'A Folklore for my Generation: A Pre-History of Late-Stage Capitalism' in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami (short story within the collection)
This post is about a short story from a collection by Haruki Murakami- esteemed Japanese author and surrealist aficionado. If you like books about talking cats, if you like stories entirely about spaghetti, or tales about interlacing, make-believe worlds then Haruki is your man. As a lover of all of the above, I'm a big fan.
I know I've been a little remiss in my previous blogs about actually summarising the plot of what I'm writing about and I've discovered the subsequent ramble gets a bit confusing without it. Well allow me to remedy this. This particular tale is about two men having dinner together, having met by chance in Italy years after they first knew each other at school, in Japan. Our narrator is listening, and also editing together, his dining companion's tale about the relationship he had with his first sweetheart. Now, before I launch into my little analysis, I better define my terms as this will get a bit confusing without some clarification of who I'm talking about in this story. From our point of view there are three layers: Murakami, the author (as previously with Kerouac, the author), the unnamed writer character within the narrative (henceforth called the narrator and closely comparable to Murakami himself) and the focal character of the story, again unnamed- just to be extra-confusing), henceforth known as the protagonist.
Instantly from this you can assume, correctly, that this story isn't going to be the self-flagellation of The Subterraneans. Rather than the narrator stumbling through his own self-assessment, as Kerouac's Leo does with the limited success I've already discussed, Murakami affords his protagonist the luxury of an epistolary voice through narrative layers- here not written but rather communicated as a tale that is then 're-worked'. Think Nick Carroway in The Great Gatsby but with more insight on the part of the narrator (in fact Murakami goes a bit meta-fictive by giving his narrator a chance to explain that he is tidying up the story as he goes along). To tie this point back to the issues I raised in the last part, this use of a third-person, and arguably more emotionally stable, narrator helps to stablise, even as it lessens the intensity of the emotional catharsis that the reader can take from the story. For me this evokes a more satisfying conclusion to the narrative as, although further removed, the results seem more honest, even if I'm not getting it from the horse's mouth.
Not unlike Kerouac, Murakami's interpretation of the breakdown of a relationship is still raw and true, while it also seems rather more evenly handed. The female character in the story, Yoshiko, has a stock phrase: 'these are two different things' which she repeats over the course of her conversations with the male protagonist. The concept of this phrase is given due consideration by Murakami and by his narrator throughout the story and the tension is created where these two different things, or people, become so disconcertingly similar (they are styled by the narrator as 'Mr and Miss Clean') that it makes their inevitable separation that much more poignant. Yoshiko tells the protagonist that she cannot marry him, and thus consummate their relationship, quite matter-of-factly and leaves him in a state of in-consequentiality- something previously unknown to him 'Ever since we were little, people had been pushing us...[and] we met their expectations'. When they meet again, several years later, it is the protagonist's inability to make the sexual contact that his teenage self so craved that finally destroys his hope of their being together. It is an unhappy and rather dark end to what starts as a sweet yarn about first love.
One way of summarising this tale is by using the title, as it is both oddly deliberate but deliberately odd. The word 'Folklore' is an interesting choice- in itself a genre based on the, often oral, re-telling and re-working of the tale to suit the needs of the teller and, by extension, the reader/listener. After the protagonist tells the narrator of the strange phrase he always has in mind when thinking of himself and Yoshiko (' "and when it was all over, the King and his retainers burst out laughing" ') the narrator gently tells his reader that 'there's no moral or lesson' to be drawn. The point of the tale, of love and loss, is simply to be read, and understood by the reader. Stories like these, for all their quirks and apparent ability to define an era, in this case 'Late-Stage Capitalism', will be told time after time through generations. The emotions they evoke and that they describe, will stay the same. And in realising that, and in reading this, Murakami provides us with the best emotional self-help there is.
Next time: the women take over the emotional development and I'll try to answer a very important question: is it socially reprehensible to honk with laughter when reading on public transport?
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