Blog

David Robinson | Oct. 14, 2020

Film noir is almost inexplicably a reaction to the horrors of WWII. The dark realism and paranoia inherent to the genre are definitely in response to the international traumas felt during the 1940s. While it’s known as an American genre, influenced by the German refugees and given a name by the French, it’s incredibly interesting to look at Japan’s take on it. In immediate postwar Japan, Akira Kurosawa would finally enter his own as an artist with Drunken Angel (1948) and Stray Dog (1949), his first two collaborations with Toshiro Mifune. These two films had the director taking liberty with his standing in the studios and crafted two ostensibly noir films during the period where noir itself was just entering its own in American cinema. Unlike its American counterparts, which display a sense of doom, or an inevitable fatality, the early forms of Japanese noir are brighter, with a focus on social consciousness and national healing.

Tokyo was still in ruins and Japan was reeling from the destruction of World War II in 1949. American forces occupied the country, and would for another few years. Censorship was heavily implemented to reform the country’s sensibilities, and filmmakers were urged to craft films from a standpoint of social consciousness. While the turmoil of American noir is almost purely psychological, Japan noir can take on more literal forms from its destroyed locations. The Japanese people were still reeling from their defeat, and the entire country was in the midst of social and infrastructural reform. Perseverance is a common concept in Japan, and especially in the postwar years.

Stray Dog has Toshiro Mifune playing rookie cop Murakami who has his Colt pistol stolen in the beginning of the film. A mark of shame, he works tirelessly to retrieve it with veteran detective Sato (Takashi Shimura). As he embarks his quest, he becomes increasingly more distressed as his gun is used in crime after crime. The film takes place in the Tokyo summer when the city is blisteringly hot and muggy. From its onset, Stray Dog’s characters are mired in the intense Tokyo heat, which is a tangible stand-in for their psychological turmoil, adding to the paranoia and tension of the film. Its opening credits play over a panting dog, alone and suffering on a hot summer day. The exterior shots are filmed with oppressively high-key lighting, using intense blinding sunlight rather than shadows to form tension. Often indoor scenes use strategically located fans to create strange shadows and visual patterns which only adds to the overwhelming sense of Murakami’s paranoia. The outside is oppressively bright, but the indoors are dark and seedy, with high-contrasts as the outside seeps in.

Its characters are men alone against a violent world. Mifune’s Murakami always stands out, with his tall, glowering figure, but Shimura’s Sato knows how to infiltrate better. Fairly early in the picture, Murakami interrogates a woman implicated in the robbery, but only Sato can get her to talk. The interrogation begins, Murakami rushes through the crowded hallways of the precinct, criss-crossed by shadows coming through the dirty windows. He introduces himself, and Sato does as well, and it switches to a medium shot behind Murakami where he creates a barrier between Sato and the woman. It is unsettling and disorienting but illustrates his ability to impede his cause through his own blunders. He steps aside and sits in the corner, in shadow, while the interrogation proceeds. It is a long take and the movement of the woman dominates the frame. Her slightest movement blocks the other two, and their cigarettes build smoke as empty as her words. Whenever an important question is asked, the smoke clears and quiet fills in as intensity builds. She is a rat in a snare and she’s realized it. The camera shifts and suddenly it’s a wide shot with the table clearly between them. The distance is greater than it seemed prior and everything is small again. Rarely do any of the characters feel natural in their environments, furthering the sense of displacement.

They set off on their search for Yusa, the man who stole Murakami’s Colt, and already the film stresses the shared identity between the he and Murakami. Both were soldiers and are veterans, but Murakami became a prosperous member of society, learning to have dealt with his trauma, while Yusa has strayed from that path. The film gives meaning to his crimes, for he does not act out of malice but fear. When returning from the war, he turned to crime for he had no positive outlets. The two men are contrasting representatives of a shared generation with Murakami as the positive portrayal of youth. While its ending is by no means happy, it does end optimistically as the injured Sato praises Murakami and offers him advice for his future. But he hardly seems pleased with it, as the memory still burns fresh in his mind. It is that dread and fear which marks this film as noir, but where it fully encapsulated its American variety, Stray Dog stresses there is an end in sight, and it is through Sato that hopefulness flourishes. During their first conversation, Murakami confesses it is his Colt that was stolen, with much guilt, but Sato tells him simply, “If it wasn’t a Colt it would have been a Browning.” The scene is filmed outside and behind the characters the dark clouds move slowly, dreadfully, but even then sunlight shines through the cracks. Murakami responds meekly, “I have an awful feeling something worse will happen.”

