ITAMI JUZO VERSUS BEAT TAKESHI

The Japanese film industry has always been strong. The late 1980s saw the emergence of Itami Juzo, a major talent in a film industry that boasted the likes of Ozu and Kurosawa Akira, Oshima Nagisa and Imamura Shohei, Ichikawa Kon and  Mizoguchi Ken, (not to forget Teshigahara Hiroshi). It was an industry that had produced classics like Rashomon, Kwaidan, Tokyo Story, Woman of the Dunes and Pigs and Battleships. Then, of course, there are the anime (animated films), but that is another story.  The satirical films of Itami Juzo made lots of people laugh but they also took a savage swipe at the excesses of Japanese society, particularly during the 'bubble economy' period of the 1980s..  After The Funeral (1984) and then Tampopo, Itami made A Taxing Woman in 1988 starring his wife Miyamoto Nobuko. This was a major success. With success came more scrutiny, however, and given the nature of some of the targets of his satire, it was perhaps no surprise when he was attacked by the yakuza and hospitalised after making Minbo no Onna, an anti-yakuza film in 1992.

Whilst Itami Juzo blazed the self-righteous trail of the independent film-maker, a challenger appeared in the opposite corner from an unlikely source. Whilst Itami Juzo targeted the excesses of the yakuza and religious cults, Beat Takeshi's comic, tough guy films, celebrated the dignity of the yakuza with his back to the wall, a long established tradition in Japanese film (see the films of Suzuki Seijun). Kitano Takeshi restored their honour. At the time, however, many Japanese would have found Kitano Takeshi's emergence as a serious film maker hard to accept after his years of making lowbrow comedy as Beat Takeshi on Japanese television. These were madcap television programs aimed at the lowest common denominator. To emerge as a serious film maker working with respected professionals like the film score writer Hisaisha Joe was an unlikely achievement, especially when it culminated in the making of Hanabi in 1997, which received the Golden Lion award at the Venice film festival. That put him up there with the likes of Kurosawa and Mizoguchi.

This was great news for Kitano Takeshi and the Japanese film industry but a humiliation for Itami Juzo. This was the award that Kurosawa, his film Rashomon and the postwar Japanese film industry on the map. Itami Juzo had been eclipsed by a man who glorified the yakuza and had made a career out of low brow game shows on Japanese television. Subsequently, after  a murky sex scandal, Itami Juzo allegedly committed suicide by jumping off a Tokyo building in 1997. There was, however, rumours of yakuza involvement in his death due to talk about Itami planning to make a second anti-yakuza film. One of his last acts was to laud his wife, Miyamoto Nobuko, as one of Japan's greatest actresses.

MURAKAMI HARUKI: 'DANCE DANCE DANCE', A SEQUEL TO THE RAT TRILOGY

Dance, Dance, Dance, revisits the RAT trilogy and has the narrator search for Kiki, the woman with the beautiful ears, who he last saw in the Dolphin Hotel in Hokkaido. It was "her purpose" he explians to lead him to the hotel which she he describes as a "biological dead-end" (3). Apart from Kiki's disappearance, the Rat we discover has, in fact, died and been transformed into the Sheep Man. He took his life in Hokkaido after he had been possessed by the sheep, a malevolent spirit that takes control of those it possess in order to gain power. About the Sheep Man the narrator asks, “Why is he around? I don’t know. Maybe I needed him. Maybe because as you get older, things fall apart, so something needs to hold things together. Put the brakes a little on entropy, you know…” (Dance, Dance, Dance, 194).

There is a sense of fatalism at work in the novel as the narrator says early on, "The story's already decided" (6). The idea that he has a lack of control over his own life is underlined when the narrator compares his life to a computer game which recalls the second book of the trilogy Pinball 1973: “I hardly had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. Some rises and falls. But that’s it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I’d loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death” (Dance, Dance, Dance, 210). This idea finds its ultimate expression in the concept of the switchboard which the Rat uses to explain how it is his job to keep the various parts of the narrators life connected through the switchboard. Finally, it is Kiki who explains to him that everything that exists in the parallel world in the old Dolphin Hotel is part of him.

