MURAKAMI HARUKI: THE RAT TRILOGY PART ONE

The Rat trilogy starts with Hear The Wind Sing first published in 1979. The book (and Murakami's career) starts off with the observation, "There's no such thing as perfect writing..." Central to his understanding of good writing is the career of an obscure writer by the name of Derek Heartfield. The narrator informs us that, "His style is difficult, the stories impossible, and the themes infantile." Heartfield's weakness was, we are informed, that he "never got a clear picture of who he was fighting..." There is little evidence of fighting in this early stage of the series. We are introduced to the Rat, who is a regular at J's bar, drinking beer and eating peanuts. Essentially he is bored and rails against the rich... of whom he is one. Together with the narrator the Rat is a drifter unable to feel any substance in his life.

Despite not being a reader the Rat writes a novel of which the narrator says it has two points to recommend it, there is no sex scene and no-one dies. Following the sinking of their boat, a man and woman find themselves afloat in the ocean. The woman decides to swim and find an island... The Rat prefers to float and drink beer. The sense of ennui in the novel fills the lives of Murakami's characters. When the narrator puts a drunk girl from the bar to bed and stays overnight there is no sex scene but she doesn't believe him. It turns out eventually that she has had an abortion and her life is on hold. She is not the only one to struggle with life. The narrator describes the three girls he has slept with in his life, the last of which, a French major, hanged herself.

Seemingly untouched by these experiences, the novel is an amoral expose of the lives of young people who care little about what the reader make think about them. Murakami touches on the years of student protest in Tokyo during which the narrator himself was a student. His front teeth were bashed in by a riot policeman but rather than being an innocent victim he describes how he himself was involved in animal testing at the university and had killed "thirty-sex cats and kittens in two months." Numbers take on an added significance in the life of the narrator. Given the insubstantial nature of his life, the narrator says "putting a numerical value  on everything would enable me to transmit something to others." He realises, however, that no-one else will be interested in how many cigarettes he smokes or the size of his penis. This strategy turns out to be a dead-end...The only things that matter to him are music and food.

When we get back to Derek Heartfield, his life seems to be a validation of the ennui in which the narrator and the Rat are trapped. The narrator crows about his "cynicism and derision and wit and paradox." Significantly he has written a book of short stories called, "The Wells of Mars." This is probably the start of Murakami's career as a writer. No-one has any idea of why these wells were dug. They avoided water and after tens of thousands of years "not one block was out of place after tens of thousands of years." As a result of following the well passages that were dug to "curve along the warp of time" a young space vagabond reaches the surface of the planet... This journey has apparently taken him a "good fifteen billion years." Conversing with the winds he asks if they have learnt anything... The response is a laugh after which the young space vagabond shoots himself. His death is no different to the indifference with which the Rat and the narrator arm themselves except in relation to music and food and the loyalty the Rat feels towards the Chinese barkeeper, J. From this point on, however, Murakami's characters will be drawn to wells into which they climb in order to discover something deep inside themselves.

The novel does conclude with a breezy DJ on the radio NEB pop request line who reads out a letter from a listener and momentarily drops his patter to tell his audience, "I Love You All" but the novel ends with the narrator moving back to Tokyo. The narrator subsequently takes a trip to America to visit the grave of Derek Heartfield and he leaves the reader with a pearl of wisdom courtesy of Heartfield, "Compared to the complexity of the universe, this world of ours is like the brain of a worm." That's much more like the real ending to this novel!

The second novel in the trilogy Pinball, 1973, starts with the narrator's confession that his love of people telling him stories about faraway places was "almost pathological." More significantly is his observation that, "It was as if they were tossing rocks  down a dry well: they'd spill all kinds of different stories my way, and when they'd finished, they'd go home pretty much satisfied." Murakami's characters from the 'young space vagabond' onwards are all drawn to a well of some description. The impulse to pull the trigger being restricted, however, to Murakami's early fiction. In this novel there is also a return to reminiscences about the days of student unrest... In keeping with the story about the wells of Mars two of the people who share stories with him are from Saturn and Mars. One of them, the guy from Saturn, explains how heavy the gravity is and then how he is going to start a great revolution. In the meantime the narrator is given the best seat in order to listen to Haydn's Sonata in G Minor.