              Murakami is panicked and self-destructive. His only aim throughout the movie is the recovery of his essential tool, his gun, so he can resume his position moving forward in life. His troubles are his primary concern and his work is a path to healing. In his search, he brings himself unwittingly into harm and his rash acting only harms his case. But as he goes, he learns, which makes him unique as a noir protagonist. Murakami is not sleazy nor a loser, but merely a man trying to find his way with what he has available. In the opening moments of the movie, his negligence lets his pistol be stolen from him on the crowded trains of Tokyo, so his fatal flaw is inexperience not inability, which makes the film a mirthless coming-of-age tale. First, he infiltrates the underworld, and for the most part fails, but his determination gets his foot in the door, even though he is willing to follow his determination until it kills him.

Virtue is his pass as he grows before the camera, but it is this same initial step which begins his identification with the villain Yusa. Sato is his counterbalance and mentor, and instructs the young cop as his anxieties and stresses build on his shoulders, for he understands his stress and how to guide him through it. One of the most telling features is Murakami’s extended interaction with Harumi, the chorus girl and closest the film gets to a femme fatale. Her harmfulness and destructiveness is also shown as a byproduct of her age and naiveté (the actress was only 16). Stray Dog never puts blame on any of its characters alone, regardless of their actions, because the greater cause is societal.

When they first find Harumi, she is on-stage with a dozen other girls who dress and look and act the same as she. Harumi is a scared girl who found work as a chorus girl and is as much a victim of her circumstances as anyone else. Her outfit doesn’t fit her; it’s too old, and her insubordination feels forced, like she’s acting older than she is. She looks too young and innocent for the predicament she’s found herself in. Their dressing room is the attic of the venue, crowded hot and grimy, where all the dancers pack in and wait to be further exploited. When they first talk to her it is beneath the stairs in darkness and shadow, accentuating the mutual paranoia they feel towards each other.

These are the people at the very bottom, scraping the barrel with only beauty to trade. Someday she’ll grow into it. Harumi is the key to finding Yusa, and Murakami and Sato both know it. In an extended sequence, they split up, with Murakami staying with Harumi while Sato goes in search. They find her with her mother, but this domestic space holds no comfort for her. She sits in a threshold as they are invited in, and it frames her claustrophobically, creating the sense she is trapped by them, or maybe her mother who hounds on her more harshly than either cop. Again, Murakami is framed between the two and forms a crux on which they bicker. Suddenly Harumi becomes vibrant and taunts him about his interrogation. She’s disobedient and standoffish and throws the dress she received from Yusa on the floor to be the barrier between them all. Her own paranoia has gotten to her, and she confesses her involvement, the harm she caused by involvement. As she talks she realizes the weight of her situation and becomes more distant in frame. With the dissolution of her disobedience she fades from femme fatale to a scared little girl, and it becomes difficult to blame her. She dons the dress and spins around like a child, the storm and shadow plays out her terror on Murakami’s face. She breaks down when her mother intervenes. None of the harm she causes is intentional, her role of femme fatale is tangential, but she reinforces the film’s sense that malice is a result of circumstance.

              Yusa lives in a shack, almost a jail already, filled with grime and dirt. The implication is clear it is his environment which spurred his mania, even he is spared blame. Domesticity plays an intriguing role in the picture, for it very literally represents the stability and prosperity which was yet lacking in the majority of Japan. Sato is the only of them who comfortably has a home and family, which works to justify his wisdom. The reassurances he gives to Murakami are all a matter of patience, for he understands the importance of waiting and the world will bend. During the middle of the movie, Sato brings Murakami to his home for dinner. He brings Murakami into his world to show him his path. He explicitly explains the après-guerre, postwar generation to him, and eases his paranoid identification to Yusa. While it is a heavy-handed display of social commentary it is important because Murakami is ignorant to his role. Sato saves him with this gesture, while Yusa’s rejection of domesticity spells his downfall.

