Reading Log: A Murakami double bill of sorts
I started reading Haruki Murakami's latest novel A City and Its Uncertain Walls some time mid January. While in the midst of reading that, I chanced upon Murakami's Novelist as a Vocation (non-fiction) at the library and ended up going through the book while on Walls. Last week, while spending a lot of hours being horizontal, I finished both.
Novelist as a Vocation is a series of essays from Murakami about his process and it was interesting to catch a glimpse of that while reading one of his novels. I often like to switch between fiction and non-fiction, or toggle between multiple books at a time, as that gives my brain some fresh air afforded by the alternating. I started Vocation later and finished it earlier than Walls, and as I returned to the novel, I had a sense of the author speaking to me. Or rather, he had written it in order to pour himself â what's inside of him â out, for me, for us, readers.
I enjoy Murakami's simply way of writing, and this comes through especially in his essays. Honest. Humble. Straightforward in expressing his views and opinions about life, his creative process, but never prescriptive. The most common message he expounds seems to be: this is merely my process, this is what has worked for me. I'm not saying this is for everyone. But if it's helpful for you, take what you will. I hope it works for you. How to not feel affections for a man like that especially if my soft spot is humility? The effect of reading Murakami's process and in fact sometimes reading about other artists' process is that i start to have a kind of faith in the slow burn. Sometimes it seems like I know, but I forget.
I remember first coming across Murakami's books when I was 17 and the first novel I read was Kafka on the Shore. I was enthralled by the way he writes, the strange corners the novel would find itself in and there were scenes I would find myself visiting years later in my mind for no good reason. I know some people who are put off by the odd sexual scenes that seem to come up in his books but it doesn't bother me. They're simply there, part of the stories he tells.
Anyhow, I enjoyed both books immensely.
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City and Its Uncertain Walls is Murakami's fifteenth novel and I'll let it speak for itself if you happen to read it. I'd go only so far as to say that it's about a city, its uncertain walls, time/non-time, libraries, peculiar yet somewhat endearing characters.
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For Novelist as a Vocation, here are some of my favourite quotes:
On expression:
This is purely my opinion, but if you want to express yourself as freely as you can, itâs probably best not to start out by asking âWhat am I seeking?â Rather, itâs better to ask âWho would I be if I werenât seeking anything?â and then try to visualize that aspect of yourself. Asking âWhat am I seeking?â invariably leads you to ponder heavy issues. The heavier that discussion gets, the farther freedom retreats, and the slower your footwork becomes. The slower your footwork, the less lively your prose. When that happens, your writing wonât charm anyoneâpossibly even you.
The you who is not seeking anything, by contrast, is as light and free as a butterfly. All you have to do is uncup your hands and let it soar. Your words will flow effortlessly. People normally donât concern themselves with self-expressionâthey just live their lives. Yet, despite that, you want to say something. Perhaps it is in the natural context of âdespite thatâ where we unexpectedly catch sight of something essential about ourselves.
On readers:
...that person and I are connected. I donât know the details of where and how weâre connected. Yet I get the distinct sense that deep down, in some dark recesses, my roots and that personâs roots are linked. Itâs such a deep, dark place, not something you can casually drop by and see. Yet through the system of narrative, I feel that we âare connected, the real sense that nourishment is passing back and forth.
Yet if that person and I were to pass each other in some back street, or be seated next to each other on a train, or lined up together at the same checkout counter in a supermarket, we wouldnât (in most cases) notice that our roots are connected in that way. Weâd just pass by each other, strangers, and go our separate ways without ever realizing it. Probably never to see each other again. But in reality, down deep in the ground, in a place that penetrates below the hard crust of everyday life, we are, novelistically, connected. Deep within our hearts we share a common narrative. Thatâs probably the type of reader I assume. And every day I write my novels with the hope that that reader will enjoy them a little, and feel something when he reads them.
On the reality of stories in society:
In any age, when something major occurs and thereâs a shift in social reality, thereâs a related yearning for a shift in the reality of stories as well.
Stories can exist as metaphors for reality, and people need to internalize new stories (and new systems of metaphor) in order to cope with an unfolding new reality. By successfully connecting these two systems, the system of actual society and the metaphoric systemâby, to put it another way, allowing movement between the objective world and the subjective world so they mutually modify each otherâpeople are able to accept an uncertain reality and maintain their sanity. I get the sense that the reality in the stories I provide in my fiction just happens to function globally as a kind of cogwheel that makes that adjustment possible. Naturally, this is, to repeat myself, just my own individual sense of things. But I donât think itâs entirely off the mark.