The narrator explains that at times he feels like he has been put together from two different puzzles... He tries to drink the problem away but often wakes up feeling worse. Then he wakes up one morning to find himself sleeping between two twins. The duality he experiences in his own consciousness is in this way given external representation which leads to a discussion about what names he should give them. He observes, "Where there's an entrance, there's got to be an exit." But of course there are exceptions like mouse traps. This leads to a story about a well... The well was in a small town where Naoko grew up... It was a region witrh freezing cold rain and a "table of sweet groundwater." Near the station lived a well digger who was an "ill-natured man of fifty or so, but when it came to digging wells he was a bona fide genius." When Naoko was seventeen the well-digger was killed by a train. After that sweet water wells were hard to come by in the town. The narrator notes, however, "I like wells, though. Every time  I see a well, I can't resist tossing a rock in. There's nothing as soothing as the sound of a pebble hitting the water in a deep well." The narrator informs the reader that this story is also the story of the Rat and that "September, 1973, that's where the novel begins. That's the entrance." With a sense of foreboding he continues "We'll just hope there's an exit."

For the Rat it appears there is no exit, he left home when he went to university and then dropped out of university.. Murakami explains that the Rat had "... any number of reasons for dropping out. The wiring to those reasons had gotten impossibly tangled up, and when things heated up past a critical point, the fuse blew with a bang." The idea of wiring and fuses leads to the episode where a repairman comes to the narrator's apartment to change the switch panel. The repairman is of course impressed when he finds the twins in the narrator's bed and he asks the narrator later "... that must take some doing, eh?" The Rat of course cannot be so easily fixed... And as the repairman explains to the twins "if the mother dog dies, then the puppies die too." In the midst of the gathering gloom, the Rat is drawn to a beacon on the beach where he often went in childhood at dusk. Whilst he knows the path out there by heart he is always filled with loneliness on the way home. He knew a woman who lived near there but he lets this relationship go. Ultimately he feels that "whatever lay waiting 'out there' was all too vast, too overwhelming for him to possibly make a dent in." Unlike the narrator, the Rat is not a 'survivor'.

In Hear the Wind Sing, the first book of the trilogy, the narrator confesses to having killed cats and kittens at the university. In Pinball, 1973 the narrator and the Rat have a discussion about a cat that had its paw crushed. Significantly the Rat seems unaware about the narrator's experiences at the university because he wants to know, '"Who'd want to do that to a cat's paw?" Significantly the narrator replies, "You said it. Not a reason in the world to crush a cat's paw... It's just senseless and cruel. But y'know, the world's full of that kind of mindless ill will." He seems to have forgotten his own 'mindless ill will'. He appears to have had a change of heart and at the twin's insistence, even the switch panel is given the last rites... The narrator hastily drawing on his knowledge of Kant to provide a prayer. He notes that "The obligation of philosophy is to eradicate illusions born of misunderstanding..." There is a sinister note, however, when he tells the office girl that he is late because he was "playing with a cat."

The title of the love comes from thre narrator's love of pinball and, in particular, a rare model called the 'Spaceship'. To introduce this part of the story the narrator tells us that, "On any given day, something claims our attention..." This leads to the observation that, "We're always digging wells in our heads. While above the wells, birds flit back and forth." In a sense we are as alien to ouselves and to each other as if we came from Saturn or Venus and the wells we were digging were on Mars... The twins arrive and inevitably they will leave. There is no explanation and those that look for an explanation, like the Rat, are destined to fail. The narrator is a 'survivor' because is content to observe things without making any real attempt to form any deep attachments... And even when he comes face to face with the piball machine he misses so much, he is confronted by the "familiar board. Deep blue space, a spilled-ink ultramarine. And in it, tiny white stars. Saturn, Venus, Mars... while in front there floated a pure-white spaceship." Significantly inside the spaceship a "family gathering appeared to be in progress." But the narrator walks away without even playing a game, his clothes smelling of dead chickens... The sense of alienation is overpowering.

At the end of the novel, the Rat leaves town. Sitting alone in his room, the Rat observed "his own body lose its physical presence, grow heavier then become numb."Having been drawn to the beacon since childhood he feels that there is "Nothing to explain to anyone anymore... No doubt the bottom of the sea is warmer, more peaceful and puiet than any town..." So while the narrator experiences his own sense of weightlessness in outer space, the Rat is being drawn to the bottom of the ocean.