The final confrontation occurs outdoors, but instead of the blinding sun, he is chased by Murakami through the forest, where the sun casts crooked shadows through the branches. They converge upon each other, two halves of the same generation, and it is Murakami who overcomes. Yusa is caught, and he breaks down screaming and crying, finding liberation in his pain so now he can receive the help he needs. Murakami solves his case, makes his first arrest, so now he can begin the rest of his days as a cop. The message is clear: good will prevail and Japan will benefit and succeed. The ending is bittersweet and in direct contrast for noir, but it fits because it shows Murakami’s acceptance of misfortune. To prosper as a cop he must accept that bad will always exist, and that it is his job to face it. Impending paranoia is rife with that sentiment, even if it lacks fatality. But it broaches a higher topic, for it reflects Japan’s Zen sensibilities. For good to exist, there must be bad, for only in its absence is it defined. Murakami walks the borderline, he enters the underworld to improve it, but unlike either of them it does not consume him.

Sources

Nora Inu. Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Toho International Co., 1949. DVD.

Rafferty, Terrence. “Stray Dog: Kurosawa Comes of Age.” RSS. Criterion, 24 May 2004. Web. 21 Apr. 2016.

Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro. “10. Stray Dog.” Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000. 147-55. Print.

Borde, Raymond, Étienne Chaumeton, and James Naremore. A Panorama of American Film Noir: 1941-1953. Trans. Paul Hammond. San Francisco: City Lights, 2002. Print.

By David Robinson | October 7, 2020

Hiroshi Teshigahara lived during one of Japan’s most turbulent periods. He was 18 at the end of World War II and graduated from the Tokyo University of the Arts in 1950. While he eventually embraced and explored the traditional cultural elements of his nation by taking the reins of his father’s ikebana school, his period of avant-garde exploration during the 1960s is a marvel of world cinema. His most well-known movie, and the one I’m talking about today, is Woman in the Dunes (1964).

It tells the story of an entomology professor who misses the last bus back to Tokyo while looking for a yet-undiscovered beetle on a beach in a largely uninhabited region of Japan. He makes his way to a neighboring village and is given a place to sleep for the night. The villagers are old and greet him with almost a wink as they lead him to the bottom of a basin, where a lone house sits, and a lone woman resides. She is friendly and gives him food while he studies the insects he found. He expresses his goal to find an undiscovered beetle and have his name put towards the discovery. Early the next morning, he sees the woman shoveling sand outside the home. When he gets himself fully up for the day, he sees she has since fallen asleep and lies naked in the home, covered in sand. The camera lingers on her, as if confused; the audience shares the man’s sense of foreboding.

Shortly afterwards, he learns the truth. When trying to leave, the ladder is gone. He’s stuck there, forced to shovel sand as the woman was doing that morning. He’s told the village is threatened by the sand, that it will consume them if it’s not dug out. They’re in financial ruin with no local economy and sell sand illegally on the black market for use in construction. The woman’s house is at the heart of the issue. If her house is overtaken by sand, the next house will be at risk. She performs her duty willingly, without questioning her plight. She’d lost her husband and child to the sand, and she seemingly won’t allow the village to suffer the same fate. The film follows the man’s assimilation into the village, showing multiple escape attempts and ultimately concluding with his accidental discovery of how to extract water from the sand.

The woman is a paragon of selflessness, though it doesn’t seem to have any extrinsic benefit to her. She has suffered and is suffering immensely, risking her life for the benefit of the village. The film seems to center on two different archetypes, those who question and strive to achieve and find purpose (the man) and those who quietly accept their role, either inherently or because life harshness has taken its toll on them. The story follows the man finding meaning and purpose in life. They are trapped together; she is the only one who can share and sympathize with what the man is experiencing.

