So this is a book about
butlers. I agree with the comments of the various reviewers printed on the
back cover. It is indeed a "dream of a book". "Remarkable, strange,
moving". It certainly did deserve the Booker Prize of 1989. But before
getting carried away with all of this, we should really put this whole
butler business into perspective. I found
this
interesting website, devoted to explaining the wonderful opportunities to
be had if you want to be a butler in this modern day and age. So you see,
you can get a "fabjob" as a butler, typically earning $50,000-$100,000, or
more per year. Great, isn't it? Certainly better than what mathematics
brings in! But what I don't understand is, how does a "fab" butler have
the free time to enjoy all his fabulous earnings? Or is all of this
something which is of a completely different quality than the butlering
which Mr. Stevens, the hero of our book, indulged in back in the inter-war
years of England?
For me, one problem with this book was that I saw the
movie, staring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, on television a couple
of years ago. Perhaps I even saw it twice, or at least during the second
viewing, watched it for some length of time. So when reading the book, I
had Anthony Hopkins' character in my minds eye. He projects a feeling of
suppressed aggression, of bitterness at what is not. Emma Thompson was a
very lovable Miss Kenton, but Anthony Hopkins was hardly a fab butler! If
I was Reggie Cardinal, then I would certainly not want Anthony Hopkins to
be telling me about the birds and the bees! But after getting into the
book, with an effort of willpower, I was able to suppress this vision of
Anthony Hopkins, and instead form a more sensible picture of Mr. Stevens.
A defining moment in Mr. Stevens butlering career is
the big "conference" at Darlington Hall in 1922 (or is it 23?). Lord
Darlington correctly realizes that if the Versailles Peace Settlement
(forcing Germany to pay crippling reparation payments, flowing through
England and France directly into the bank vaults of New York) is not
changed, Europe will be overcome with disaster. Mr. Stevens must create a
pleasant atmosphere to ensure the success of the conference. The challenge
is increased through the unfortunate circumstance that Mr. Stevens'
father, who has been kindly hired by Lord Darlington to keep him going in
his old age, chooses this very night to expire in a massive stroke!
However, Mr. Stevens is able to make the best of things, since Dr.
Meredith, who had been called to look after the father, had thus
conveniently arrived at Darlington Hall, and so to the great satisfaction
of M. Dupont, the seemingly touchy French delegate, there was a medical
doctor present to look at the blister on his foot. This triumph of
butlering skill allowed M. Dupont to declare his true assessment of the
situation. Namely, contrary to all the bad things said about France in
relation to the Versailles business, the real culprit was that horrible,
sleazy American, Mr. Lewis, who was the cause of all evil. Fair enough.
But as we have seen, despite Mr. Stevens best efforts, Europe did, in
fact, become overcome with disaster in the aftermath of this episode.
One thing that didn't come across in the movie was that
the action in the book actually takes place much later, in 1956. Europe is
totally drained, Lord Darlington has himself expired, and so various rich
Americans are coming to buy up what remains. Darlington Hall has been
bought by the jovial Mr. Farrady in order to show his friends what great
things he can buy with all his money. An American couple visits, but they
mock his purchase, telling him that not only the house is "mock" English,
but the butler, Mr. Stevens, is too! However our hero decides that he
might be able to save the situation by teaching himself how to banter with
Mr. Farrady, and by increasing the number of servants which, in line with
the idea of increased productivity in the modern age, has dropped to the
ominously low level of only four. So, acting on a slightly emotional
letter which Miss Kenton had sent him (she had left Darlington Hall 20
years before to marry another butler, even though she secretly loved Mr.
Stevens) he motored off across England to see if he could get Miss Kenton
to come back. But she doesn't.
The recurring theme in the book was the quality of
"dignity". I can't say that I know lots about this theme, but it seems to
me that in a basic sense, being a butler, and being dignified, are totally
contradictory states of existence. Now it may well be that butlers put on
a big show of being dignified in order to mask their true identities.