Materialism and mindless greed are increasingly Murakami’s targets in this pre-Kobe earthquake and pre-Aum Sarin gas attack sequence of novels. If he is ambivalent about the student protests of the 1960s, he is unimpressed by the bubble economy of the 1980s. The protagonist notes in Dance, Dance Dance, “Not to overstate things, financial dealings have practically become a religious activity. The new mysticism. People worship capital, adore its aura, genuflect before Porsches and Tokyo land values. Worshipping everything their shiny Porsches symbolize. It’s the only stuff of myth that’s left in the world.” The narrator reflects that things were simpler in 1969 (55).

Whilst materialism and greed are a concern in the novel, the narrator has to try to connect the various parts of his life which have come undown starting with Kiki. He is also unable to cry for what he has lost but he hears someone crying for him. Significantly he asks "Why would anyone want to cry for me?" (5). Sick of "shovelling cultural snow" for a living, the narrator goes to Hokkaido. He discovers the old Dolphin Hotel has disappeared and been replaced by a huge concrete, steel and glass tower. He meets a receptionist with an unusual name, Yumiyoshi, who has had a strange experience on an uninhabited floor in the hotel that ordinarily doesn't exist. It scared her badly. There was no light, no sound and the air was moldy (43). When she told her manager he told her to tell no-one. The narrator eventually finds this mysterious place and is reacquainted with the Rat. The Rat explains that this place is the knot, it is tied to everything, the things that you lost and the things that you are going to lose (83). The narrator has been worried for some time, however, that he will never get back to the "real world". Having met Yumiyoshi is a significant experience and he says, "I was jealous of the real world and her swim club" (77). In the meantime, however, he had seen a thirteen year old girl, Yuki, in a bar with her mother. When Yuki smiled at him, the narrator says, "I felt as if I had been chosen" (33). Later when she is abandoned by her mother, Yumiyoshi asks the narrator to accompany Yuki on his way back to Tokyo. The narrator is caught in a series of events whose significance are not yet clear.Yuki, it turns out, is also aware of the existance of the Sheep man. The only advice that the Rat has been able to give the narrator in the meantime is to keep dancing.

The narrator needless to say, forms a deep connection with Yuki and as the various elements in his life continue to unravel she is able to help him with crucial insights. When he reconnects with Gotanda, an old friend form junior high school who has become a well known actor, he spends the night with Mei, a high class prostitute. It is Mei who explains to the narrator that her name, like that of Kiki, has no reality, "These names don't have real lives. We're all image, signs tacked up on empty air" (156). When her dead body is found the narrator is picked up for questioning by the police but is released after he refuses to make an admission that he knew the dead girl. He is covering for his friend, Gotanda. It is Yuki with whom he dicusses these events. Watching her the narrator says, "She was truly a beautiful girl. I could feel a small polished stone sinking through the darkest waters of my heart. All those deep convoluted channels and passageways, and yet she managed to toss her pebble right down to the bottom of it all" (208).  When the narrator swaps cars and picks Yuki up in Gotanda's Maserati, she feels sick. It is Yuki who suggests that, "Maybe death's your connection to the world" (275).

The narrator sees Kiki again in his dreams and is taken to a room where there are six skeletons. He wonders who they are? Downstairs he finds a telephone number written on a piece of paper. After the deaths of the Rat and Mei comes the death of Dick North whom the narrator had met with Yuki in Hawaii. Later, when they watch Gotanda's movie together, Yuki feels sick again when she sees the scene where Gotanda has sex with Kiki. Yuki explains that Gotanda killed Kiki and put the body in the car which is why she felt sick. The narrator reassures that this isn't what happens in the movie but Yuki is adamant that that is what she felt. When the narrator suddenly asks Gotanada about this Gotanda himself is unsure, he feels that he did kill Kiki and it is because of a gap between his real self and a shadow self. He has commited many destructive acts since childhood because of this sense of unreality. His body is recovered from Tokyo Bay next morning after he drove the Maserati into the bay. Most of the skeletons that the narrator was shown in his dream are slowly being accounted for. The narrator says, however, that Gotanda's death, "lay me down in a lead-lined box of despair" (361).

