Haruki Murakami and Hear the Wind Sing

Love really is suffering. Therefore, I blame Haruki Murakami, along with other perpetrators, for bringing me so much pain in a way that I could never resist. They forces me to confront myself, look into the parts of me that I don’t like and pressure me to cope with them. In this post, I would like to discuss a few things about Murakami, my thrilling experience with his works and a little bit more about Hear the Wind Sing, his first novel.

By saying that Murakami is not a typical modern Japanese writer, I don’t mean to praise or criticize him – it is more a fact than a judgment in either direction. I simply feel the need to draw a line between him and other Japanese authors after World War II. His distinct style, which is marked with a surrealistic vibe and broken timelines, has made him both immensely popular and highly controversial. In my case, the moment I opened my fist Murakami’s novel, Kafka on the Shore, was the beginning of another obsession of mine. Every aesthetic choice that he made clicked with me instantly. Because of him, I was made to accept one of the last things I would want to admit about myself: No matter how much I try, I will never be as rational as I aspire to be. At the time, I could barely pin down the true meaning of the novel, yet my love for it was confirmed. It turned out that the subconscious part of my mind didn’t always favor the argument over how the argument was presented. I wanted to be as sensible and grounded as possible; therefore, I didn’t want to think of myself as someone who favored style over content. I want to be able to clearly rationalize the reasons I love a piece. Murakami always has a lot of interesting things to express through his works, but I was addicted to his writing before I could explain what he was trying to say. Now, having escape that grey zone of not knowing if I should like what I like, I still come back to his novels mainly for the feeling they bring me, a feeling so unworldly you must put yourself to sleep and enter a dream world with rules of its own to understand it.

One of the ways that people in Murakami’s novels trap me in their world is with their charm. Though the main characters, who are usually the narrators of their own stories, appear to be fairly reliable, I could never them trust entirely. They don’t lie to us, the readers, but they don’t always tell us everything they have in their minds either. Murakami, a certified loner himself, consistently casts loners and introverts in his novels. In most cases, instead of being given a broad description of the lead from the start, we gradually learn about him or her as the story progresses. As the protagonists are telling their stories, we only know what they allow us to know. At no time during the span of three novels do the narrator of Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973 and The Wild Sheep Chase disclose to us his and Rat’s real name. In fact, we aren’t even sure if he knows Rat’s real name. Murakami’s characters’ best attempts to connect with us are through sharing little bits of their personal lives like their choice of music and food or giving weirdly specific depictions of mundane stuff. Once in a while, they let us enter their head while they are reflecting on their lives and the world around them. When that happens, please remember to cherish the moment. These characters may not display complete alienation from society, but they can be quite distant and aloof. One way or another, they invite readers’ curiosity and keep us hanging for more.

Another notable aspect of Murakami’s novels is their surrealistic mood. There is something mysterious and unpredictable about the world inside each of his novels, where the line between dreaming and waking is absurdly thin, and sometimes non-existent. There, wondrous things can happen in real life while dreams sometimes feel more genuine than the physical world. Everything is beautifully chaotic. The deeper we dive in, the more strange events occur. Like Alice in the Wonderland, we and the narrators are leaded from one surprise to another. At its most extreme, the place where the story-tellers inhabit could be an outright fantastical land with very few rules for us to hold onto. Just to make things slightly more confusing, we aren’t often given a chronologically-ordered story. Normally, the narrators provide us with fragments of their past and present adventures, all of which we must then piece together ourselves to follow them on their current expedition. In the case of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, the novel goes back and forth between two separated stories that are set in different worlds and involve different characters.

A typical piece by Murakami deals with very personal problems like loneliness, love, loss and identity. These themes are woven into almost any novel that he ever published, including those that don’t follow his general style. In this post, I want to introduce to you one of such novel, Hear the Wind Sing. This work, along with Pinball, 1973 are Murakami first two releases, neither of which he is really proud of when he speaks about his works, publicly. If you haven’t read any book by Murakami yet, I suggest trying out The Wild Sheep Chase (the last of the Rat trilogy) or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, both of which adopt a pretty standard Murakami style. Nevertheless, I think it’s necessary to talk about his first novel before moving onto his latter works in order to get a comprehensive idea of his career.

Despite reaching up to forty chapters, Hear the Wind Sing is a very short novel that has little to no plot. As the narrator (a rising senior majoring in biology) says in chapter two, everything began and ended within eighteen days from August 8, 1970 to August 26 of the same year. However, instead of telling us a sequence of consecutive events in the life of a college student visiting his hometown, Murakami gives us a collection of very loosely connected incidents that occurred during that summer. Each chapter opens and closes abruptly, without any build-up or climax. The only thing that seems to matter to the narrator, who occasionally rambles on about irrelevant things, is the rampant flow of thoughts and emotions. Interestingly, that digressive narrating style is oddly familiar, for we can attest for ourselves that when one’s mind is left wandering around unfocused, it jumps from one topic to another, paying little attention to the calendar and the clock. Though the novel’s realistic approach to the narrator’s life isn’t a good indicator of Murakami’s general style, any of his fans can still enjoy the slightly melancholic tone of the story while lying on a couch in a peaceful afternoon.

We can tell from the title, Hear the Wind Sing, that at some point in the novel, the narrator will mention the wind and its voice. He, of course, doesn’t disappoint, creatively doing just that in multiple ways. Firstly, he describes the refreshing wind coming from the sea of his hometown, Niigata. Secondly, he cites a passage from a science fiction novel that includes a conversation between the wind on Mars and an unnamed man. Thirdly, in a walk with the girl without a little finger, the narrator and she talk about the wind of youth, whose direction, according to the narrator, will eventually change. From the novel, we can see how youth and wind resemble each other. Both of them pass us quicker than one would expect, leading us to new territories we never know we belong to. As the narrator returns to Tokyo to continue his study, he waits for life’s final verdict on his future. His youth hasn’t ended yet, but soon enough, it will.

Hear the Wind Sing isn’t among Murakami’s best novels; nevertheless, it’s a case that a Murakami’s fan shouldn’t overlook if he or she want to better understand the evolution of his writing. After finishing some of his otherworldly creations, you can give Hear the Wind Sing a go just for a change of mood.

Fun fact: Before becoming a writer, Murakami ran a jazz bar (like J in Hear the Wind Sing). He talked a little bit about this in his one of his other book, What I talk about when I talk about running.