Thinking about this, I have recently read that there are as many as 300
billionaires in the United States at the present time. This surprises me,
since I had thought that Bill Gates, with his Windows (which I, of course,
along with all of the mathematicians here, do not use), towers in the
lonely isolation of his immense riches with his 50 billion American
dollars. But this is not the case! Warren Buffet is only a couple of
billion shy of Bill Gates. Then there are hundreds of others with all
their billions, going right down the scale to a mere one billion. Thus we
see that there are hundreds of billionaires with money to splash about on
all these butlers, and what have you. Who knows what sorts of degenerate
lifestyles these riches lead to?
So is Bill Gates' butler extremely dignified? I can
hardly imagine this. Just looking at Bill Gates' figure, I imagine that
his butler spends half his time driving over to the nearest McDonalds to
get him a cheeseburger. Perhaps Warren Buffet's butler does look
dignified. But then, as with Mr. Stevens, he must wait cautiously outside
the smoking room, while Warren Buffet speaks of the great affairs of the
world with his newest protege, the designated next President of the USA,
Arnold Schwarzenegger. As for the butler at the White House, whoever he
may be, I can scarcely imagine what he is up to. The internet is full of
various ideas concerning the present conditions in that household.
Whatever that state of affairs may be, most people seem to agree that the
butler during both Kennedy's and Clinton's tenures had less dignified
tasks to attend to. So Mr. Stevens definition of the term "dignified",
namely the ability to keep one's clothes on in public, may not have been
far from the mark. Finally we must not forget Diana's butler, Paul
Burrell. I must admit that I haven't bothered to read his book. But it
seems to me that Mr. Stevens would not elevate him to being in the
category of one of the "great" butlers, since he did not deny that he had
served Diana.
These are the third and
fourth adventures of Inspector Morimoto and his assistant, the young,
mathematically trained police woman, Atsuko Suzuki, written by my
compatriot in name, the mathematician Timothy Hemion. I had wanted to wait
until I had read all four of the books before writing something more here,
but unfortunately, although Luce had the second book, "Inspector Morimoto
and the Diamond Pendants", in their computer catalog, and so I ordered it
weeks ago, it still hasn't arrived! There seems to have been some
confusion, and they have made some inquiries with their suppliers. But at
least in this way, I still have one more adventure to look forward to
reading. It seems that Timothy Hemion will not keep up the pace of writing
which he has achieved in these first four volumes, and so we will have to
wait another year before the fifth book comes out. But as I say, since
Luce had no prospect of quickly delivering "The Famous Potter" and "The
Sushi Chef", I took the step of ordering them through Amazon.com. This is
the first time I have ever ordered anything via the internet. Who knows
what worms, or viruses, or trojan horses may be awaiting my vital
information somewhere down the telephone lines? But then I realized that
the information I would be transmitting was not very secret at all.
Nothing to do with credit cards. A simple bank transfer which could be
recalled at any time it might be thought to be in error. Also I had
thought that perhaps nobody would be at home when the postman came with
the package. But really, it's seldom that nobody is at home, and anyway,
the postman is a very sensible person. So I went ahead and clicked away at
Amazon, and in less than two weeks the postman rang our bell and delivered
the books!
