Plurality of Meaning in Murakami’s ‘Nausea 1976’: A Phenomenological Approach

If you have read any of Murakami’s short stories, you will know how their brevity really emphasises the search for meaning in his narratives. I have discussed the ambiguities of these meanings previously, but there is also a plurality of meaning which is being highlighted by the imagery used. This imagery is so strange and unique, that we cannot help but imagine some grand meaning behind it – why are her ears so beautiful and magical, why is her sister in an endless slumber, and why on earth are fish falling from the sky? His conversational tone invites us to seek out these connections, and I feel as though, as a reader, I am being teased with the answer to some great secret being dangled directly on the page.

Michael Dachstein’s ‘Time Traveler’ via Google images 

Nowhere is this more obvious than in Murakami’s short stories, where large casts and sequences of events are no longer diluting the metaphors and symbolism present. Instead, we are forced to confront the meaning directly. In ‘Nausea 1976’, particularly, we are presented with quite a simple story – readers of his larger novels will be familiar with untangling more complex narratives, jumping all over the place both spatially and temporally – in which our narrator is talking to his friend who tells him of a time when he has a strange case of vomiting for ten consecutive days [1]. Yet, during this period he experiences no other symptoms or discomfort but simply finds himself unable to keep meals down, and every day he receives a strange phone call from an unknown caller, who would simply say his name and then hang up.

Listening to this story, along with our narrator – who turns out to be Mr Murakami himself – I found myself using every detail given as a clue to help form some kind of connection between the two. There were clues as to why it started, but less as to why it ended when it did, and there were clues as to why there were phone calls, but less as to why there was nausea. Is it because of his lack of romantic emotion or his continual betrayal of friends? Is he being punished by them, or by some other force? Of course, there was no definitive resolution as the end.

However, we are given an insight into Murakami’s phenomenological attitude toward these kinds of metaphors and symbolism. Phenomenology, in philosophy, considers the unique experiences that having a consciousness necessitates [2]. In other words, it considers how our consciousnesses make us see the world in different ways, due to varying intentional states of the perceiver. For Murakami, the same holds for stories. At the end of his bout of nausea, the mysterious caller says one additional thing to Murakami’s friend: ‘Do you know who I am?’ (p. 195). ‘Do you know who I am?’ – the ‘know’ informs us that the answer is something which needs to be sought out, it needs to be considered, it is an ‘intentional state’ which phenomenology claims can lead to a change in meaning.

Additionally, our mysterious caller invites the reader into a privileged dialogue with one of Murakami’s metaphors, asking us to really consider it. The friend tries this, in as logical a manner as he can manage given the strangeness of the situation: ‘I suppose it could have been someone from my childhood, or someone I had barely spoken to […]’ (p. 195). All of his suggestions revolve around his own experiences and memories (‘from my childhood […]’), prompted by the questions appeal to what he may ‘know’; an appeal to his own consciousness (for how can anyone really ‘know’ what is experienced by another…?). And yet, this is inevitable. Of course, any metaphorical meaning we do consider is likely to be self-projected:

 

“So, what you’re telling me, Mr Murakami, is that my own

guilt feelings – feelings of which I myself was unaware – could

have taken on the form of nausea or made me hear things

that were not there?”

“No, I’m not saying that,” I corrected him. “You are.”

(p. 195)

 

This goes for all of Murakami’s work, he is offering up his metaphors to the reader; allowing them to find their own meaning in his stories: ‘[…] I’m not saying that,” I corrected him. “You are.”‘ He surrenders authorial intention, and with it places the responsibility for meaning in the hands of the reader: ‘Anyhow, it’s just a theory. I can give you hundreds of those.’ (p. 196).  Or, as Irish poet Louis MacNeice eloquently put it: ‘The world is crazier and more of it than we think/ Incorrigibly plural […]’ [2].

Here, we cannot help but be reminded of a remarkably similar phenomenological account, provided in a novel with the very same title: Jean Paul-Sartre’s ‘La Nausée’ (‘The Nausea‘) [3]. In his first novel, the existentialist philosopher Sartre also documents a strict diary-keeping story-teller, who is as baffled by the various meanings of things – and of existence itself – that he begins to experience a continual feeling of nausea, based in his sudden disillusionment with the world around him and his inability to reclaim meaning. After all, Sartre is the same philosopher who wrote that ‘Existence precedes Essence’, or, to put it simply, he realised that it is only given our existence in the world that we can posit any meaning into such a life and that it is, therefore, our duty to decide this for ourselves.