HAMAYA HIROSHI AND THE FURUSATO

I first 'discovered' the photography of Hamaya Hiroshi in a newspaper article published in the late 1980s in Japan. It was published in either of the two English language newspapers The Japan Times or the Yomiuri Shimbun... The article talked about Hamaya being a 'lensman of principle' and that he had won the Hasselblad prize in 1987. The photos in the article showed children making their way through the snow protected by straw and an onsen deep in the mountains where the bath was lit by candles. These images conjured up a romantic image of Japan that foreigners like myself longed to see. Coupled with the fascination I had with Japanese animation like Akira and Astro Boy (Atomu) and the fast life of a city like Tokyo, I had an equally strong longing for what the Japanese refer to as the furusato. This is a term that means 'hometown' and it has come to refer to the Japanese nostalgia for the past during a period of intense globalisation and kokusaika (internationalisation). Homely images of the countryside have come to represent the true essence of the culture (and the self)... These images reassure the Japanese people and give them a touchstone with which to keep faith when everywhere esle their sense of identiy is bing threatneed...  Hence the popularity of actors like Atsuki Kiyoshi in the long running Otoko wa Tsurai series or Sugawara Bunta in the Toraku Yaro series. These archetypal characters belong to the furusato, the Japanese homeland of the mind, and hence, their relevance or significance can't be measured by the usual standards. 

 

At about this time there was another article in the newspaper that  was about how a Japanese company was the first firm in the world to lease land in China. All land technically belonged to the state but foreign investment was needed to speed up urban development. So the National People's Congress eliminated the prohibition against leasing land. Whilst this was done, it was also stressed that public ownership would remain dominant in China and that its socialist character would not be lost. 

 

So the world was changing and changing rapidly. Miyazaki Hayao had made his first animated feature in 1984, Nausicaa, which evidenced the shift in concern from nuclear to environmental catastrophe. In 1988, at the time I was reading about Hamaya Hiroshi, Miyazaki had made Tottoro, a quintessential anime about the furusato. The lush greenery of summer in the countryside and the old house where two young girls and their father wait for their mother to recover in hospital is filled with magical creatures like the tottoro which counteracts the sterility of modern life. A few years later, in 1997, Murakami Haruki was to end his years of disengagement and challenge what he described as the 'black magic' of gurus like Asahara Shoryu who, had ordered the members of  his cult group Aum Shinrikyo to attack the Tokyo subway system with Sarin gas. Murakami descrribed the novelist's art as 'white magic' and he intended to use this to address the same issues of sterility and spiritual vaccum but in order to heal people rather than exploit them for personal gain.

 

Hamaya Hiroshi preceded these developments by several decades. In the post-war period, his aim was to capture on film images of a Japan that were fast disappearing. Over the years I collected a number of his books which I discovered in a great second hand photography book shop in Kanda, Tokyo, called Book Brothers. I bought a copy of the 1959 book Kodomo Fudoki which looked at a variety of games played by children. These are taken around the country and feature children dressed up as Kamen Rider or else in traditional costume and in one photograph crossing a stream by ropeway to get to school. These are images that would not be out of place in the Kaneto Shindo film The Island. Another book I bought was Shi no Furusato published in I958. This book captured images of the countryside, the sea, the city, traditional clothing not to mention workers in busy city streets. Hamaya Hiroshi didn't restrict his activity to Japan, however. In 1958, he also published Mitekitta Chugoku about his travels in China. There were lots of images of places and people at a time when China was being left behind by Japan in the race for modernity and economic development. In 1967 Hamaya Hiroshi published American America, which I suppose was an attempt to document the blueprint Japan and then China would adopt to bring their economies into the future. The images I like best are of the hippies in California. There are a lot of images, however, that focus on decay and the passage of time. If this is the future it hasn't escaped from the clutches of time. The fleeting nature of the future is perhaps due to the the futility of trying to evade time. A shortcoming in the future that the invention of the furasato would try to address. The old and the new appear side by side in all of these collections but it is the people who are really the subject of these photographs. They straddle both worlds neither of which appear to have any permanency. The future appearing to age more quickly than the past... The 1982 collection Tabi is the culmination of his work since the 1950s recording images of the Japanese people from strip clubs to shrines, the streets to the family home, the office to the factory and the environment itself from the mountains to the fields and the rivers and the coastline. I kept buying them until I came across a copy of Nippon no Retto and asked the price, at 150,000 yen (about $1,500 Australian, the price of a return air fare) I lost interest. I was given a pair of white gloves for an inspection but I felt too pressured with my backpack by my side to peruse it with any sense of leisure.

