Book #61: One More Week ...

Just one week until my book launch ...  These past few weeks, my mind has been oscillating wildly.  I have consulted my doctor, my naturopath and meditation coach about various sleep remedies, with varying results (in the end, listening to the sound of thunderstorms and ocean waves on my iPod seems to work the best).

Of course, I knew this day would come.  And I am excited.  And yet, there is an unnerving side to the self-exposure of having your memoir published, I've discovered, somewhat belatedly.  While having dinner with some friends who are now reading my book, it has, not surprisingly come up as a topic of conversation - particularly, the racier sections.  "Which old boyfriend was that?" one friend asked with an arch smile, trying to decode the changed names.  She'd heard bits and pieces over the years, over boozy dinners, but never as uncut as this.

I heaved a sigh of relief when she reassured me how much she was enjoying it and didn't object to when I changed the topic of conversation.  I guess that's what old friends are for.

Perhaps my insomnia hasn't been helped by what's on my bedside table.  When I haven't been writing, I have been reading Haruki Murakami's tome-like novel 1Q84 and I am now nearing the midpoint.  Although this novel feels experimental and meandering in structure, and may not be among Murakami's finest works, it is nevertheless strangely addictive to read.  It takes the reader on an epic journey through a world, which, on the face of it, is 1984 Japan, but turns out to open outward into a world of double reality.  As one of the main characters, a serial killer named Aomame, reflects: "The streets had fewer passersby.  The number of cars declined, and a hush fell over the city.  She sometimes felt she was on the verge of losing track of her location.  Is this actually the real world? she asked herself.  If it's not, then where should I look for reality?"  Characteristic of Murakami, the world of reality bleeds into another world that is surreal and disturbing and possibly is contained within his protagonists' minds and fantasies, but just as possibly might actually exist.  Similarly, it occurred to me, my own perceptions have been feeling weightless and off centre lately ...  Perhaps this is what the writing life does to you: it dissolves the world into pure, malleable representation, which can quickly take on a life of its own. 

Equally compelling about this strange double world is the quest of the other main character, a writer named Tengo, who has been retained to ghostwrite a novel based on the experiences of a mysterious, almost autistic high school girl, Fuka-Eri, who has lived through some unspeakable childhood in a cult.  But who are these strangely mystical beings called the "Little People" that haunt Fuka-Eri's narrative?  Don't expect this novel to provide a little soothing bedtime reading ...  More likely you'll find yourself up reading until three in the morning, unable to sleep, like me.

Hope to see you next Tuesday at my book launch!

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Book #60: My Holiday Reading

“For weeks the kid been going on and on about how dreadful we sound.  He kept snatching up the discs, scratching the lacquer with a pocket knife, wrecking them.  Yelling how there wasn’t nothing there.  But there was something.  Some seed of twisted beauty.”

                                                                                              -Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues

Ever since childhood, my favourite thing about the Christmas holidays has been the lazy, languid days of curling up in my bathrobe and doing nothing but reading all day.  And this year has been no exception.  Right now, as I write, I’m wearing my favourite black terry cloth robe, a stack of books teetering on the sofa beside me.

Not surprisingly, I got a lot of gift certificates for bookstores for Christmas.  The first book I bought was Esi Edugyan’s Giller-winning Half-Blood Blues.  I read this novel in just a couple days, unable to put it down.  What a pleasure to become immersed in the strange, delicious world of this novel, the underground jazz scene of Berlin and Paris during the Second World War, as seen through the eyes of Sid Griffiths, a “half-blood” musician from Baltimore, whose skin is so light he can almost pass for white.  But just the opposite is true for others in the band, most notably Hieronymus Falk, who, despite being the youngest, is the genius of the group.  Hieronymus – “Hiero,” as he’s known – is a “Rhineland bastard.”  He’s of mixed German and African parentage, fathered by a Senegalese soldier who was serving as part of the French colonial troops occupying the Rhineland after World War One.  Despite growing up being reviled for his skin and relegated to a stateless identity, Hiero has musical talents that win him the name “Little Louis.”  Sid and the others take him under their wing, as a little brother at first, but as Hiero develops as a musician and artist, his remarkable abilities lead to tensions and rivalry.  Particularly where a certain singer, Delilah Brown, is concerned.  Sid becomes enamoured from the moment he first glimpses her strangely glamorous turban and thin, stark body and mesmerizing, pale green eyes.  Although she returns his affections, to an extent, she appears far more enticed by Hiero’s musical brilliance.

This is what I found so compelling about this novel: Edugyan brings to life a slice of history that until now, I’d known very little about, yet she does so through the lens of a set of characters and relationships that are so rich they’re constantly drawing me in.  Who among us can’t relate to the predicament of being jealous of a more talented friend?  Yet what under normal circumstances would simply be clashing egos and rivalries over art and women lead to much larger, tragic events in Nazi-occupied Germany.  Sid’s guilt and tormented conscience over whether he could have done something to prevent Hiero’s capture by Nazi police, in the riveting opening scene, lays the ground for his emotional journey in the rest of the novel.

And now, I've just started reading Chattering by Louise Stern, a slim, elegant collection of stories that I stumbled upon quite randomly a few days ago at a used bookstore on Ossington.  The best $4 I’ve spent in a long time.  Narrated from the perspectives of different deaf characters, drawing upon the author’s own experience, these stories give an intriguing glimpse of what it feels like to be constantly struggling to express oneself through sign language, body language and scribbled notes – heightening the ways in which we all feel estranged from language at times.  Young and surprisingly adventurous, these characters hitchhike with strange men, sleep on the beach, wake up in weird, risky places.  In between stories, I’ve turned my attention back to Haruki Murakami’s tome-like latest novel 1Q84, which is gradually drawing me in….  So much holiday reading to do….