In a way, this is the same mantra with which Murakami encourages those reading his stories to uphold – to add essence to his narrative despite the plurality of meaning. Otherwise, the absurd will simply stay absurd. Towards the end of Sartre’s Nausea, meaning seems to slide and waiver altogether as absurd imagery replaces everything else: in a deep existential angst, the narrator describes centipedes replacing human tongues and facial spots bursting to reveal additional eyes. It has been noted that the core of many existentialist aesthetics (plays, novels, and art produced by the ‘Existentialists’) is a phenomenological one [3]. Perhaps Murakami is also an Existentialist of sorts, his novels and stories are traditionally viewed from the same, rather detached narrator, who observes the absurd happenings within the story with an often frustratingly thoughtful acceptance. This leaves us to simply consider our theories, which will be bound up in our own experience of the world.

In the end, the meaning of the nausea and the phone calls is left open. The only advice offered by the Murakami in the story is this: ‘the problem is which theory you are willing to accept. And what you learn from it’ (p. 196). And I think this a philosophy to be applied to reading any meaning or symbolism into Murakami’s writings: it doesn’t matter what he intended by this image or that metaphor, what matters is what meaning resonates within us; something that we can learn from.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] Murakami, Haruki, ‘Nausea 1979’ in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (London: Vintage, 2007) pp. 183-197.

[2] MacNeice, Louis, ‘Snow’. Accessed via https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/snow/ on 03/12/18.

[3] Smith, David Woodruff, “Phenomenology”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/phenomenology/&gt;.

[4] Deranty, Jean-Philippe, “Existentialist Aesthetics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/aesthetics-existentialist/&gt;.

 

 

 

Mirrors and Multiple Worlds in Murakami’s ‘A Wild Sheep Chase’

I may have a slight obsession with the stories of Haruki Murakami, and if you read any one of his books I defy you to evade developing one yourself. In many of his novels, we are confronted with an intricate and finely-tuned view of the complexities and relationships of daily life, combined and contrasted with aspects of magical realism and absurdity.

In his novels, most of what Murakami describes is grounded in reality and abiding by the laws of our world. However, quite suddenly, we will then encounter vanishing hotel floors, an elusive Sheep Man, a gathering of Skeletons, talking crows and a sleeping character who is abruptly absorbed into a television set, and so on. As a reader of Murakami, we cannot help but wonder if these oddities are supposed to be happening in the same world we inhabit, or if the worlds described in Murakami are fundamentally different realms; perhaps with a predisposition for these occurrences.

A philosophical explanation of the latter interpretation would be the ‘Possible Worlds’ concept: things may not have ended up as they are experienced by us, but may have led to an entirely different experience and situation [1]. Maybe, the world was constructed where sheep men hide in vanishing rooms, scurry around the mountains of Hokkaido, and converses by candlelight upon a towering stack of books.

In Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase, we join our narrator on a search for a mysterious sheep. Yet, the odd connections and coincidences of the ‘chase’ leave us incredulous and disbelieving [2]. A girlfriend’s beautiful ears seemed a not-too-unusual character feature, but suddenly those ears are a means for psychic predictions – a matter which is accepted by our narrator without any seeming hesitation. This doesn’t seem like a reaction someone from our world would exhibit, given this realisation. Furthermore, upon the discovery of the Sheep Man, of hearing the tale of the non-existent sheep with the mark on its back, and of a man who claims to have been possessed by such a sheep, our narrator is similarly nonchalant and accepting.

Perhaps we are to conclude that this is not our world. Perhaps, what we should conclude, is that Murakami is presenting for us a possible world. Philosophically speaking, the notion of ‘possible worlds’ are mostly induced with regards to modal logic, that is, for discussions of logic and argumentation. But there is an instance of philosophy where these ‘possible worlds’ are invoked in a notion where they exist in the same space and time as our own world, and this is in the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics [3]. Let us simply note that according to this view, there are worlds in the Universe which overlap with our own – of which we are totally unaware – and of which there are various instances of ourselves.