These books are called "detective stories", but they
are not just little logical puzzles in the style of Agatha Christie, where
some number of possible murderers are all together in a house, or a train,
or a ship, and the reader is then presented with a set of facts, and the
game is to "win" by deducing "who done it" before the solution is revealed
on the last page of the novel. Once or twice I've tried reading such
stories, but I've given up with boredom before finishing. These books of
Timothy Hemion are quite different. If anything, they remind me of the
Swedish "Commissar Beck" programs which were shown on television. I think
there were only 5 or 6 of them, and I think they were based on some
Swedish detective story novels, but I haven't read them. As with Morimoto
and Suzuki, we have these Swedish policemen being confronted with various
cases from one episode to the next, and as in real life, the characters
continue, and they often think about their previous adventures. The
difference is that Commissar Beck, and particularly his sometimes violent
assistant, Gunwald Larson, are often confronted with scenes of shocking
brutality which provoke Gunwald to answer in kind. Gunwald is no
mathematician! although he often gets the right idea. However his weakness
is that he must pursue that idea, often against all logic, bullying the
various characters which come in his way, until the crime is finally
solved. Surely this is often the way things really are in life. It's not a
silly little logical puzzle. The force of events gradually reveal more and
more about a crime, and in the end - hopefully - the truth becomes
apparent to all. The difference is that, unlike Gunwald Larson, neither
Morimoto nor Suzuki have as yet become physically violent. There is
Sergeant Yamada, the judo champion of the Okayama Police Department. But
until now he has not needed to demonstrate his skills in a professional
capacity.
So as we gradually learn more and more about the lives
of Morimoto and Suzuki, we form a better picture of the whole situation
there, around the "Inland Sea" of Japan. I can well believe that it was a
great shock, especially for Morimoto, to hear about the tragic train crash
in Osaka which we saw recently in the news. I have the feeling that, as
the series progresses, Timothy Hemion is enjoying the development of his
characters. "The Famous Potter" was a good read, and we learn much about
the traditional pottery industry of Japan. Then "The Sushi Chef" is
concerned with a phenomenon which is perhaps becoming more and more of a
danger to everyone, not just in Japan.
How are we to deal with official "experts" who put on a
show of knowing everything, yet common sense might show that they are
wrong? In the case at hand, a professor in the field of probability theory
gives evidence which appears to be irrefutable. But on closer examination,
it is pure nonsense. Surely there are many people in the real world today
who have been put away in prison on the basis of such false testimony. I
think this is a real problem, and I am sure that it is always a good thing
if experts with inflated opinions of themselves become deflated. Although
there are many bad examples of distorting the truth with statistics, it
seems to me that an even greater danger is the increased use of DNA tests.
These tests are certainly often helpful, but surely we should always
accept the results of the tests with skepticism. The world is filled with
countless, invisibly small molecules. Undoubtedly most crime scenes are a
total organic mess. A swab is taken somewhere or other, containing
trillions, or even more, molecules. Then, using the technique of PCR, an
organic "chain reaction" is set in motion in the laboratory, making huge
numbers of copies of a single molecule which, by chance, may have been
found on the swab (assuming it wasn't contaminated by a microscopic waft
of air, or whatever, in the meantime). On the basis of such evidence,
which few people understand, and which the professors, putting themselves
up as great experts, can't be bothered to explain in great detail to a
courtroom (in any case, the court would not be prepared to bother itself
with all the myriad possibilities of uncertainty which might come into
play here), people are condemned to prison. It may be true that the tests
are often valid. But imagine the situation of a person who has been thrown
into prison on the basis of false DNA analysis. For such a person there is
absolutely no hope in the world! A belief in "science", however misguided
it may be in some cases, has taken the place of the same kind of belief in
religion which existed in medieval times.
This link, which I have
given to Haruki Murakami's "Official Website", is really well worth
visiting. Very cool. And
here is
another link, to a site which contains many reviews of his various books.
I wanted to know what the reviewers had said, since for me, this book was
somewhat of an enigma.
The story is very simple, and it is simply told. There
are basically three characters: the narrator, whose name I don't think was
revealed in the book, then Sumire, a young woman who would like to be a
novelist, and finally Miu, who is a woman in her late 30s. The narrator is
a young man, maybe 24 or 25, and he has drifted into being a school
teacher for younger children - say around 10 years old. He is in love with
Sumire, in the sense that life without her is meaningless. She needs him
too. He is the only person she can really talk to, and in her disoriented
life, she rings him on the telephone at 3 in the morning, then flows on
about things for hours. This must have left him rather bleary-eyed the
next day at school. Then Miu appears, who is the source of this enigma.