The narrator flies back to Hokkaido to see Yumiyoshi. They make love and the narrator is reassured that he has rediscovered reality. All he has to do is "recover the know to to be connected" (386). He has a dream and revisists the Sheep man but the room on the non-existant floor is empty. Despite telling Yumiyoshi not to let go of his hand she does and he watches as she disappears into a wall. He is scared that he has lost her and follows her. When he wakes, she is sitting on the sofa watching him. Undressing, she rejoins him in bed where they make love and he says, "She was warm and smooth, with the weight of someone real... Yumiyoshi was soft as the ticking of time, her breath leaving a warm, damp spot on my ar. Reality" (292-3). During the novel, as the narrator discovers who each of the skeletons represents, he is filled with a sense of dread. Kiki explains, however, that the room and skeletons inside it were all part of him. Ultimately, the narrator is able to make his way out of the labyrinth of his own mind and find himself again in the real world.

'ABENOMICS': NEWS FROM TOKYO POST-FUKUSHIMA

Greetings from Tokyo,

                                     January -- should be quite a bit colder and drier by then! We've just slammed, literally overnight, into the rainy season, so the heat and humidity are still taking some getting used to. About two weeks ago we will still enjoying drier, sunny days which were quite pleasant and kept me in the pink (skin).

 

Anyway, Fukushima has influenced some changes, but they're not major for most people in Tokyo, so life seems to go on as it did before. Most of the nuclear reactors are mothballed, so electricity costs are subject to the relative strength of the yen, because utility companies are burning imported carbons. As a result, offices tend to keep the air-conditioning higher in summer (26 or 27 degrees) and lower in winter (20 or 21 degrees) in an effort to control overheads.

 

This also affects the time that people go home -- most people I talk to leave the office before 7:00 pm, and the trains seem more crowded between 5:30 and 7:00. Again, companies want to avoid burning the midnight oil!

 

The other direct impact is that produce from Fukushima is cheaper than produce from anywhere else. Some people seem wary of buying vegetables from the area, and this seems to be influencing prices. Personally, I tend to be much more careful about how much fish we consume, and tend to look for imported fish. So I think there is a bit of paranoia about radiation (at least in my brain).

 

The biggest changes, though, are from "Abenomics". A whole lot of money flooded into the Japanese economy but none knows exactly where it went! It seems to have gone in search of high-yielding investments, driving up the Nikkei like pressure drives up a bubble, and offshore. The weakened yen encouraged a lot of companies to repatriate funds, and exporting companies were able to book "exchange rate profits". But Japanese inflation seems to be price-driven (the bad type), rather than demand-driven (the good type). A simple chain is that a weak yen means that petrol costs more, and all stakeholders transfer the increased cost to the end-consumer. However, companies will not increase wages, so there is a risk of stagflation -- inflation but no economic growth.

 

Graeme

MURAKAMI HARUKI: THE RAT TRILOGY PART TWO

Wild Sheep Chase (1982) is the final part of the Rat trilogy that features the frequent customer of a small bar nicknamed Rat and the narrator known only as Watashi (I). This is an example of hard-boiled detective fiction influenced by Raymond Chandler but set in Japan. At the start of the novel, the narrator reminisces about university... These are the days he spent drinking and socialising. He reflects about a girl he knew who wanted to die. She slept with anyone but feels shut out when she has sex with the narrator. This is a significant observation as it is a theme that runs throughout Murakami's writing, the detachment of his characters who are eventually confronted by their lack of wamth and feelings. Murakami is very specific with detail: He describes exactly what the narrator eats, how he cooks his food, what he wears and what music he listens to. The reader isn't just given a time frame for the novel, the reader is given the exact time, July 24, 6.30 am (page 14). Given this attention to detail, the reader's senses are heightened. When the narrator's divorce is mentioned (page 17) it is no surprise given the fact that the girl he slept with at university felt 'shut out'... There is a sense of foreboding established within the first two chapters as the narrator recounts the death by suicide of the girl he slept with at university and then his divorce. Typically his wife didn't want to leave him, but she she felt like she was going nowhere with him. The narrator observes, "We had been walking ever so peacefully down a long blind alley. That was our end" (21).