 

In 1997, when I went back to Japan to teach on the JET program, I took one of the Hamaya Hiroshi books I had bought in Tokyo, to the classroom. These junior high school students looked at the photographs and asked if they were taken in China. The poverty was something with which they couldn't identify. Hannan City, in southern Osaka, was itself going through major development at this time. The new international airport had just been built on reclaimed land in the bay and a new fifty floor tower had been built in Izumi Sano. The local economy, however, was debt stricken and it would emerge later that there had been corruption (dango) in the tendering process for some local developments and some of these developments had subsequently stalled. Houses stood empty and brand new schools had only a handful of students.  The cabbage patches which had dotted the landscape were starting to disappear and be replaced by apartment blocks. The fishermen were still fishing in some of the towns closer towards Wakayama and many of the local festivals were still talking place, but the population was changing and even here the old ways were being lost. Blinded by the prosperity of the 1980s, the past was receding and the furusato was becoming the stuff of fiction rather than fact. Hamaya Hirsohi had preserved images of the past but the children of the future were unsure how to read them.

SHINOHARA TOMOE AND AKB48

I first saw Shinohara Tomoe on Japanese TV. She was one of a number of participants on the program Rabu Rabu Ai Shitteiru and she went around asking for, if not demanding, presents from the guests. Zany and outrageous in costumes that she designed herself, she was hard to refuse becxause she was not only insistent but also 'crazy'. This was her charm, this was her appeal. She was the epitome of the unstoppable and non-sensical Gya Gya Gyaru... And in a way she was the antithesis of the carefully groomed and demure pop idols that Japan produces generation after generation, of both sexes. Who can forget the rediculous Hikari Genji on their roller skates and TOKIO and SMAP with their impossible good looks? On the other side there have been the all gil idol groups Pink Ladies in the 70s, Puffy, Morning Musume and more recently AKB48. What is fascinating with these carefully produced idols is when they transgress. This is when the true nature of the organisations that they represent is exposed. Kusanagi from SMAP is a male idol in point. He was found naked wandering his local park after a big night out. There was some embarassment but little in the way of punishment apart from unwanted publicity. More seriously, a member of of the all girl idol group AKB48, Minami Minegishi's transgression was to date a boyfriend against company policy. The retribution was particularly swift and resolute.

 

 

She had her head shaved and had to make a public apology on Japanese television Where is Shinohara when you need her? Her rediculous antics exposed the ludicrous nature of Japanese popular culture whose toxic nature is explored more ruthlessly in the 1997 anime, Perfect Blue directed by Satoshi Kon. Sure, the Japanese idol industry is a factory producing visions of the perfect male and fenale for fans to fantasise about but the reality is even more ugly when it is exposed because there is so little room for human error, especially for females. While Hello Kitty and the kawaii school of cute rule Japanese popular culture the truth is  that the rules are inflexible and these girls (and guys to some extent) are skating on thin ice. It is a miracle Shinohara was able to cast her spell of nonsense for as long as did over the likes of Tamori and the other more faceless men of the industry

FRANZ KAFKA AND MURAKAMI HARUKI

Murakami Haruki is often described as a postmodern writer, postmodernism being a movement which had a profound effect on Japanese culture in the 1980s. One of the principal ideas behind postmodernism is the notion of a culture or society becoming de-centred. The relevance of this in the Japanese context can be seen in a number of ways:

1.      In the changing role of women in Japanese society and the breaking down of the patriarchal society. The Japanese woman is no longer considered to be subservient, finding fulfilment solely through marriage and motherhood.

2.      Whereas the Japanese novelists of the modernist period attempted to break away  from Western viewpoints in a bid to create a national narrative, Japanese postmodernists have chosen instead to open themselves up to popular culture and embraced an international style in which a sense of the uniqueness of being Japanese is not so important.

Murakami Haruki is considered to be a typically postmodern Japanese novelist. His light and breezy style  stands in stark contrast to the dense and 'literary' junsuibungaku style of Oe Kenzaburo, steeped in modernism. Murakami can't, however, be dismissed as being lightweight, however, and it is his embracing of surrealism that shows most the influence of Franz Kafka on his writing. Like Oe he abandons 'realism' and turns to the surreal in order to overturn the reality that threatens to consume them. In Murakami's writing, the 'real' world is polluted by moral and political corruption. His characters are given clues by mysterious figures (both human and non-human) that will help them resolve their various dilemmas. Ultimately they need to suspend their disbelief in order to find the help that they need. And the conflict that needs to be resolved is often located deep within themselves.