Sumire falls in love with Miu, and secretly wishes to love her physically
as well. The narrator finds this to be unfortunate, since he would like to
have Sumire too, but he accepts the way she is.
Miu is Korean, although she has grown up as a Japanese.
She has studied music and gone to Paris to further these studies, but when
there, something strange happened. In some way, the feeling, physical part
of her, split away from her in a surreal scene, and the part which she was
left with became half lifeless. Her hair became suddenly white. Thus, as a
person with no passion, she is no longer able to play music herself. She
can only listen to concerts, or recordings. Her family had a business
importing wine into Japan which she inherited on the sudden death of her
father, so she frequently travels to Europe to keep in touch with the wine
makers. She is an expert at judging music, wine, food, cloths, and
everything else you can buy. She is the elegant, perfect consumer of
modern life, with no deeper feelings.
Miu employs Sumire as her personal assistant, and they
go off together to Europe. They end up on a small Greek island, spending
hours each day lying on a beach in the Mediterranean sun with no clothes
on. This overwhelms Sumire, who in the middle of the night seems to have a
kind of fit and then does come nearer to Miu, but then the next day Sumire
apparently also loses herself in a surreal world of dreams. Perhaps she is
no longer a part of this world. She disappears, as if in a cloud of smoke.
Miu rings the narrator in the middle of the night in Tokyo, asking him to
come. His sudden flight into this Greek world of dreams leaves him still
whole, but disoriented. Sumire is never found again. It is a small island.
The Greek police tell them that if she had drowned, then the fishermen
would have found her body. Where could she be? Perhaps she is lost in the
depths of a cave which the police mention, but which is not further
discussed in the book.
So, in a sense this becomes a kind of ghost story. But
the ghosts are not people who have died, rather they are people who have
lost their feelings. Indeed, I think it is true that there are many such
ghosts in the world today. The glossy magazines one sees, full of the most
elegant, wonderful things to have, to buy, seem to belong to a ghost-like
world of refined, but meaningless feelings. This is the new, almost
religious feeling people seem to have developed when thinking about "the
economy", "consumption", and so forth.
The title, "Sputnik Sweetheart", came from the first
encounter between Sumire and Miu. Sumire wanted to talk about her
admiration of the Beatnik writer Jack Kerouac, but "Beatnik" - a
highly-charged, emotional movement back in the 1950s - came out in Miu's
mind as Sputnik, a Russian word meaning "traveling companion". The first
Sputnik was a lifeless, bleeping metallic sphere which orbited the Earth.
The second, which was launched on the 3rd of November, 1957, carried the
female dog Laika, on a trip of no return into the lifeless emptiness of
outer space.
According to the review of the
book in the Economist:
"European and American fiction moved on
from this kind of relentless nihilism, this fascination with feelings
of immeasurable emptinessnot to mention a fixation with the
Beatlesquite some time ago. But in Japan it is still popular,
especially among a burgeoning new generation of so-called freeters:
young people who cannot be bothered to get a full-time job because, like
Mr Murakamis latest heroine, Sumire, they can live off their parents.
Translated into English and shipped back to Europe and America, this
dark, if not particularly original, brew is rapidly attaining cult
status in the West too."
Maybe. I have no idea what is, or isn't cultist. And anyway, I often have
the feeling that the world has moved on in various directions to places
where I simply don't want to be! The Economist may object to "freeters" in
the modern world. But where would we be without them? I can imagine that
the writers for The Economist would dismiss most of us at the University
as being mere "freeters" as well!
So I thought it was a great book, and I've gone into
the bookshop at the University and have gotten the two other books by
Murakami which were also on the shelf there. Namely, "Norwegian Wood" and
"South of the Border, West of the Sun". I almost wish I could read
Japanese so that I could read these things in the original. When I do get
around to reading them, I'll report on it here:
Norwegian Wood: This book is
very different from Sputnik Sweetheart. In fact, this week I saw in the
paper that a small, local "arts" cinema here was showing a movie based on
another book of Murakami: "Tony Takitani". So we went to see it.