From the film’s opening sequence, it establishes itself as a parable for the human condition. Its extreme close-up of sand particles, showing the crude beauty of such small particles found abundantly, zooms out to showing a beach hosting trillions of grains of sand. Teshigahara is making clear his intentions for this story to show something of a secret to happiness. In fact, the man is designed to be a stand-in for every one of us. Throughout the film, he goes completely unnamed. His anonymity serves to make him an Everyman, and it exemplifies the low standing he has in society. He’s taken from the mainstream, and the mark he left in the world is demonstrated only in the film’s final frame as Teshigahara shows the missing persons report with his name, “Niki,” displayed. There’s a degree of dehumanization occurring that’s reflexive to the perceived dehumanization Niki comes to terms with throughout the film.

Teshigahara had made one film prior to this one, 1962’s Pitfall, and multiple documentary features beforehand. His technical mastery is on full display throughout Woman in the Dunes, as he switches between rapid cross cuts, slow zooms, and sweeping panoramas. His characters are confined primarily to a small shack, which similarly confines him and his camera. Despite that, he remains nimble with tight, moving shots. As in the opening sequence, he creates a pattern of shifting camera distances from extreme wide shots (and wide angles) to microscopic, dissecting close-ups. This small, claustrophobic shack on the outskirts of Tokyo creates a disorienting experience that strengthens a thematic element of confusion. Teshigahara is a master of this reality, but his characters come off as free agents within it. The closest approximation I can come up with to real life is “the fog of war,” or the natural confusion that comes about when we don’t know the prescribed outcome. Us as the audience are privileged with either a bigger picture, and that’s something we lack in our own lives. We may feel like our realities are incarcerating due to an uncertainty of decision making; Teshigahara created an incarcerating reality for his characters.

The sand of the village defies any logic, despite the realistic look the film maintains. Teshigahara represents sand as though it were water. Doing so allows the film to take on more expressionistic representations, like early when the image of his wristwatch becomes a close-up of his face before the woman’s form fades onto the screen. When his face fades away, the image of sand scrolls over her, crisscrossing itself in a play of lines, especially when the parasol keeping the sand from the table comes next into the shot. It returns to her naked form, in various close-ups, and it is apparent the man has been watching her. These moments serve to draw the audience into their world, blending its elements together, denying any evidence of the divisions Teshigahara exhibits in other moments of the film.

Teshigahara cuts between drastic shifts in camera distance, creating a narrative that occasionally flows between the broader third-person reality of the audience as the viewer and dipping into their first-person view. At one point, the woman bathes the man. It begins with a wide shot of her kneeling beneath him, but quickly shifts to a close-up of her washing his feet, and more obscured close-ups of just his back. They are not immediately recognizable, and are disorienting, but it shows the woman’s interest in him as she studies his physique. It jumps around so much that it is rarely clear just what part of him she is bathing. They’re studying their situations, and in doing so their dynamic changes. Earlier in the film, he refuses to let her shovel sand. He prompts her with the possibility either of escaping or helping the village find enough economic success to let them go. As he discusses this, there is an extreme close-up of their hands flecked with sand. It cuts to a wide shot of him sitting before her getting close on his chin, then her face panning down to her hands, back to a wide shot of them both. There’s no point to their conversation, and they both know they won’t be able to do either of these things, but Teshigahara uses this as a moment to bring us into their world as their mind drifts away from the conversation and into idle observation of the world around them. It’s like when you’re in a meeting and notice toothpaste flecked around your supervisor’s mouth. These shifts are disorienting, and it undermines the reasoning and logic the man attempts to bring to his scenario.

The divide between the outer world and the inner space is erased by the sand as it pervades their home. Visually this suggests an erasure of civilized norms, but it also coincides with the man’s recognition that he’s traded one cage for another. Midway through the film the two become lovers, and the way this occurs underlines the man’s acceptance of his new reality. While shoveling, he becomes frustrated as he realizes how little his actions impact his situation. In a rage, he begins to tear down the house. The woman stops him, and they fall onto each other. She is the only one who understands his situation, and their embrace alleviates his grief and frustration. There’s little romance to their situation, and the following scene is almost pornographic in nature. The soundtrack drums and the sexuality of this instance is palpable in the camera’s craning from his face, over his hand to hers. It cuts to wide shot and the roof unleashes sand upon them. There is an inevitability to what follows: he helps clean the sand off her, partially closing the divide between them. For all its sensuality, Teshigahara undermines the eroticism, portraying their sex as a matter of course, with a sense of inevitability. Her hand explores his back and buttocks as he holds her close, brushing off the sand from her back. The angles jump to add disorientation to the events onscreen, and the soundtrack screeches as they fall into each other’s arms.