In Kafka’s writing the enemy was without; totalitarianism, the boredom of work, the expectation of his father that he would 'work' for a living... In Metamorphosis, Gregor was hounded by the need to keep up the finances of the family in a job that he hated. Murakami’s characters are perfectly content with the material world. They listen to music, dress well and eat well. There is no sign of distress on this level. Rather they are being consumed by the emptiness inside which suggests a disconnection between material well-being and spiritual well-being. Murakami’s stories often end on a point on which the character is suspended between giving up their old life and beginning a journey of self-discovery. A traditional quest. Resolution is not the point, however, rather it is the acknowledgement that although they are on a journey they are only at the beginning. The things they have buried deep within themselves may have finally come to the surface and, whether it is an event like an earthquake that makes them visible or being abandoned by a partner, the result is still the same. These have to be faced and this requires great courage.

In Murakami's 2002 novel Kafka on the Shore, there are two plots told in alternating chapters. The metaphysical plane is where Murakami's characters are revealed to themselves. And it is the framing device of the storytelling that allows the writer to make visible what was invisible. And because what is revealed is often abstract by nature, the frame itself takes on a greater importance. Thus Murakami's  story telling becomes the focus for the reader. The unique characters and the unique nature of their relationships and of the journeys they undertake are the real revelations in Murakami's writing. Significantly, when  Kafka chooses life in the forest with his mother he asks if she is his mother and she says, 'You already know the answer to that'. He realises that, 'Putting it into words will destroy any meaning' (476).

 

There is much in this novel that represents a challenge to established perceptions. Nakata is able to talk to cats but he is not ‘smart’. He has lost his memory, can’t read and write and is a disappointment to his high achieving family (50-53). Nakata is described by the cats, however, as a ‘sensible human’ (85). Later, another character Hoshino, is able to talk to cats (482). This non-human perspective is central to the sense of dislocation, or de-centering experience of the novel. And to add to the list of characters who differ from the norm, there is also Colonel Sanders who describes himself as a ‘concept’. Whilst Nakata is perceived as not being smart, he does, however, have other powers which include the ability to make it rain fish and leeches (180). Nakata is lost in corporate Japan (Shinjuku) as he tries to make his way towards a mystery goal following the murder of the sculptor (201). Meeting Nakata, Hoshino thinks he might become great, ‘Most people can’t do the kind of things he does’ (406). Nakata also understood he was ‘different from other people’ (229). To put these powers into perspective, Hagita a truck driver says to Nakata, ‘Boundaries between things are disappearing all the time’ (206). Nakata lost his job after thirty-seven years and couldn’t get another one, ‘That kind of gloomy, dark, traditional furniture didn’t sell as well as it used to’ (229). Ultimately, Nakata changed Hoshino’s life, awakening him to music (439).

 

The alternating narrative tells the story of the runaway teenager, Kafka Tamura, who is abandoned by his mother and cursed by his father. He has a half shadow (54). Like Nakata’s story, his is a story about the breakdown of family and alienation from family members and self. Stray cats are said to ‘have a very tough time of it (87). This is also a description of Kafka’s struggle to be the toughest fifteen year old in the world. Kafka ends up in an isolated hut on a mountain side near the town of Kochi. Here he makes the observation that plants on the mountainside are different to those in the city (144), ‘They have a physical power, their breath grazing any humans who might chance by, their gaze zeroing in on the intruder as though they’ve spotted their prey. As though they have some dark, prehistoric magic powers. Just as deep-sea creatures rule the ocean depths, in the forest trees reign supreme. If it wanted to, the forest could reject me – or swallow me up whole. A healthy amount of fear and respect might be a good idea’ (144). The importance of this last statement becomes clear later in the novel. The move to the mountain is a form of social withdrawal that mirrors Nakata’s estrangement (124). Kafka didn’t fit in at school (124). There are incestuous tones to the curse that Kafka feels. He has sex with his mother in a dream (302) and later in real life (is ‘massaged’ and has dreams about his sister. She ‘massages’ him and says it would be nice to be his sister (98). She says he feels like a ‘younger brother’ (300). Kafka says he feels lost (360). He asks ‘Why didn’t she love me? Don’t I deserve to have my mother love me? (429). As the novel moves towards its climax however he starts to see beyond himself and explores her motives (430-431). Despite his difficulties, Kafka chooses life (474). He is ultimately able to express to forgiveness, ‘Mother, you say, I forgive you. And with those words, audibly, the frozen part of your heart dissolves’ (477).

Ultimately resolution is found in the search for the entrance stone (278). Hoshino finds the stone (308),  and says focussing on your strengths is like being able to talk to the stone (385). The stone, however, isn’t very talkative (390). Hoshino observes, ‘Some men talk with stones, and some sleep with other men’ (406). Hoshino tries talking to the stone but, ‘For the moment the stone was just a stone’ (459).