Unfortunately these "artistic" people don't bother with the ventilation of
their small cinema, and although nobody smokes these days in such a room,
the remains of earlier smoke are still present. Also my increasingly
inflexible back fits badly into such well-padded, but for me, ill-formed,
chairs. Nevertheless it was an extremely interesting film. Much better
than the junk Hollywood has degenerated into producing these days. (The
last thing we saw was The Aviator, which was so astonishingly stupid that
we left after having tediously endured the whole first half of that
ridiculous nonsense!) But to return to Tony Takitani, despite the fact
that was quite a moving film, in the end it was really nothing more than a
sketch of the plot of the book. Rather like reading the comic book
versions of the "classics", instead of having to read them to make some
dreadful "book report" for the English class at school. So this shows
that, at least with books such as those of Murakami, there is always much
more to the book than can be dealt with in a 90 minute movie. Tony
Takitani doesn't seem to have been translated into English yet. But at
least it was clear that the plot was totally different from that of
Sputnik Sweetheart, and also that of Norwegian Wood.
So what is Norwegian Wood all about? It's longer than
Sputnik Sweetheart. Also it's a more complicated story. But also a much
more "normal" story. So in this sense I was a bit disappointed. After
finishing it, I saw that the translator, Jay Rubin, had written a few
notes at the back, describing the circumstances surrounding this book.
Apparently many of Murakami's fans in Japan were also disappointed when
this book first came out in 1987, since it is just a "normal" love story.
But it must have struck a chord of very great resonance in the Japanese
mentality at that time, since it sold over 4 million copies. That is to
say, something like one in every twenty five Japanese bought this book! So
practically every one of them who has managed to elevate him, or herself
above the level of the "classical comics" has read it! Murakamai was
shocked by this, and he escaped from the country. He lived in Europe, then
the USA until 1995, when he finally ventured to return to Japan. But he
refused to be drawn into any television appearances, or whatever.
It seems that with Norwegian Wood he had set himself
the challenge of writing a "normal" novel, just to see what it would be
like. It deals with the life of a student, Toru Watanabe, in Tokyo in the
later 1960s. According to the notes at the end of the book, many readers
assumed that the story was taken from the life of the author during that
phase of his life. But he said that his actual life was much less
interesting, and it would only take 15 pages to describe it, rather than
the 386 pages of this book. Of course I was also a student in the later
1960s, and I can say that my life - at least in relationship to the
aspects dealt with in the book - was so boring that it could be described
in less than one page!
Watanabe (the name sounds to me like "Wanabe" - or
"Want to be" - which is somewhat distracting) was 19, going on 20 years
old. He was surrounded by girls who loved him. His late-adolescent sexual
fantasies were not not merely fantasies, but were lived out, in explicit
detail. His girlfriends were certainly not backward in describing their
sexual fantasies to him as well. But all of these sexual aspects of things
did not bring him happiness and fulfillment. His primary girlfriend,
Naoko, was really the girlfriend of his best friend at school. But then,
while still at school, that friend committed suicide, for some unexplained
reason, by sitting in a car in a closed garage, with the car's exhaust
brought through a tube into the interior of the car. Both Watanabe and
Naoko were devastated. They went for long walks together, day after day,
gradually coming together, even though both knew that the dead friend was
really the middle point of their relationship. But then, when Naoko was
younger, she had suddenly come into her sister's room to tell her that
dinner was ready, and she found her hanging dead by a rope around her
neck. To make matters worse, a brother or sister of her father or mother
had also committed suicide. This really ran in the family! So she ended up
in a place which was a kind of mix between a hippy compound out in the
mountains back of Kyoto, and a mental hospital. Watanabe was thinking of
her all the time, longing for her, writing her long love letters. She also
longed for him - sort of - but in the end, family tradition took the upper
hand, and she went out in the middle of the night to the surrounding
mountainous forests and hung herself from the branch of a tree, for some
unexplained reason. This devastated Watanabe. Luckily though, he had
already found the perfect companion in Midori, who was a wonderful girl, a
fellow student. The fact that he felt much guilt with respect to Naoko was
the cause of great initial difficulties with Midori, and I suppose these
feelings were then a cause of further disruptive emotions in their later
life together, which was no longer part of the scope of this book. But
still, Murakami writes so beautifully that his challenge to himself of
turning such a gushy story into something good was, indeed, a great
success.
