Murakami and Privacy

What's it time for again? What else, but a slightly self-serious piece of literary criticism done on a couple of short stories. These short stories are the first dozen-ish in the Current Official Selection of the Book Club, which is Haruki Murakami's Blind Willow Sleeping Woman. To talk about a book of short stories is, I think, to talk about a series of attempts to do something. It is hard for me to imagine a wild-eyed, free-spirited Writer Type who wasn't working on poems or a novel; the production of some, and especially the production of many, short stories seems to me to be a guarantor of authorial seriousness, or some sense that the author knows what she is doing well enough to keep plugging away at it: there's just so many of them.

A couple of Murakami's stories in this collection feature his commentary on his process as a writer of short stories, or at least on the process of their own production. One wishes to look in these pieces in particular for something like the Murakami credo, and in "A Poor Aunt Story", we find something that, if not a credo, will do til the credo gets here. The narrator/protagonist is trying to explain to his companion that he wants to write a story about a poor aunt, despite the fact that he has no poor aunt (the companion does). Trying to explain himself, he says this: "I can't put it into words very well...In order to explain why I want to write a story about a poor aunt, I'd have to write the story, but once the story was finished, there wouldn't be any reason to explain the reason for writing the story -- or would there?"

Or would there? Murakami's stories always have some element that, once we've done the usual work we do on short stories, that still demand a reason to explain the reason for writing the story, little cores of ineffability, which, if you didn't like Murakami, could probably seem really really annoying. What is going on with the dabchick at the end of "Dabchick"? Why does Tony Takitani just send the new woman away, and why is everyone more or less ok with this? What the hell is a poor aunt, really, and how does one materialize on one's back? And why is the other thing that might pop up on one's back a hatstand?

Richard Rorty writes that the things we value in artists (and he counts just about everybody using words in the category of possible artists) is that their system of private metaphors that they find important has resonance with us. The most lasting artists are the ones whose metaphors (a Rorty example is the atom as a metaphor for the way stuff is organized) become public property. What I find so appealing about Murakami, I think, is that his metaphors are the floatiest possible kind -- almost all signifier, for which we can stick in any signified -- so that we get the sense of resonance with Murakami that we get with great artists while at the same time retaining our privacy. We can identify with the Vinteuil sonata, and love Proust more for it, but by doing so we are in some way become less private persons. (Incidentally, this is even more an issue with television shows -- I love Liz Lemon to death, but I love her for the same reason that millions of other people do). I am much more confident that my fascination with particular Murakami stories is a more private affair, because I feel like I have brought a lot more to the table on which he and I are going to figure out what the hell he's talking about.

My favorite story this far has a good example of this: "The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes", which features a narrator in the "what the hell was that?" mode in which Murakami operates so well. The story culminates in crows pecking each other to death over a question of whether or not a cake of the narrator's making is a genuine Sharpie Cake, and the narrator washing his hands of the whole affair. It's not impossible that the crows and the cake are a metaphor for writing to please oneself rather than crows, but it's also not impossible that that has nothing to do with it. I personally like it because, owing largely to a Kafka quote I happened to read in the New York Review of Books two years ago, and things that Kafka quote about crows has meant to me in the ensuing years, I think that the set of phonemes "crow" is absolutely gorgeous and fascinating and important, and the idea of crows determining cake quality was for me an aesthetic delight. And Murakami's ineffable prose lets me have exactly that delight.