 

 

 

 

NINAGAWA YUKIO'S MEDEA

 

Ninagawa Yukio is one of a number of Japanese artists, including the film-maker Kurosawa Akira, the musician Sakamoto Ryuichi and the animator Miyazaki Hayao, who have established themselves on the international stage. Ninagawa has made a reputation for himself principally for his Japanese language productions of Shakespeare and the Greek tragedies. More recently he has directed films such as 'Snakes and Ear Rings' by the young Akutagawa Prize winning novelist, novelist Kanehara Hitomi.

 

Living in Osaka in the late 1990s, I was lucky to see a production of Medea, by Ninagawa Yukio. On this occasion, Medea was played by Taira Mikijiro... It was a highly stylised and striking all male production, both in terms of the visual elements and the music. The highlight was the scene where Medea pulls out a length of red ribbon from her mouth. The stage was full of movement; Medea's costume was otherworldy and the ribbon looked like she was pulling her entrails out of her own mouth. Mae Smethurst, who has written extensively on the 1993 Tokyo production featuring Tokusaburo Arashi, warns that whilst the use of the red ribbon in traditional Kabuki and Bunraku theatre can signify blood, it can also be used to express love...  Ninagawa's ability to find intense dramatic pressure points through this kind of imagery, choreography, the human voice and through the use of contemporary music lift these productions to great heights. And the fact that these productions are in Japanese, doesn't stop a non-Japanese speaking audience from being able to engage with them. Ninagawa  first directed Medea in the late 1970s and toured this production through Europe, including Athens, in the 1980s.

 

SHINDO KANETO: 'THE ISLAND'

'The Island' is a film by Shindo Kaneto made in 1960. Shot in black and white on a small island in the seto naikai it shows a family of four eking out a hand to mouth existence. It is a fascinating film with little or no dialogue. The two adult characters row small boats over to the mainland to sell produce, buy goods and to take the children to school. The remoteness of the island means there is little interaction with other human characters in the film, instead it is their daily routinues that fill the screen. They weed the crops and laboriously bring water over from the mainland. The film shows them struggling with the buckets of water up the treacherous paths to the crops grown on the steep sides of the hill. The island is little more than a hill that sticks out in the sea. At one point the mother drops one of her buckets and is beaten by her husband. Presumably life is in the balance and his reaction is not only an expression of the patriarchal family structure but also an expression of the desperation of their circumstances.

There is little relief from the struggle of their daily lives as the film takes the viewer through the four seasons of the annual life cycle. Like creatures from nature, the family stick to their relentless tasks in order to survive. When one of the boys becomes sick, the other waits for his parents to come back from the mainland. His father immediately sets off for the doctor. By the time the doctor arrives it is too late. The boy succumbs to the fever and dies. His classmates come to the island and stand against the skyline whilst the casket is lowered into the ground. Later, after their farewell, the body is burned. The family is now reduced to three members and life will be that much tougher.

 

Whilst New Age values imbue the the sensibility of much of what is written about the relationship between humans and the natural world in contemporary writing, this film strips away false sentimentality and exposes the pain and hardship of life lived in close harmony with nature. And whilst modern Jungian re-evaluations of the reconnection between humanity and nature such as in Yoshimoto Banana's writing provide relief from the strain of modern urban life, this film pays homage to the people who actually lived in these environments without the advantage of wealth or modern labour saving devices. The landscape is both beautiful and brutal, as are the lives of the people who lived there.



POSTHUMANISM AND YOSHIMOTO BANANA

Since her early books, Yoshimoto Banana has increasingly explored a posthuman world in which human characters interact with non-human characters such as ‘intelligent plants’ and animals. In literary terms, Yoshimoto has often described her writing as ‘fables’. The fable has a long and rich tradition in the West and is a genre that has been used by Japanese writers such as Miyazawa Kenji. There is a significant difference, however, in the way Yoshimoto writes about animals compared with Miyazawa. Miyazawa Kenji wrote traditional fables using animals instead of human characters for a moral purpose. For example, in Miyazawa’s short story ‘The Fire Stone’ (1992), a hare by the name of Homoi rescues a baby lark from drowning. In return, the king of the larks presents Homoi with a jewel (107). At first Homoi is pleased but with the jewel comes great responsibility. Because of his personal failings, a speck appears on the stone and at the end of the story it flies away (132). This fable teaches the reader a lesson about humility. The animals in this story are to all intents and purposes human beings in disguise. Yoshimoto, however, is more interested in exploring a world of the senses in which her human characters, animals and plants are equal. She is not writing allegories. And so, she is free to create new ways of being which are not bound by a humanistic framework.