One thing that I can't restrain myself from mentioning
is that this book, like so many books dealing with students and the 1960s,
describes a spirit of anarchy on the campus. Here in Germany, and
particularly in France, they seem to have made a great myth out of the
"spirit of '68", and so on. Well, in 1968 there was no more anarchy at the
Australian National University than there was in any other year that I
know of. I was just trying to pass my exams, like everybody else. And I
suppose that any Australian students who felt dissatisfied with life could
always - and did! - just go out into the hugeness of the great Australian
bush and get back to normal. But why did these Japanese and German and
French students make such a big deal of 1968? What did it have to do with
them? After all,
I was drafted to go to Vietnam and become involved in
that mess, not the students of France, Germany, or Japan! So I had to keep
studying, for its own sake, but also to keep my deferment from the draft
alive. Luckily the "Coalition of the Willing" of those days saw sense
before I had finished my studies. So I escaped!
Back then in 1968, LBJ, the then President of the USA,
was keen on keeping the coalition going, so he dropped in to Canberra to
make sure the Prime Minister was not about to get cold feet. Out of
curiosity, I drove out to Canberra Airport to have a look at him. Maybe
200 other people had the same idea. So they had put up a rope on the grass
next to the tarmac, to say that that was where the public should stand. To
begin with, one big jet landed before the one which was carrying LBJ, and
from it emerged a large, black, vintage convertible Cadillac, surrounded
by men in black suits with conspicuous bulges under their arms. I walked
over and peered into the Cadillac. It contained three or four machine guns
of the kind one used to see in gangster movies of the Chicago mafia of the
1930s. Those large, disc-like cannisters filled with machine gun bullets
hanging below the firing mechanism. After admiring all this mafia-like
stuff, I wandered back to the rope and watched LBJ's airplane land at
Canberra. It taxied over to us, he got out, descended the gangway, spoke
to some official-looking types, then decided to walk along the rope and
shake hands with the people standing there. So I shook his hand. He really
had a big hand. Very thick and muscular. I've never shaken hands with a
bigger, stronger hand than that in my whole life, even though here in
Europe it's normal to shake hands with everybody. Indeed, he was a very
tall, big man. His largeness doesn't come across in the pictures. So after
this, he got in a closed Cadillac, or perhaps it was a Lincoln
Continental, which they had also brought along with them, and I suppose he
went over to the Prime Minister to give him a severe talking to. After
that, he was scheduled to retire for the night at a certain hotel in
Canberra. Along with a few thousand other people, I went there to
demonstrate against him. We chanted things like "LBJ, LBJ, how many kids
did you kill today?" And so on. But it got later and later in the evening.
Still no LBJ. Finally it became known that, in his sneaky way, LBJ had
sneaked in the rear entrance to the hotel, and had already retired for the
night without experiencing our demonstration against him! So out of
frustration and anger at this lowly example of his lack of character,
everybody shouted "BOO" very loudly. I was extremely interested to see
that it was this moment which made all the international television news
on that day.
South
of the Border, West of the Sun: If Norwegian Wood was based -
ever so loosely - on 15 pages worth of the life of the author as a student
in Tokyo, then this book deals (again loosely) with 7 or 8 pages worth of
his childhood before leaving for the big city, and then another 7 or 8
pages worth of a rather premature midlife crisis at the age of 37 years.