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Book #59: The Other Murakami

"They don't have compensated dating in America," Jun said.  "I wonder what these geniuses would say if an American newspaper asked them to explain why Japanese high-school girls sell it."
                                                                                               -Ryu Murakami, In the Miso Soup

I recently went book shopping and bought Haruki Murakami's latest novel 1Q84, a tome-like brick of a book with a close-up of a pale, beautiful, slightly melancholy Japanese woman on the cover, and Ryu Murakami's much slimmer and lighter In the Miso Soup sporting a photo of a woman in black lingerie, her head cropped off, her skin aglow in eerie red light. 

Much as I love Haruki Murakami, there's something a bit daunting about starting a 925-page novel while immersed in my own writing....  I decided to save it for the Christmas holidays and dove into the other Murakami instead.

I have vague, pleasurable memories of reading Ryu Murakami's cult classic Almost Transparent Blue as a teenager and being particularly fascinated by the character named Reiko (perhaps partly because Reiko is my middle name).  In the Miso Soup, his more recent novel, provides the same kind of gritty look at Japan's underworld through the lens of the sex trade, yet this novel provides more reflection and commentary, on the part of the narrator, than I recall in his previous work.  It closely follows the relationship between two characters: Frank, a slovenly, balding American tourist, freshly arrived in Tokyo to indulge his appetite for the sex trade, and Kenji, the twenty-year-old drifter whom Frank hires to be his guide in navigating the peepshows, lingerie pubs, bars and brothels.  While the premise of this novel may not sound overly promising - it could quickly lapse into nothing more than a prurient thrill - Murakami's art lies in his ability to provide an almost anthropological look at the two cultures, Japan and America, which the two protagonists and their strange encounter represent.  One of the most interesting concepts central to the Japanese sex trade, we learn, is known as "compensated dating," where school girls go on paid dates with businessmen - but their activities may go no further than singing karaoke.  Or they may go further; the line isn't clear.  And it isn't only school girls.  Middle-aged, frumpy women trying to pass themselves off as college students frequent the same bars where hookers hang out, vaguely entertaining the possibility of selling themselves, too, should Mr. Right walk in.  What emerges, as Kenji takes Frank through this bizarre, highly stratified underworld, is a picture of a society where the lines between intimacy, sex and prostitution have utterly blurred and money is the only currency of desire.  

I lived in downtown Osaka one summer several years ago, during my undergrad days, and I recall being both baffled and intrigued.  Perhaps it was just the area where I ended up living, but the sex trade seemed to be absolutely everywhere - hostess bars tucked between the flashing lights of Pachinko parlours, swarms of garishly made-up girls in stilettos and mini-dress uniforms running into the streets accosting the men.  It perplexed (and saddened) me because I guess I held some naive, stereotypical views of Japan as a fairly traditional society.  Instead, I found myself immersed in a place where selling sex and sexuality seemed very much in your face and integrated in everyday life.

I don't know whether I ever quite came to terms with that summer in Japan, but Murakami's critique of the extreme loneliness and hollowed out existence that seem to be driving both his Japanese and American protagonists (the latter turns out to be a psychopath) made for a fascinating read.  In the end, the novel suggests that Frank and Kenji, though they come from very different cultures, may be equally screwed up.  In one of the final scenes, after Frank has gone on a killing rampage, Kenji searches his memory trying to explain what the word bonno means in Buddhism: "I think it's usually translated as 'worldly desires.'  It's more complicated than that, but the first thing you need to know is that it's something everybody suffers from."

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Book #48: Murakami On My Mind

"Strange and mysterious things, though, aren't they - earthquakes?  We take it for granted that the earth beneath our feet is solid and stationary.  We even talk about people being 'down to earth' or having their feet planted firmly on the ground.  But suddenly one day we see that it isn't true."
                                                                                  -Haruki Murakami, After the Quake

Two months after the earthquake in Japan, I'm not hearing much about it in the media anymore.  It's strange how an event can appear larger than life for so many days - earth-shattering, literally - and then just fade away, as other more current current events take over.  Perhaps this is what I find so unsatisfying and unsettling about reading the newspaper and watching the news.  But fiction, on the other hand, provides a whole other way of seeing the world, where the everyday details surrounding an event are carefully dissected.  And so, lusting after this kind of reading experience, I picked up Haruki Murakami's After the Quake earlier this week.

In this collection of short stories, Murakami writes about how the 1995 earthquake in Kobe transformed the lives of ordinary people in Japan forever.  What I found so moving about these stories is the way that they don't focus on the most dire instances of suffering; there are no torn limbs or people trapped under crumbling buildings in these stories.  No, Murakami's art is a much more subtle, startling form of grief.  A doctor attending a conference in Thailand curses her estranged ex-husband - half wishing that he died in the earthquake - only to learn from a fortune teller that he is still alive, bringing an unexpected relief to her tormented mind.  A crazy man dreams that a giant frog has saved Tokyo from being destroyed from a quake.  And in my favourite story, a writer comforts the young daughter of the woman he's secretly been in love with for years by telling her whimsical stories about "Masakichi the bear" to distract her from her nightmares about "Mr. Earthquake."  Strangely, the earthquake pulls them all together into a new kind of improvised family.

Although Murakami was writing about the Kobe earthquake, I can't help but see these stories as illuminating the more recent earthquake, too.  And late at night when I, like several of the characters, also cannot sleep, it's comforting to pick up Murakami and get a sense that life in even the most disastrous circumstances carries on, and people manage to find new forms of happiness, however fragile.

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