Yet, I believe that in Murakami’s works, we are being told stories about some of these other worlds, rather than our own. Near the end of A Wild Sheep Chase, it seems that our narrator, in fact, becomes aware of these overlapping worlds during a strange encounter with a mirror. The narrator experiences the sensation that the person in the mirror is separate from himself:

 

“I wasn’t seeing my mirror-flat mirror-image.

It wasn’t myself I was seeing; on the contrary,

it was as if I were the reflection of the mirror

and this flat-me-of-an-image were seeing the

real me.” (p. 269)

 

This ‘real me’, could be referring to the version of himself that belong in our own world. Furthermore, when he is talking to the Sheep Man, later on, our narrator notices that the Sheep Man is not reflected in the mirror: “In the mirror world, I was alone” (p. 272).  On this interpretation, we can see that the strange occurrences, exemplified by the mysterious figure of the Sheep Man, do not exist in the world seen through the mirror. This mirror-world reveals a different world, which happens to be our world: the one inhabited by your and me, where the Sheep Man does not exist.

Additionally, a similar encounter with a mirror is described in Murakami’s short story ‘The Mirror’, reinforcing the intention of this symbol and the idea that Murakami’s stories are from a world very much different to our own [4]. That they are from another world is confirmed in this story, where our narrator recalls a time when he was on night duty as a janitor at a high school. He describes his experience upon suddenly discovering a mirror, which he has never seen before: ‘It looked exactly like me on the outside, but it definitely was not me. No that’s not it. It was me, of course, but another me’ (p. 72). Here, our narrator has also come across another version of himself from another world, revealed briefly and inexplicably through a mirror.

In telling his stories through the guise of another world, Murakami allows the reader to confront the absurdity of our own condition; things needn’t be as they are and they could have, very easily, ended up differently. Earlier in A Wild Sheep Chase, our narrator goes off on one of his many tangents and talks about the ‘worm universe’: “In the worm universe, there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers. A cow is bound to get her pliers sometime. It has nothing to do with me” (p. 67). Here, our narrator references and directly mentions the notion of multiple worlds, of ‘alternate considerations’. Murakami forces us to realise that maybe the stories being told seem absurd and crazy to us, but if their world and our world are just two in a multitude of different worlds, then we have no grounds to reason that they are not all absurd.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Menzel, Christopher, “Possible Worlds”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/possible-worlds/&gt;.

[2] Murakami, Haruki, A Wild Sheep Chase (London; Vintage, 2003)

[3] Vaidman, Lev, “Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/qm-manyworlds/&gt;.

[4] Murakami, Haruki, ‘The Mirror’ in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (London; Vintage, 2007)

‘After Dark’: Murakami’s Temporal Lullaby

Murakami’s After Dark lasts for the duration of a single night in the centre of Tokyo. The pages are a-buzz with the perpetually busy city. But at night, a different kind of crowd begin to dominate the streets and a series of closely-knit, but independent, events unfurl. With the action sharply divided by frequent chapters from the perspective of a young woman who had been asleep for several months, we cannot help but imagine if the whole plot is a dream (it certainly feels like it).

After Dark’s dream-like nature is only reinforced by the fact that, often, the reader only receives fragments of information during a scene: until – suddenly – there are dramatic links between stories, as in a dream when the isolated episodes begin to blend together so that afterwards we are left with a simple incredulity: how could I not tell this was a dream?

With one narrative slowed down to the sleeping heart-rate of Eri Asai, and the other charged with the increasing momentum of events surrounding her sister Mari (who is awake and out in the city), After Dark prompted me to consider the correlations between Sleep and Time.

Eri Asai’s constant, sleeping form poses a metaphor for Relative Time. Throughout After Dark, Eri acts as a reference point for the passage of time in the novel. The events of the night speed up and combine and separate as ideas of causation and coincidence are forced upon the reader: Was it inevitable that the events ended up this way, influencing each other?  We lose track of time whilst reading as the plot thickens and we discover new connections. We don’t know, in the beginning, that Mari is the younger sister of Eri Asai. We are simply guided back and forth between their narratives by a very omniscient narrator, strikingly familiar to ourselves.

There is a theory of time in which the flow of time is not an objective reality, but is something projected onto reality by our experience of it (Smith, 2016). In After Dark, we are forced to keep track of time at the beginning (and end) of every chapter: chapter numbers are accompanied by the image of a clock, on which we watch time slowly move forwards. I realise how much I appreciated this as I read, how I could better imagine the plot alongside these time-references. How have I managed to immerse myself in books without this fictional guidance? I wondered.

