#afterreading

This post includes some minor spoilers for the novel.

After writing the last post on “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”, I feel like there’s still some unfinished business with this book, for when I looked at the magical realism in the novel, it seemed like Murakami is painting an indifferent world, in which humans are merely thrown into. But when I think about it, the book isn’t really that bleak, and the protagonist, Okada Toru, sort of proves that.

One thing that made it difficult for me to get into the novel at first was Toru’s passivity. It is of course essential to have an active protagonist, or else we won’t have a story. But for most of the novel, things happened to Toru, instead of Toru making things happen, and it does make the reading experience a bit stale.

But as I was thinking about how the novel offers no explanation about the strangeness of Toru’s reality, I begin to realize this sounds kind of depressing. Yet, the novel does not feel depressing, because Toru eventually makes a choice.

After his wife Kumiko left, the Kano sisters tell Toru to give up on finding the cat (the symbol of marital bliss) and to leave Japan for a while, but in the ending of Book 2, Toru decides to stay and find Kumiko. No, to be more accurate, he is still waiting for something to happen most of the time. Then how is that a change in Toru’s character?

I think we often forget waiting can also be a choice. Toru waited before and after he made a decision to stay. In appearance, it’s as if he has no character development, but Toru’s purpose for waiting is different in these two scenarios. Before Kumiko left, he just left his job. He is aimless and is simply waiting for something to happen. After Kumiko left, he is going against what the world is telling him to do and chooses to wait for something that can guide him to his wife. 

Choosing to wait is his act of defiance against a world that doesn’t make any sense, a world that forces us to move along its strange flow. The reappearance of the cat, despite Malta Kano’s prediction that it will never come back (and her predictions are written to be flawless and always accurate), is a representation of Toru’s defiance against the reality that is constantly out of his control, and this is because he chooses to stay and wait. This simple choice directs how the story is going to go.

Reading Haruki Murakami’s novels can be frustrating, because they give you many questions, but they don’t always give you the answers. You can brush this off by saying that’s the thing about magical realist novels (and Murakami is very famous for writing those), where strange happenings are part of reality. But I often think the point of magical realist literature is to ask: what’s the point in adding magic in a realist setting? Why make reality unexplainable?

Exactly that.

I can’t say I have read enough Murakami’s books to say this, but I get the idea that his books tackle the complexity of the human existence more than societal issues. Whenever I pick up his books, there is a feeling of kinship you find in his words, as if the writer understands your confusion regarding your life on earth.

Take The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as an example, which I have just finished. The novel is about Toru Okada’s strange adventures after his cat went missing. Some of the “strange” incidents are explained. Most are not, like the Kano sisters’ and Mr. Honda’s powers, how Toru can travel to an alternate reality in dreams, and how that alternate reality can influence the current reality. It is as if magic is very much part of our real world, which in itself sounds contradictory.

But isn’t that life? The world we live in, despite how the education system teaches us to find reasons to explain it, defies explanation. Philosophy has tried decades to use logic to solve our existence, and there is still so much science cannot prove. Reason, though useful, cannot help us understand ourselves completely. Why are we who we are? What triggers us to kill? Why are we still alive? When do we die? Why do we keep on living?

Is there a reason for the things that happen to us? 

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle gives this answer: not always. And that’s the reality of our lives. Despite the fact we need answers, life doesn’t always offer one. If it is meant to be, it’s meant to be. If Mr. Honda says Lieutenant Mamiya will live a long life, Lieutenant Mamiya will not die in the Second World War. There are just times when you have to admit you are too stupid to understand your own life.

*Sigh* I often feel this way after reading a good book. It's like losing a good friend. Sometimes it hits me even before the end, like I know I'm going to lose touch with people in couple hundred pages. It takes you to someplace truly elsewhere and then dumps you out at the end, back in the normal world. You can never stay quite long enough. I always find myself re-reading the first chapter and some of my favorite parts so that I can savor the moment again.