"Everything's a metaphor," says Oshima, quoting Goethe.
I was reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore when a friend on Facebook remarked that, “Murakami makes me nonchalantly suicidal.” This pretty perfectly summed up the effect that Murakami has on me. And, come to think of it, not just Murakami but most modern Japanese literature --from Soseki to Oe-- gives me the blues.
A friend (who is also a Murakami scholar) asked me, Why? And thinking about it, I realized that it's the characters that seem to always depress me. Randomly bumping up against each other like pinballs in a pinball machine, they are people who make their way through life alone trying to find meaning. Indeed, in many ways his characters remind me of the sinners in Dante’s Inferno. With no sense of community, no over-reaching authority or collective vision to make sense of things, for me the overwhelming mood of the books is of a dazzling isolation. And, this makes me feel lonely, I guess.
"Hurting themselves but harming others," we know from reading Dante that those in Hell choose to be there. Feckless and friendless, Murakami's characters also live with abandoment and often speak of a terrible void within themselves. But, I think what is perhaps so depressing about them is that rather than in friendship and love, they try and fill this void alone, in their private journeys within themselves. Contrapasso?
As a contemporary philosopher once remarked that,
Heidegger would point out that a minimally meaningful life requires sensitivity to the power of shared moods that give mattering to our world and unity and meaning to events
Everything for me comes back to the motion that true meaning resides in the finest details of our shared imagined experience. And in being good to each other.
**
Then at the river--an old man in a boat:
White-haired, as he drew closer shouting at us,
"Woe to you, wiked souls! Give upthe thoughts
Into eternal darkness, on the opposite side,
Into Fire and Ice!
Abandon hope, all ye who enter here
Western critics sometimes complain that Murakami's characters are "passive." And, I think--indeed-- they drift in emotions that are so large it seems they are helpless to do otherwise. In this way, destiny, rather than being a person's character as the ancient Greeks suggested becomes instead nothing but personal angst. And meaning (or metaphor) then seems somehow depressingly accidental, ambiguours and fleeting. Inhuman, even.
Don't get me wrong, Murakami is a genius I think. First and foremost, a fabulous storyteller, I love his stories and am looking forward to reading his novel Chronicle next.
Reading Kafka on the Shore, though, I kept thinking of Hannah Arendt; and to my great surprise, there it was in the novel-- that famous scene about the Nazi Eichmann as a cog in the wheel that Arendt had written about so famously after the War. The Librarian Oshima says it this way:
Comments