But this is exactly the issue at hand: normally, frequently without any guidance at all, we superimpose a timeline onto fiction. We wait for some cues to confirm this “The next day” or “three years later”, but if these fail, we – the reader – become the reference point to time. As we read the dialogue, the dialogue is performed in our heads. In After Dark, Murakami takes this control from us; we are kept to a strict series of events, happening in a predetermined timeframe. And this is why I felt so reassured when the events slowly pushed and influenced each other, time was being set out for us so nice and orderly. 

And yet, this aid to immersion further distances us from any narrative involvement: time is taken from our hands. We become like the sleeping Eri Asai, cared for and unchanged by what happens elsewhere in the city, at night, after dark. The narrative lens Murakami provides – the ‘camera’ he describes us as looking through as we watch Eri sleep, even the ‘bird’ flying over the city in the very opening chapter, viewing all from above –  forces us to reflect upon our own involvement in time… wondering whether time is perhaps dependent on this involvement.

 “In both that room and this room, time is passing at

the same uniform rate. Both are immersed in the same

temporality. We know this from the occasional slow rising

and falling of the man’s shoulders. Wherever the intention

of each might lie, we are together being carried along the

same speed down the same river of time”

—-

[1] Smith, Nicholas J.J., “Time Travel”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-travel/.

[2] Murakami, Haruki, After Dark (London, Vintage, 2008)

Spookiness and the Sublime in Murakami’s ‘Dance Dance Dance’.

 

The Two Comedians by Chris Peters, via Google Images

 

In Philosophy, the ‘Sublime’ is what we experience when we are confronted with the vastness of existence. It refers to an underlying nature that we occasionally acknowledge by experiencing the incomprehensibility of the thing itself. I think often when we are overwhelmed, this sensation is accompanied by, or almost indistinguishable from, fear. Or, as Edmund Burke unabashedly notes, a certain ‘Terror’.[1]

‘The Sublime’ is indeed a philosophical notion and refers to such occasions and scenarios that induce in us a reflection of pain and, or, danger. For the narrator in Dance Dance Dance, his reality has been overtaken by occurrences of the Sublime, and this is exactly why reading this book can often create a certain trepidation; an uneasy empty-stomach feeling… a terror.[2] For example, when the elevator opens, not onto the modern hotel interior, but instead onto the musty darkness of the Sheep Man’s realm; or, when our protagonist finds skeletons seated around a television in a tucked away room, in an abandoned office block, in a busy street in Hawaii, these happenings are unnerving exactly because of the unknown danger they taunt us with.

Are we one of those skeletons? Are the other characters we have come to like being represented by those skeletons? Will they die soon? What awaits in the darkness of the other realm and will it harm us? This underlying terror produces a rather spooky tone, and it is there even in the hinted at imperative of the title; the Sheep Man demanding our narrator to just keep dancing;

 

“Dance. It’stheonlyway […] Dance. Don’t think. Dance.

Danceyourbest, likeyourlifedependedonit, Yougotta-

dance”

 

We picture a frantic, eager dance; full of a fear that keeps him moving. The Sublime is manifest in this fear; a fear that is always around the corner from our Narrator, but never truly visible. Fear of a warning, rather than of a thing itself: “It’stheonlyway”. Its origin is lost behind the ‘connections’ which are desperately weaved to make sense of his life.

Chaos itself merely fuels the Sublime, and the more desperate the search for a connection, a unity, the more the chaotic nature reasserts itself. For, Burke identifies that one thing that makes terror so distinct is that it has a certain ‘obscurity’, and this is exactly the issue for our narrator. Burke writes that:

 

“When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can

accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension

vanishes”

 

Now, the Sheep Man represents our narrators need to have things make sense (to remove the obscurity he is experiencing): “Weconnectthings. That’swhatwedo. Likeaswitchboard, weconnectthings. Here’stheknot. Andwetieit”. But our narrator has focussed too much on the absurdity of things, and his threads are splaying and falling around him. Thinking too much is the cause of his terror, and he is advised against this by the Sheep Man: “Yougottadance. Aslongasthemusicplays. Yougottadance. Don’teventhinkwhy”. Here, we see general advice aimed at mankind. Don’t think about your situation, don’t pause but just keep on moving.

