to sexual economics. The back and forth. He’s not bad at negotiating. So he sees prostitutes, and he obtains from one of them this wild sex lust essence, and then he plants it much later on his sister. And he goes to the spiritual medium to see if she can’t help him get rid of … I don’t know. LOL
Chapter 15
Our hero wakes up on the couch; we don’t know how much time has passed. It might be Day Nine, but it might not be. Now our hero might have some time to go to the library. May Kasahara is calling, sounding totally inappropriately happy with herself, calling him MWUB and saying, “Tell me, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, are you mad at me?”
“I don’t know,” he says, but then he agrees to meet her.
She is wearing a very skimpy bikini—he is amazed how little cloth there is in it. He has a mark on his face; she asks him about it. Then he says something that kind of alludes to being down in a well without food for days. It’s a slightly passive-aggressive remark, and so she renews her question: is he mad at her?
He lets her off the hook by saying he’s got “tons of things (he has) to think about before (he starts) getting mad at you.” They then have this back-and-forth; she tries to excuse herself by saying she would have saved him eventually, and she really thought perhaps she was helping him. And he doesn’t let her off the hook with this; he says if it had really come down to it like she said her plan was, to wait till things got dicey and then save him, he says “If you went that far, all it would have taken was one last push.” Perhaps provoked by this bit of info, she offers some vulnerability and relates: 1) She herself went into the well after he got out, and after Creta Kano got out. She said that while she was down there, this “gooshy white thing like a lump of fat” inside of her was taking her over, eating her up. She describes this scared feeling it gives her, and she wants to share it with someone; she said she had wanted to hear MWUB have feelings related to dealing with this same thing. He then thinks to ask her, since it must have been on his mind after hearing Creta Kano’s crazy story, if May has ever felt that she had been defiled by something. May remarks on how the meaning of that word seems vague, which MWUB admits. Then he has a follow-up, sort of unrelated, which is why does May think about death all the time? This turns out to really open up May.
So it turns out, we learn here, that May has killed before. She played with the idea of killing MWUB accidentally, and playfully—but she had already previously killed her boyfriend accidentally, and playfully. She says that “We did stuff like htat all the time. It was like a game. I’d cover his eyes or tickle him when we were on the bike. But nothing ever happened. Until that day …”
The thing that goes on in this chapter is that MWUB kind of provides some space for May Kasahara; she gets to be open and vulnerable and as a result, perhaps she gets to heal from these things that haunt her. And this is in part because he treats her like such an adult. He doesn’t judge her or talk down to her. He shares a little about himself, and lets her share a little about herself. At the same time, if anybody had ever walked in on them it would have been seen as wildly inappropriate pedophilia. I mean, if this were an American story. Maybe in Japan it’s more liberal. But yeah, this chapter in particular, with her especially skimpy bikini. I skipped over it, but I wanted to mention that they take turns spraying each other with the garden hose because it’s so hot out; it’s like the Wild Things car wash scene in May Kasahara’s back yard. But in the midst of that, you have this healing; and you have May explaining her sense of what MWUB is going through; he seems to be taking on the whole world and she says let’s face it, he’s a heavy underdog. It’s inexplicable how she knows this, but she does, and he says, “I understand completely.” A kind of nice notion she has when she explains the inexplicable is that she says it feels as if he is fighting for her in his fight. One possible frame on this is: His fight is with NW, with this adult situation; but it’s important he not cut corners or do the wrong thing because as a good guy, he needs to model what’s good—for the kids. For May and … anyone else. But then yeah. Anyway, she admits to being a little overwhelmed by his story and his struggle—and maybe this speaks to the pedophilia angle. A kid shouldn’t be this exposed to adult stuff, maybe. Of course, kids are gonna get exposed to adult stuff one way or another. But at least they can take their time; and they can do what May’s going to do. She’s decided to go bac to school, to go back to a world that’s a little more normal. And she seems to admit that this is good; there was something surreal or abnormal about her sedentary life, where … I don’t know why she’s so ignored by her family … But there she is, in the back yard tanning all day, all weekend. And doing her weird wig job, there’s that, too. Ahh, this is all a bit all over the place. But in the final moments of it, she presses her palm onto his cheek, then has him close his eyes and then touches her lips, and then her tongue, to his blue mark. Then she takes his hand and puts it to the wound beside her eye. It’s a half-inch scar she got in the accident that killed her boyfriend. And we have this final bit of inappopriate sexual tension. Geez, Murakami …
Oh yeah and, when they’re having their Wild Things moment in the water, it is remarked-upon that the hose gets well water, pure and unpolluted. Weird, MWUB says, isn’t it, that there’s a dry well across the alley, but the Kasahara family well is all filled with plentiful water. Hmmm.