The villagers captured the man out of obligation to their homestead and more specifically to their duty to protect it. The woman is acting out of obligation to her dead husband and child. At the beginning of the film, the man’s obligation is to his career, shown by his obsession with finding an undiscovered beetle species. Throughout the film, his obligation shifts to the woman and later to the village. The more he assimilates, the more he fears the outside world. He embraces his simple life more and more as he realizes that his life in the city is just as confining, though using different means. There are economic limitations to his existence that prevent him from having true freedom. As he finds contentment, he realizes his human limitations and develops an awareness to the inherent futility that is the underbelly of our privileged existences. Futility is a strong word here. I’d like to clarify that I don’t mean this cynically or pessimistically. It’s part of managing expectations so as not to succumb to defeat. The man continues to take risks and alter his situation, though it does so differently. Us, like him, owe to ourselves to do the same thing. Discovery is founded on risk taking, and it’s through risking his life to escape that he ultimately discovers his most proud achievement, how to extract potable water from the sand.

The man undergoes an enlightenment almost. Buddhist teachings prescribe a lack of attachment to worldly means, which the man emulates by giving up his urban life in Tokyo. His simpler life, lived for the benefit of others, brings him a tranquility and contentment he lacked otherwise. His discovery of extracting water from the sand not only brings him pride in himself, but it’s something he can teach to the villagers to improve their lives as well. It’s the missing piece he’d been looking for in his life. By comparison, the woman has already arrived at this conclusion. She is the bedrock to compare against his character arc. She is a survivor, short-sighted and insouciant, and indifferent to the world outside their own little bubble, unperturbed. At the end of the film, the man’s opportunity to escape arrives, but he lets it go by, instead choosing to refine his technique to draw water from the sand.

It’s up to us as the audience to gauge the nobility in what meaning the man finds. There’s a cynical worldview that says the man found acceptance by settling, but alternatively he had not meant to find meaning where he did. His manual work and persistence in saving the village follows a similar pattern to his existence in modern society. Throughout the story, he becomes aware of those parallels and embraces the simpler order which he deems of higher reward. His career goal and spoken purpose in life in his native Tokyo is to find recognition academically for his discovery of an unknown beetle species. However, it becomes clear that it’s an extrinsic motivation. He wants glory and a modicum of fame, but those are hollow victories once achieved. The glory he finds at the end of the film is intrinsic. When he accidentally discovers a method of straining potable water from the sand (don’t bother questioning the science behind that), he feels pride in himself which he lacked before. In doing so, he begins to see his situation differently and appreciates the simplicity of that existence.

The man is neither the first nor last captive claimed by the village. Early in the film, he has a monolog denouncing social identity as a social construct, yet knowing that he still seeks glory through getting his name in a textbook. He wants to distinguish himself and create an identity society will recognize. He eventually finds the beetle, but in doing so he doesn’t care. He learns to see beyond the fake identity and embraces a new, intrinsic identity founded in his own accomplishment. There was no purpose to his initial goal, just like there was no purpose to the woman wanting a radio. While he chastises her for having it at the beginning of the film, he understands its necessity to her at the end. When his opportunity to escape arrives, he does not take it. He has gained liberation in his incarceration, simply by being in a space where being is all that is required of him. Here he needs not fear the outside, but more importantly, here he finds he can make an impact. His discovery of how to get water out of the dunes is an undeniable feat, and one which nobody can dispute. He spends the majority of the movie struggling against something which cannot change, but despite that he found the means to improve his plight, if only slightly.

Sources

Ebert, Roger. “Great Movies: Woman in the Dunes.” Rogerebert.com. N.p., 1 Feb. 1998. Web. 3 Dec. 2015.

Richie, Donald. A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to Videos and DVDs. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2001. Print.