The music becomes our lives. The Dance becomes our response to it. The terror of the Sublime cannot be ignored, but we can move on from this. We can dance and not think too hard about it. Go with the flow, as they say. And so, throughout the book, we are ourselves eagerly trying to make sense of the plot, of the loose ends we are shown and of the various unique characters presented to us; how do they fit together? What will happen to them? And then death intervenes. And with it, we are back to the Sublime. Yes, the reading of this book is tense and frustrating, but when the narrator stops questioning things, we find we can also relax again. We are happy that he is happy. And we join him in his dance.

 

—-

 

[1] Edmund Burke, The Sublime and Beautiful

[2] Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

The ambiguities within Murakami’s ‘A “Poor Aunt” story’

‘A “Poor Aunt” story’ is a prime example of Murakami’s ability to merge both fantasy and realism into a narrative which simultaneously guides you along peacefully and confronts you with disparity. In all of Murakami’s writing, we feel a heaviness is attached to certain images: a simile will simply feel as though it holds greater depths, metaphors resonate and adjectives declare themselves. In ‘A “Poor Aunt” story’, Murakami exploits the interchangeability between words and meaning, emphasising their role as ‘conceptual signs’. By doing so, we are forced to acknowledge the role that subjective participation plays in story-telling. By subjective participation, I mean an active contribution from the reader, based on their own personal experiences.

Murakami prepares the reader in advance for the ambiguities within, establishing their need for subjective participation from the outset, by using the indefinite article ‘a’ in the title. This is not, he is saying, a story about that poor aunt, or this poor aunt, or about the poor aunt over there; instead, it is about a poor aunt. Here, the indefinite article presupposes reader participation by telling us that the ‘poor aunt’ is not a reference to a specific individual, but is ambiguous: it demands multiple interpretations. In ‘Why I Write’, the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre emphasises the need for the writer and the reader to work together in the creation of a work: ‘To write is to make an appeal to the reader that he lead into objective existence the revelation which I have undertaken by means of language’. This task is made real for our narrator, whose pairing of the words ‘poor’ and ‘aunt’ have caused a physical manifestation of this aunt to develop upon his back: ‘What I have stuck to my back, finally, is the phrase “poor aunt” – those very words, without meaning, without form’.

As Sartre suggests, those who witness this ‘conceptual sign’, do indeed transform it into an ‘objective existence’: the narrator describes the ‘aunt’ as appearing different to different people. However, there is a commonality within these perceptions, and this is the expression of pity. The “poor aunt” is, therefore, acting as the conceptual sign associated with this specific emotive response. For our narrator, this response was prompted by his imagining of a poor aunt at a wedding: ‘Almost no one bothers to introduce her. Almost no one even talks to her. No one asks her to give a speech. She sits at the table where she belongs, but she’s just there – like an empty milk bottle’. For others, this pity manifests in different forms, such as an old dog who died painfully from cancer (‘But what an awful way to die, poor thing’), or a widowed school teacher with burns (‘Poor thing. She must have been pretty before that happened’).

And yet, when his companion finally looks at him, she says she cannot see anything on his back. Now we can see that this is because she has known the ‘real article’, as she describes it: one of her relatives is described as an actual ‘poor aunt’. This emphasises how often the sign becomes greater than the original thing itself; for the individual with the particular aunt, the symbol cannot have the same ambiguity as it does for those who do not know ‘a real live poor aunt’. There is no Sartrean ‘revelation’ to be had, for she is already aware of the pity entailed by this poor relative. Comparatively, for those others, including our narrator, the pity associated with this idealised notion of a ‘poor aunt’ has emerged as a result of their subjective experiences. In other words, they are left to retreat into their own lives for some means by which to establish a relation to this hypothetical ‘poor aunt’, so that they may display the empathy they envision this aunt as instigating.

Sartre argues that our existence in the world is the only reason for there being an idea of ‘relationships’, and this is epitomized in ‘A “Poor Aunt” story’: the relationships of those who interact with the narrator, and the meaningless, formless concept of a ‘poor aunt’ upon his back, are derived from their own prior experiences. And this, Murakami is leading the reader to acknowledge, is what happens in all story-telling.