It fast-forwards through the student-in-Tokyo phase of things, since that
has already been dealt with in the previous book. His name is no longer
Watanabe, but rather Hajime - which seems to me to be a bit more settled,
as a name. Nevertheless, the character is again full of his desperate
sexual adventures with various girlfriends. The ones from his childhood
come back to haunt him in his later life. The more intense childhood
girlfriend was Shimamoto, who he knew from his toddler period up to the
age of 12. (Of course - even for Hajime, with his enormous libido - this
was still the pre-sexual phase of things.) I think that Shimamoto was her
last name. Then when he met her - or perhaps he just met her haunting
image - during the midlife-crisis phase of this book, he called her
Shimamoto-san. The other childhood girlfriend was Izumi. In contrast to
Shimamoto, Izumi hated him, since he had gone off and had a number of
intense encounters with her cousin. So our hero just dropped Izumi, even
though she loved him. Thus the vision of her which came to haunt him later
was of an empty, but rather insane woman. As we can well imagine, all of
this caused rather a strain on his otherwise happy marriage, during this
early middle-aged phase of his life, to his wife Yukiko.
I very much like the name "Yukiko", since it reminds me
of a book I read many years ago by
Macdonald
Harris (that was just a pseudonym; his real name was Donald Heiney).
He dealt with some of the same themes as Murakami, but in a much lighter,
more varied way. Quite frankly, I have now had enough of Murakami, at
least for the time being. How nice it would be to read a few of the
Macdonald Harris' books which I haven't yet read! But unfortunately, some
time ago I looked into this and I found that his books are all out of
print and unobtainable. How ephemeral these things are! Macdonald Harris
was a great writer, so I think this is really a shame. He combined a
dream-like world of the inner thoughts with interesting adventures in the
outer world. For me, at least, this is preferable to Murakami's heavy
Japanese egotism.
But getting back to the present book, the title
consists of two parts. "South of the Border" (down Mexico way) was a song
of Nat King Cole, back then in the 1950s, or early 60s. It was on an LP
which was part of Shimamoto's father's record collection, which she played
when Hajime visited her. "West of the Sun" is the thought that perhaps
there is a farmer living all alone in the barren wasteland of the Siberian
tundra, toiling away, trying to grow crops. Everything is flat; the Sun
circles around the sky from East to West day after day, year after year in
its hopeless journey through remorseless time. The farmer then becomes
insane, and trudges off toward the West, soon to stumble and lose his
life's energies.
During Hajime's midlife crisis, he owned two "jazz
bars", or "clubs" in Tokyo. This reflects the fact, mentioned in the
biographical notes of the author, that Murakami himself opened a "jazz
club" in Tokyo called "Peter Cat". I couldn't really picture what this
was, since I have almost no experience at all of visiting "jazz clubs".
There is a kind of jazz club here in Bielefeld called "Bunker Ulmenwall".
I've only once been there. The brother of a friend is a professional jazz
saxophonist, whose style is totally non-melodic. He produces strange,
often disturbing noises on his instrument, using a most extreme technique.
So we went down into "The Bunker", which is a small, dark, underground
cavern, surrounded by reinforced concrete many meters thick - built to
protect the Nazi functionaries of Bielefeld from World War II bombs - and
listened to this stuff. (I'm sure that the fate of those horrible old
functionaries was not protected by all of this concrete. But at least they
left something solid for posterity to think about.) During this "concert",
if you could call it that, a couple of people were drinking beers, but the
bar was a rather primitive, simple affair. People came to hear this
strange music, in this strange room. It certainly isn't a place to go and
expect to eat expensive tid-bits! "Designer clothes" would be very out of
place indeed! Old jeans, T-shirts, maybe an old sweater would be the
appropriate attire. Actually, I read just a couple of weeks ago that Gilad
Atzmon (see above) had come to Bielefeld and played in The Bunker. I
really wished that I had known about it, since I would have liked to have
seen him. But in the interview in the paper, he said (if I recall it
rightly) that The Bunker is really cool, and also the reviewer in the
paper found his playing to be cool. So perhaps he will make another
appearance in the not-too-distant future.