Suna No Onna = Woman in the Dunes. Dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara. Criterion, 1964. DVD.

Woman in the Dunes, a Video Essay. Prod. James Quandt. Criterion, 2007. DVD.

David Robinson / Sept 30, 2020

Despite the popular representation of college as a time of freedom and growth, my college years were miserable. They were marred by family tragedy and encapsulated mostly by lonely nights with a textbook. Within that time I was given my introduction to Haruki Murakami, the now famous (and probably somewhat overrated) Japanese author who has been firmly established in the American mind. His popularity likely speaks to the concerns of many Americans and of course millions of Japanese. My uncle gave me my first story of his, torn from the pages of the New Yorker and handed to me in the nursing home where my grandmother would pass away a few months later. I didn’t like that first story, at least not at first, but it was intriguing nevertheless and resonated with the struggles I was facing in my entry to adulthood.

Japan’s economy has been mired in constant recession and is now closing out the third of its “lost decades.” Murakami’s first books were written in the late 70s, at the peak of Japan’s economic bubble, and they spoke to the darker realities of modern existence. We’re protected from the threats common to humanity for centuries, but in creating safe, guided livelihoods, we’ve removed a lot of the things that make life interesting and worthwhile. We live in a pacified existence upheld by the same dehumanizing capitalist institutions that keep our society in check. It’s within this landscape that Murakami’s stories take place. Murakami’s heroes begin in his stories as passive players who are spurred to change and fight against their stagnating lives. Its conflict follows the awakening of its protagonists who learn to grasp the minor amount of free will they’re allowed and make something worthwhile with it.

Murakami’s first full length novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, focuses on a nameless protagonist who gets caught up in a wacky series of events revolving around…a magic sheep. At the beginning of the story, the unnamed protagonist is living a life imbued with mundanity. Recently divorced, he has re-integrated into society after a prolonged hiatus. He swears that he is the pinnacle of mundanity, going about his day to day. His early struggle is against the dehumanizing nature of modern existence. He’s clearly unhappy (probably clinically depressed) and fills the void of his existence with vapid consumerism. He buys records, drinks whiskey, and chain smokes. His job has him making flyers in a small marketing firm that supports him enough to maintain his non-existence, but socially he is an apparition. That he isn’t even given a name indicates that he could be any one of us, floating through our days waiting for the next thing to occur.

The main plot kicks off when he is contacted by a mysterious figure alerting him that he had inadvertently published a photo of a mysterious sheep. The photo had been sent to him by his old friend named The Rat (who is a regular character in his first two novellas). The mysterious figure represents a right-wing political figure over whom the sheep exerts a strong influence which keeps the man alive. He has a girlfriend who joins him on his adventures. She has magic ears that give her strange seductive powers. The unnamed protagonist leaves Tokyo with his girlfriend and travels to Hokkaido. His search leads him to The Dolphin Hotel, run by a man whose family is connected to the old sheep farmers that used to exist in that area. What he finds is that The Rat and the sheep are fundamentally connected, and that to find one, he must find the other.

Its title and plot revolve around a magic sheep, and though Murakami has denied that the sheep has any meaning inherent to itself, the nature of the protagonist’s quest portrays the sheep as a symbol of the corruption and power that uphold the status quo. The sheep’s existence must be kept secret to protect the livelihood of the rightwing figure who has given the task to begin with. Its discovery represents a danger to their institutions, but it’s not clear specifically what those are. The person running The Dolphin Hotel is from a long line of sheep farmers, indicating a connection with Japan’s agricultural industry. The sheep could be the representative interests supporting the capitalist institutions.

At the plot’s culmination, the protagonist makes his way to The Rat’s cabin in the mountains of Hokkaido. Shortly after arriving there, his girlfriend leaves and he gets snowed in. At first the cabin’s presence is maddening. He has little for recreation and no contact to the outside world. He is visited by a man in a sheep’s costume, whom he befriends and learns that The Rat has died. He had become possessed by the sheep and committed suicide to prevent it from gaining entrance into society because of its evil wills. His death points to a futility of existence. Cause and effect are enacted by so many unseen threads that it’s hard to navigate this world. Free will is a myth in Murakami’s world, but what he designates as such is the sense that everyone is a byproduct of their social order. Collective will overpowers individual will, though Murakami leaves room for the bravery of the few can create a positive shift if it impacts the many.

