Until last night I had read all but one of Haruki Murakami’s books.
Until last night I had read all but one of Haruki Murakami’s books. Here is a complete list of his books that, until last night, I had read:
The Elephant Vanishes, and After the Quake, both collections of short stories
Underground, a book of interviews with those who survived the Tokyo gas attack
And the novels:
Norwegian Wood
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Dance Dance Dance
A Wild Sheep Chase
South of the Border West of the Sun
Sputnik Sweetheart
Heard the Wind Sing
After Dark
Kafka On the Shore
Until last night I had read all but one of Haruki Murakami’s books, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. I had been saving this book for several years because I dreaded not having any more of his work to read. Maybe dread isn’t the right word, but I don’t know how else to describe it. Oh, I picked the book up many times, but for some reason I just couldn’t seem to bring myself to start it. At least by not having read it I would always have it to look forward to.
There is a quote from A Wild Sheep Chase that I keep on hand: “We can, if we choose, wander aimlessly over the continent of the arbitrary.” It is unfair to Haruki Murakami to choose a single sentence from his work, but to me this little sentence says more about how one might approach life than any self-important book written with that intent in mind.
Meanwhile, I re-read most of his other books. Especially Dance Dance Dance, and A Wild Sheep Chase. Sometimes, after I would finish re-reading one of his books, I would try to make myself think what Haruki Murakami would write about next in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. I probably read the description on the back cover of the book a thousand times. It says, “In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo.”
So you can see I had a pretty good head start for imagining what he might write about next. Still, I found that my thoughts would just clang around in my head without any life or substance. Sometimes he found his wife, sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes he found the cat, sometimes he didn’t. Just empty, idle thoughts, without any direction; lifeless, dull, stiff thoughts contained by a limited imagination.
You might think, “What a pointless exercise.” And you’d be right. But it was something pointless I did over and over again just the same, maybe a bit like how some people imagine what it would be like to win the lottery, or wonder how different things would be if only they had selected another choice at that crucial moment when the options were offered up.
And so, mostly, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle just sat there on my shelf unread. Sometimes it would move to the reading table downstairs and rest there, quietly, unopened. Occasionally I would find it on my nightstand sandwiched between other books I was reading. Once it traveled with me in my suitcase to Chicago, but it stayed packed up in the room for the entire trip, even as I went out and did business, ate, and drank with friends, coming in noisily late at night, too tired to even touch it. Never once did it complain about all of these slights. Not that it would have mattered if it did. But I must say that I began to find in the book an admirable nobility in its steadfast, implacable endurance; its ability to sit there uncomplaining, and unread.
The turning point came when I learned Haruki Murakami has a new book coming out called 1Q84. That settled it. I would finally read The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and not for a long time read 1Q84. Of course, I did not stop to consider whether 1Q84 would handle going unread for so long with the same unwavering constancy as The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. On the one hand, why should 1Q84 not handle being unread in precisely the same manner as The Wind-up Bird Chronicle?
There is a tendency to think that all books are alike in a certain, complete and unchanging way. There is a tendency to focus on their exterior bounds and definitions; spine, paper pages, pressed cover, defined beginnings and endings, ignoring even the possibility of tiny secrets that make them different on the inside.
Now, let’s put the shoe on the other foot so to speak. You think for a moment what I am going to write next. Did I ruin The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by not reading it for so very long? Was the build-up, the tension, the anticipation, too much for one little book to bear? Just who did I think I was in the first place, transferring the entire weight of my selfish disregard and, ultimately, such a heavy burden of power, power that might be both unwanted and dangerous, to an innocent, defenseless book? Do you think it was unfair of me to do that? And do you think, feeling slighted, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle might use all of its newly acquired power against me?
Well you are well ahead of the game if you can see any possible solutions or even appropriateness in those strange questions. For I did not even imagine such things when I sat down to read The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. I did not imagine the despair I would feel as the story unfolded, the sense of hopelessness as I began to see that I would never, ever be able to write a sentence as beautiful as any that appeared in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. How could I have?
Relationships with books are ordinarily very tenuous things for me. I don’t fall in love very easily. And I’m also very reserved. I don’t like to reveal too much to my books, and prefer to let them do most of the talking. But for some reason, and without really being conscious of it, I disclosed something deeply personal about myself to The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. I let slip a glimpse into a dream that I had held carefully hidden, something too sensitive to even speak aloud, and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle saw that dream and told me that it would not come true. And I was devastated. But I knew what she had told me was true, and I admired her honesty and courage in telling me. If I were younger, I might have hated The Wind-up Bird Chronicle for hurting me, even if she didn’t mean to, even if she was only doing what she thought was right. I might have hated her just because she was only doing what she thought was right. But I don’t hate The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. I love The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. And on most days, that’s enough.