What a contrast this is with the "jazz club" which
Murakami describes in his book! He makes a great effort to buy expensive
Italian clothes, in the hope that this will encourage people with more
money to come and spend it on the complicated and expensive "designer"
cocktails, which he has devised for his jazz bar. He explains in great
detail to Shimamoto that while anybody can just follow the instructions
about mixing a drink, still it only tastes good if he spends lots of money
getting the "best" bartender to work for him. Then he makes sure to pamper
his star bartender with lots of little things, in order to get even more
expensive people to keep coming to his club. The club itself is in a
building which his father-in-law, the yakuza-linked building contractor,
has just finished building in a modern, expensive fashion. (He gets angry
with his wife at one stage, since he becomes frustrated with the fact that
the father-in-law is drawing him into dangerous mafia wheelings and
dealings with the yakuza.) So he gives much thought to having the best,
most expensive interior decorator come to do things up from time to time.
Also he designs expensive little things to eat, to go with the cocktails.
That way, he hopes that the people become motivated to get even more drunk
in their designer fashions, listening to the "jazz" music.
How could anybody play jazz in an atmosphere like that?
I can hardly imagine it. The only thing I can imagine is something like
the hotel bar-lounge in that movie "Lost in Translation". Tinkling sort of
distant "musak". Playing the "evergreens" of "easy-listening" music to
deaden the trivial conversations at the tables, while Bill Murray drinks
one whiskey after the other, before Scarlett Johansson gets him away from
that dreadful "jazz club" and out into the real world. Imagining this, I
can understand why the real Murakami looks run-down - exhausted - in his
portrait pictures.
Inspector Morimoto and the Diamond
Pendants, by Timothy Hemion
How pleasant it was to read this book after all that
heavy stuff of Murakami! But I wonder what Japanese readers would prefer?
Do they really see the world in terms of the death-driven, erotic insanity
of Murakami's characters? I did very much enjoy the first of Murakami's
books (Sputnik Sweetheart) which I read, but the others just seemed to
wallow in a senseless depression. Timothy Hemion obviously has first-hand
experience of Japan, and I suppose he must know many people there who have
a very different existence from that typically described by Murakami. In
any case, thankfully, Morimoto and Suzuki remain concentrated on the task
at hand. There is no question of any dark, insane motives behind their
thoughts. I have noticed that in the academic world, the Japanese often
seem to maintain a very strict hierarchal system of going about things.
One sometimes sees them appearing in little groups. These consist of (i)
the famous old professor, then (ii) traveling with him, two or three
middle-aged, obsequious half-professors, then (iii) traveling along behind
them, four or five groveling assistants. So I suppose it is natural for
the lowest orders of this hierarchy to lose themselves in suppressed
images of erotic dementia. Perhaps this is better than the system followed
by the rest of the academic world, where everybody engages equally in a
free-for-all. At least Morimoto and Suzuki - to the lasting frustration of
the Chief of Police - remain capable of thinking freely.
The Diamond Pendants was an interesting story. But I
must admit that I couldn't really understand the reason why Mr. Kyomachi
was prepared to go along with the plan of Mrs. Uehara. After all, surely
he could have just sold his kimono business to somebody else for the same
amount of money, without getting himself into trouble like this. Could his
rivalry with the kimono shop in Hiroshima (and the parallel rivalry of the
diamond obsessions of the old wives) really have been so great as to make
him do such a thing? Also, I wondered how Morimoto and Suzuki would have
been able to cope with the whole thing if Mr. Izumi hadn't gotten himself
run over by a car at the critical moment?
"One moment, the Erl-King is hunched on my brother's shoulder, whispering
a blessed death. In the next, a trapdoor opens up in the air and my
brother is elsewhere, teasing out Dowland of all things, a bit of
ravishing sass for this stunned lieder crowd, who can't grasp the web that
slips over them."