Chapter 16
MWUB starts to set in motion the Crete-with-Creta plan, but his uncle doesn’t really approve. Or rather, his uncle reacts. His uncle reacts by visiting him at the house, and asking him about the mark, and MWUB doesn’t give a straight answer. But he is not a good liar; he is flat-footed; he is often flat-footed. When pressed by his uncle to sit down and think hard about what it is that’s most importnat to you, he responds: “I have been thinking about that. … But things are so complicated and tangled together. I can’t seem to separate them out and do one thing at a time. I don’t know how to untangle things.” This reminds me of his strategy with May Kasahara when he was at the bottom of the well, and she had pulled the ladder. With zero strategy about how to proceed forward on his own, he just sort of takes down his own armor and reveals stuff about himself. About how Kumiko left him. He just has that type of surrender as a strategy. It’s different than the type of surrender recommended by David Hawkins. It’s an interpersonal surrender; like rather than attempt to exercise control over this interaction or relationship, I’m going to let go of control and indeed, give myself over to the conversational partner, give them information that could give them control. In some sense that’s not passive, because it’s a little bit daring. It’s a style of comedy in a way; some comics do attempt to use the stage as therapy. But it’s passive because in taking the revealing action, one invites the other side to act. One cedes the field of action to the other side.
Anyway, the uncle—not a major character by any stretch, contributes a big bit to MWUB’s future trajectory here by suggesting two things. One, that he should start by thinking about the simplest things. And two, that an example of this is to stand on.a street corner somewhere day after day and look at the people who come by there. MWUB takes this idea to heart just as he had, previously, taken to heart the well idea from the Mamiya story, or from Honda’s advice. And so, he took the train to Shinjuku (wherever that is), and set about finding spots from which to observe people. After a bit of time doing this, he meets the woman who will transform his life into the life of being a vessel, or a medium, or a prostitute (of the flesh or of the mind, I’m not sure). But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Chapter Titles (so far)
Just as well we don’t try to fill out the Book Three chapter titles—after all, there are 39 of them! More short chapter titles in Book Three, or so it would seem.
Wow, man. You know, if Book Two of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is like the New Testament, then Chapter 16 is definitely like Revelations—the weirdest chapter, extremely disconnected from the others. I mean, the first 14 happen in a definite number of days, the events bunched up against each other. Of course I suppose the arrival of Creta Kano does make time get a little loopy. And so we have some uncertain time between 14 and 15. But then, while the first 14 chapters took place in less than nine days, Chapter 16 makes 11 days go by all at once. While MWUB’s trip to the bottom of the well definitely feels like the most memorable event — perhaps it is the most singular and memorable event of the entire book. But that takes up just over two days of his life. Meanwhile, at the advice of his uncle, he goes to a random office plaza and stares at people’s faces for eleven days. Murakami doesn’t go as deep into this as he does into MWUB’s well experience. Here, he just notes that in staring at people’s faces, he can just sort of forget about everything else. He talks to almost nobody, the one exception being the forty-something well-dressed woman who will become an important character in Book Three. In this chapter she sits down next to him at the park bench and stares at the mark on his face while he stares at her. She mysteriously asks him if he has any money.