 

Yoshimoto is not the first writer, however, to explore a posthuman world. Westerling notes that in Virginia Woolf’s 1941 novel Between the Acts, ‘Animal voices interweave with the human voices in the conversation that opens the novel’ (2006, 40). In doing so, Westerling argues that Woolf ‘restored human affairs to their embedded place in the wider community of earth’s beings and forces’ (41). Given the emergence of ecocriticism in literature which seeks to move beyond a humancentric view of the world, Westerling is excited by the possibilities that ecocriticism offers ‘at the beginning of a dangerous new millenium’. According to Westerling, literature can help bring the voices that French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote were ‘assumed to be silenced’ into ‘presence for a post-humanist future’ (44). Yoshimoto, it can be argued, is exploring these same possibilities in her writing.

 

Yoshimoto’s human characters claim they are able to communicate with animals in novels such as Honeymoon (1997). In Honeymoon, Hiroshi, who has been abandoned by his parents and is the victim of bullying, is described as liking dogs more than people (17). He also says that he can sometimes ‘understand’ animals. Manaka, the protagonist and his bride, thinks he is being stupid. She tells him sarcastically that when they go and see the koalas he can tell her what they are thinking (129). However, when Manaka and Hiroshi take a boat trip to see the dolphins, they see lots of ‘magnanimous’ dolphins who ‘deign’ to play with the humans. It is observed that from God’s eyes, human beings are like dolphins playing ‘wild’ and ‘primitive’ games. By watching the dolphins, Manaka and Hiroshi learn to see themselves in a new way and find a sense of meaning and purpose in life that has escaped them in Tokyo (149 - 154). Observing animals in the wild helps Manaka and Hiroshi discover this new sense of being.

 Yoshimoto often depicts human and animal interaction in a positive light which is in stark contrast to the many examples of destructive human behaviour which are referred to in her writing. In Mizuumi (The Lake) (2005b), Chihiro, the narrator, sleeps with Nakashima-kun and suspects that he has been sexually abused because he treats sex as if it is a ‘bad thing’ (40). Later, she learns that he was kidnapped by a religious cult when he was a child. When he escaped from the cult he remembers walking past a farm where he saw some horses. Significantly, they were not scared by him and gradually he felt better until he patted them. He describes their eyes as being like the sea, ‘pretty and engulfing everything’. Nakashima-kun cried and was thankful to the horses whose wild eyes returned him to himself (192). Together he and Chihiro plan to return to Shimoda to thank the horses (204).

 Animals are important because of the role they often play in the rehabilitation of Yoshimoto’s characters. In Niji (2002a), the narrator known as Watashi (I) is given a job looking after some animals and a garden after her third nervous breakdown. After her initial reticence towards them, Watashi begins to realise that they are helping her rehabilitation (68). Having lost her zest for life she is surprised by their vigour and strength and feels guilty that they are giving her so much strength. The effect of this interaction on Watashi is not surprising given the observation by Fox that:

 

Humans relax when there are animals around – just seeing them lowers the blood pressure – and this mix of human and animal has an ancient, primitive feel to it in a world where separation of man and beast, coupled with a kind of enforced sterility, is the order of the day (Fox, 2002, 52).

Estes argues that dogs ‘are the magicians of the universe’. ‘By their presence alone’, she suggests, ‘they transform grumpy people into grinning people, sad people into less sad people…’ (1997, 130).

 Yoshimoto depicts animal human interaction on an even higher level than this, however. In her stories, animals like plants, are capable of interacting and communicating with human characters. Thus, in Honeymoon, on the night that Olive died, Manaka recalls taking her for a walk. There was a strange feeling in the air that Olive was going to die (28 – 33). In Argentine Hag (2002), Mitsuko’s father makes a tombstone for his wife in the shape of a dolphin. When she sees what he is doing, Mitsuko says, ‘I forgive my father for not being present at mum’s death. Totally.’ The dolphin tells her ‘firmly’ that it is much harder for him because he was not there (85). This is one of a number of scenes in Yoshimoto’s writing, both fiction and biographical, where dolphins and humans are shown having this kind of interaction. Even more so than other animals, dolphins have an added significance in New Age thinking. David Tacey writes in his study Jung and the New Age

It is little wonder that the dolphin and the whale have become key symbols of the New Age, because they express perfectly the condition of oceanic engagement and at-one-ment to which the New Age aspires (Tacey, 2002, 55).