The deeper implications aren’t clear. The Rat’s suicide is presented as a noble act, indicating a degree of self-sacrifice that shows him taking control of his existing and railing against his perceived lack of free will. This conclusion isn’t exactly satisfying to the reader, but it touches on a truth of reality. Explanations for events are usually unsatisfactory, and we must search inside ourselves—or within the narrative—for closure. the sheep can be read as the wills of bad actors in society, and especially within our current political climate (the world over and not just in America) it seems oddly prescient that the evil force would be rightwing politics. Their machinations represent a protection of the status quo which is ultimately found to be changing.

The lack of clarity in the narrative is itself a point of the novel. For him, the important conflict is essentially internal monologue. The internal changes experienced by his characters are the purpose of his narratives. For the reader, the non-solution presented at the end of the novel forces us to look deeper and make our own conclusions. Murakami creates a surreal world that’s bizarre to our sensibilities, but its effects on the protagonists are no stranger than everyday existence. Reality is a muddled mess of contradictions. Confusion is the norm of our existence and cannot be separated from reality. His protagonists learn to navigate the chaos introduced into their lives, and to do so they need to embrace the chaos they’re encountering. Modern existence is about safety. It is a byproduct of our instinct to preserve and protect ourselves, but in doing so we’ve removed most of the random chance that brings magic into our lives. By adopting a passive existence, the protagonist becomes less than human, but through the course of the narrative, they take charge of their free will and make a difference. The unnamed protagonist learns this lesson, pushes forward, and continues with his existence. In its last scene, the always stoic protagonist returns to Tokyo, then he goes to a beach and cries. Until that point, he displayed little to no emotion, and in doing so, he rejects the passive acceptance of his reality. He shows personal growth within him. We end the novel knowing that a change has occurred, but it’s up to us to determine what specific change has occurred, but regardless his experiences have broken him from his passive mold.

In Murakami’s later novels, he’s become more explicit about the changes his characters go through. With his plot narratives, the colorfulness of the cast and events kind of muddles this point, but in his short stories, it’s far clearer. Surface action is cheap to Murakami; what matters to him is fundamental emotional development. What seem initially like non-resolutions are simply resolutions seen differently. My introduction to Murakami, “Kino,” is about a man who buys a coffee shop after his divorce and lives a quiet, shut away existence. He lives at the shop, in addition to running it, all while shutting himself off emotionally. He gets to know his patrons and steadily improves his business. He befriends a man who later reveals himself as a friend of his aunt’s who sold him the business. After some convincing, Kino decides to go for a trip. He doesn’t like it at first, but the story ends when he senses a shift inside himself while staying in a hotel a few cities over. For once, he doesn’t shut out his emotions and a willingness inside himself grows to live a full life, even if that involves embracing negative emotions.

The story ends abruptly there, and when I first read it, it confused and dismayed me. Revisiting it as an adult, I’m still confused, but I feel it speaks to a higher truth. So much of our livelihood is designed to distract us emotionally, just like Kino was doing. We take up hobbies, go out to dinner, and we hide from the things the really drive us or refuse to face the issues coming to collect. Life is a great, big complicated thing that must be experienced in full and can very easily be ignored. That’s the arc undertaken by every Murakami hero. They begin their narratives living in blissful ignorance, actively hiding from the life they have before them. Through the surrealist events occurring within their stories, they learn to open themselves to it. His conclusions don’t feel like resolutions because they end with one door closing as it opens onto a new road. The point that they reach is the first step on a road to self-improvement. Only by embracing life’s twists and turns can we keep growing.

Sources

Tyers, R. (2019). The Labyrinth and the Non-Solution: Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase and the Metaphysical Detective, Manusya: Journal of Humanities, 22(1), 76-89. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/26659077-02201004

Welch, Patricia. “Haruki Murakami’s Storytelling World.” World Literature Today, vol. 79, no. 1, 2005, pp. 55–59. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40158783. Accessed 30 Sept. 2020.