So at the end of the eleventh day, a Sunday, MWUB notices as he’s about to walk home, the guitar player, the weird guitar player he saw play in Sapporo on the night that Kumiko got an abortion. This was in one of his flashbacks-within-flashbacks that was related to us during his time in the well; he was flashing back to Kumiko’s pregnancy. That night had been something of a nightmare for him, and this random guitar player had creeped him out (adding insult to his injury) by doing this weird performance in which he burned his own skin with a candle. But now, the guitar player is not performing; he’s just walking. He’s walking a long way; he walks clear out of downtown and into some off-the-beaten path ‘hood with a lot of empty apartments in it. Finally the guitar player enters a house. Our hero had decided just to follow him. In the midst of so deciding, our hero noticed that he was possessed with a lot of forlorn anger, anger at everything that had happened with Kumiko. So then he lets his curiosity get the better of him and he goes into the house that the guitar player had gone into. Pretty reckless; I suppose from a practical standpoint, he can’t really complain that the guitar player reacted by attacking him with a baseball bat. I mean, he could complain. Why didn’t the guy just lock the door? Whatever; MWUB gained the upper hand with some kicks, and then his anger surprises him and he kind of overdoes it beating up the guitar player, causing him a lot of bleeding. And the bleeding guitar player, despite his intense agony, starts laughing, which is — something similar happens in Kafka on the Shore and maybe in one of Murakami’s short stories—it’s a repeated story, where a villain of some kind is attacked and the attempt to use rage to snuff out the villain causes the villain to laugh through his own mangled but decaying body.
Before running out of the house, MWUB does look at the guitar player’s case and finds it empty. (He notes that there is no guitar and no candles). Then he takes a bus home, but he doesn’t want to sleep. He knows he’ll have terrible dreams. Indeed, he does. In his dream he re-lives the whole incident with the guitar player, except instead of the guitar player losing the upper hand and getting his ass kicked, this time the guitar player stays in control, and he pulls a knife from his pocket and skins himself alive, just like the way the Russian had Mamiya’s cohort skinned back by the Khalke River in Mongolia. Then the dead skin of the guitar player crawls on top of a paralyzed MWUB.
This all seems just about unrelated to everything else, but it is related. When he wakes from the horror, he realizes that, in contrast with the previous eleven days, he has now reached a conclusion: He will not go to Crete. He can’t; he believes that he needs to “pull Kumiko back into this world. Because if I didn’t, that would be the end of me. This person, this self that I thought of as ‘me,’ would be lost.”
Note: His trip following this guitar player is very much like a dream itself, even before it leads to an actual dream. The guitar player is like a figment of his imagination—he is an image from a potent memory. The events of this part of the chapter are analagous to getting spun out by some thought of the past; his long march across town into a dance with death in the form of this guitar player—it’s like the crazy, dangerous places we can go when we follow old resentments and that kind of thing. I guess one sensation, reading this part of this chapter, is how close to being down-and-out MWUB is at this stage. I didn’t notice it on my first read; I was too busy being awestruck by his bravery for sitting there and looking at people from that park bench every day. He’s a unique guy, and that was a crazy thing to do. But it left him alone and feeling empty, and pushed to the very edge, nearly to death—pushed to a level of desperation that caused him to follow a random stranger across town at night, just based on some inchoate need for answers; his ambivalence toward life nearly leads to his death; if the guy had a few more strikes with that baseball bat … We might imagine that the guy, like MWUB, was or is full of fear during the moment they share together … And when MWUB or any other Murakami protagonist attacks a possessed, evil loser, it’s possible that the possession will reveal itself; the character will reappear as he was before, mostly unchanged but perhaps sometimes a little more likable.
MWUB’s encounter with the guitar player is so dream-like that in my first reading, it didn’t impact the story as much as you’d think it would, or as much as you’d think Murakami would have intended. I mean, here his character would seem to have lost a lot of his innocence; he’s literally got blood all over him as he takes the bus home. How can we consider to think of him as innocent—he has now followed a man to his home and then nearly beaten that man to death! He has lost the presumption of innocence, hasn’t he? But he didn’t really, not in this reader’s mind, because the incident was so wacky and so isolated that I waved it away as a dream. Still, I suppose Murakami doesn’t demand that you view his protagonists as pure, and it doesn’t bother him for us to see MWUB fighting, getting his hands dirty, wrestling in the dirt, scrapping for his life. He has to fight; and this is the realization he comes to. That he has to fight for Kumiko. He cannot just shrug it off.