Oceanic engagement is also at the heart of Miyazaki Hayao's 2008 animated film Gake no Ue on Ponyo (Ponyo on the Cliff) which is a loose adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's 1836 fairy tale The Little Mermaid. In a recent interview, Miyazaki stressed the importance of this theme saying:

"It's my personal belief that you can't separate yourself from nature. As you dig further

into yourself, you would eventually reach the popint of returning to the ocean.

You're connected" (Miyazaki, Quoted in barlow, 20089 The Age EG 4).

 

Dolphins and humans experience at-one-ment in a number of scenes in Yoshimoto’s books. Apart from the dolphins appearing in the wild in Honeymoon (1997) and the statue of a dolphin that urges Mitsuko to forgive her father for his absence at her mother’s death in Argentine Hag (2002), in the novel Iruka (Dolphin), published in 2006, Kimiko visits an aquarium with her boyfriend on their first date. She later recalls watching the dolphins play not yet realising that she is pregnant (42). When she realises and tells Goro, her boyfriend, Kimiko then visits the aquarium to say farewell with thanks in her heart (219). Her baby is described as being a ‘little baby from the world of dolphins’ (247). It is also described as having moved ‘from the world of water to the world of air’ (252).

Given the significance of animals in the lives of her human characters, the cruelty of humans toward animals is then especially distressing in Yoshimoto’s writing. In Iruka (Dolphin) (2006), Goro’s friends take him to visit a taxidermist’s shop in Bali, where they see some illegally stuffed gorillas with glass eyes that seemed to follow them around the shop. Later, Goro and Yukiko take it in turns to throw up in their hotel room (58). Unlike the idealised restaurant and shops where Yoshimoto’s heroines work, the taxidermy shop is not a healthy environment and the shop assistants look like they too have been ‘stuffed’ (59). Later in the novel, Kimiko moves into a friend’s house where she feels ‘something bad’ (91). In the closet she finds a stuffed tanuki (badger) and pheasant in a plastic bag. She cannot understand why people stuff animals, as a trophy or otherwise. In her dreams she is warned repeatedly that there is something evil in the house. She finds more stuffed animals in the attic and when the psychic, Mami, comes to tell her that she is pregnant, they bury the animals in the garden (146). Yoshimoto is clearly concerned about the treatment of the animals and as Yukiko tells Goro in Bali, ‘all living things feel regret’ (59).

Yoshimoto’s exploration of these New Age themes has not escaped critical attention. Apart from Ann Sherif (1999), Yumiyama Tatsuya (1995) provides a general social context for Yoshimoto’s interest in healing in his paper “Varieties of Healing in Present-Day Japan”. Yumiyama writes that interest has been growing in Japan in healing since the 1970s. Three factors have spurred this interest including the oil shock in 1973, the publication of Shirley MacLaine’s book Out on a Limb in Japanese in 1986 and the collapse of the bubble economy in the late 1980s. Yumiyama notes that defining the term healing is difficult especially since its contemporary usage applies not only to a sense of harmony between body, spirit and nature, as well as having an individual focus. Yumiyama argues that healing also embraces interpersonal relationships as well as the environment and world peace. Yoshimoto’s interest in the New Age can be seen as part of a general trend in japan from the 1970s onwards.

Of interest to this discussion is a series of letters written by Yoshimoto Banana and Patrice Julien, an Italian chef living in Tokyo, published as News From Paradise (2005). On the 6^th of June, 2003, Yoshimoto wrote to Julien that soon after she had become pregnant, she had a dream in which a dolphin played with her and looked like it wanted to tell her something. She suggests that the dolphin wanted to let her know that she was pregnant (29). Clearly, Yoshimoto is not only interested in establishing links between the human and animal worlds, but also blurs the boundaries between the worlds of her fiction and her own life.

Finally, in her depiction of equitable interaction between animals and humans, Yoshimoto shares a similar sensibility with Japanese choreographer Teshigawara Saburo. Teshigawara’s dance company, Karas, performs a piece called Green, which features a cow performing a duet with a guitarist, geese marching behind a trombonist, dancing goats and frolicking rabbits, dancers and a live band. Teshigawara sees both the dancers and animals as being ‘living, breathing creatures who will respond to the music and each other’. Sato Rihoko, a dancer with the company explains, human beings ‘are animals too and everything around us is artificial, so we have lost our connection with nature’ (Young, 2005).