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.

Photo from: here 

Book #41: Disaster, Diaspora, Dispersion

"Six months now since she'd been sent away to London.  Every morning before she opened her eyes she thought, if I were the wishing type I know what I would wish."
                                                                                                      -Monica Ali, Brick Lane

Staring at images of the earthquake in Japan has been leaving me nauseous.  To watch fields being swallowed by waters like lava and lonely survivor buildings peaking over the mounds of rubble fills me with a very strange, sad feeling, to say the least.  I'm wondering if we have family there, caught in the chaos.  I emailed my mom to ask, but of course she didn't know - it was my grandfather who faithfully wrote letters to our relatives in Japan, and he's dead now.  Neither my parents nor I even speak Japanese.  So with my grandpa's death, the cord of communication was cut, and I'm left with nothing more than hazy memories of some distant cousins coming to stay with my grandparents when I was a kid.  A couple of teenage boys, dressed all in white.  They seemed to embody the mystery and otherworldliness I'd always associated with my ancestral homeland.

As a fourth-generation Japanese-Canadian, perhaps it isn't surprising that I felt like a tourist when I visited Japan for the first and only time.  Still, it greatly upsets me to see the photos of rubble and ruined land, as if something of my past is again being swallowed up, and simply clicking a button to give a few dollars doesn't do enough to appease my conscience.

How eerie that when all this struck, I was reading Brick Lane, Monica Ali's brilliant debut novel about diaspora and dispersion.  As I read, I was thinking about the parallels between her tale and my own family history.  This novel about two Bangladeshi sisters - one of whom resigns herself to an arranged marriage in London, the other of whom runs off to pursue a "love marriage" to a man who beats and abandons her - reminds me in certain ways of the fates of my grandmother and great grandmother. 

My great grandmother was a picture bride, a woman sent from Japan to marry a stranger in America, strictly based on her photograph.  Well, that's not true exactly.  According to my grandmother, she was actually the matchmaker's secretary.  When my great grandfather proved himself a particularly picky client and turned down all the ladies selected for him, the matchmaker, on a whim, presented his secretary.  "I'll take her," my great grandfather said immediately.  Thus my great grandmother boarded a ship for Oregon, but did not find the life of luxury she'd been promised - her husband, it turned out, was merely a drycleaner.  Putting on a stoic face, she swallowed her desires, until her desires resurfaced through her daughter (my grandmother).  My grandmother, a Japanese-American beauty queen, prided herself on being American, and when the family tried to send her back to Japan through an arranged marriage to a wealthy Japanese businessman, she rebelled.  By this point, she was already in love with my grandfather; he was one of the guys who came to play basketball in the part of Portland, Oregon, where she grew up.  So she got on a ship and came back to America bringing with her only a beautiful Japanese doll as a memento, and married my grandfather.  But her love marriage soon soured.  My grandfather turned out to be a violent, angry man blinded by alcoholism and his own thwarted artistic ambitions. 

I often wondered, as I discovered pieces of her life through conversations with my father, whether she ever regretted her decision to come back to America.  It's haunting to think about the other set of descendents she would have had, had she decided to marry the Japanese businessman, and I sometimes dream about the woman I would have been.  My ghostly alter ego......

Photo from: here