 

This sense of foreboding isd maintained at the aquarium where the narrator is struck by a whale's penis... He notes that "In the aquarium of my memory, it is always late autumn" (26). He has a new girlfriend with three jobs (27). He sees her ears in an advertisement and has the photographs enlarged and taped to the wall of his apartment (29) Like the whale's penis they have been separated or are removed from their natural context and are given a surreal significance that is disorienting. The narrator himself has survived a number of disorienting experiences, the suicide of the girl he slept with at university and then his divorce. The detail provided by the clothes he wears, the food he eats and the music he listens to is important because it stops him from disappearing. It is significant that after his divorce he often conjures up the memory of his wife's slip on the back a chair. Her absence is defined by this slip. It is no surprise that he feels a sense of helplessness, "like some great whirlpool of fate sucking me in" (29). His girlfriend tells the narrator that he is only half living (40). He wonders, "Had somebody else been living my life all the time? (41). The vaccum or hollow nature of the narrator is threatening to overcome the narrator but he is unable to resd the signs. It is his girlfriend who senses that an important phone call is coming... All she knows is that is has something to do with a sheep.

The 'wild adventure' she anticipates beging when the narrator meets a strange man with a tan that "could only have been the result of some unknown sun shining in some skies" (52). There are clues aplenty that the world with which the narrator has failed to engage is disappearing. And it is being replaced by the 'worm universe' at the centre of which is the sheep. It is the sheep that draws the narrator to the boss, a major right wing figure who, he learns, is in a coma. The boss has had a brain hemorrhage... And the key to finding a successor is the sheep. The narrator is the only person who can provide a clue to the whereabouts of the sheep. He used a photograph taken by his friend by the Rat for an advertisement. It turns out that the sheep that everyone is looking for is in the photograph. The only problem is that they have to find out where the phjotograph was taken. And the narrator hasn't heard from his friend for some time. In a rare letter from the Rat the narrator had previsouly learned that he was heading north, "I've come to where I was meant to come" (80). It might as well,  he says of the landscape "be the end of the world" (81). In relation to the photograph, the Rat asks that the narrator publish it where it can be seen. The photograph is important to the Rat although he says mysteriously "I can't tell you the reason why, though" (83).

The narrative concerning the narator's visit to the boss' right hand man is interspersed with a description of the Rat's letters and a trip back to the narrator's hometown after a four year absence. He is there to see J, the Chinese barkeeper, and to say farewell to the Rat's girlfriend. J expresses his discontent with the development in the twon. "They bulldoze the hills to put up houses, haul the dirt to the sea for landfill, then go and build there too. And they think it's all proper and fine" (88). The narrator goes for a walk to his favourite spot on the river. He observes that "The town belonged to the river from the very beginning, and it would always be that way" (91). But he also observes that all that was left of his favourite spot was fifty yards of oceanfront, "Fifty yards of of honest-to-goodness shoreline. If you overlooked the fact that it was hemmed in by thirty-foot high concrete walls" (91). Of the view he says, "Instead of ocean, a vast expanse of reclaimed land and housing developments  met my eyes. Faceless blocks of apartments, the miserable foundations of an attempt to build a neighbourhood" (92). The narrator's outrage can be described as a "distant voice like an echo from the bottom of a well" (95). This image which takes on extra significance in the Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, is repeated. Elsewhere Murakami refers to a "pebble plunging down fathomless wells" (108).

The visit to the boss' right hand man sees the narrator go off on a wild sheep chase to Hokkaido in search of the chestnut coloured sheep with the star on its back. The significance of the sheep is explained by the boss' hallucinatory dreams. The boss, it appears, was possesed by th spirit of the sheep while he was in Manchuria during the 1930. Upon returning to Japan he was arrested by the American military but after a period of time was released back into the community. As a result of his hallucinatory dreams he was able to build up a "tremendously sophisticated organisation" (118). The only ones to know the facts are the U.S. military who had kept him under observation at the time and the boss himself. The boss' right-hand man tells the narrator that it is impertaive that they find the sheep as "When the king dies, the kingdom crumbles" (118). The boss' right-hand man then expounds upon his theory of the mediocrity of the '60s generation that attempted an "expansion of cosciousness" but lacked will. It is will that the boss provides that has enabled the organisation to create a "magnificent palace" which isn now threatened by the propect of the wholf of the country being turned into a "public housing complex" (119). Ironically he dreads the same "uniform rows of public housing" and a Japan "leveled of mountians, coastlines or lakes" (119) like the narrator. In order to make sure that this doesn't happen they must find the sheep.

At first the narrator isn't convinced that it is worth his while to travel to Hokkaido in search of the sheep. He tells his girlfriend that it is impossible to find one sheep among hundreds of thousands. She corrects him and tells him that there are, in fact, only five thousand sheep in Hokkaido. She has done some research in the library and reassures him that the task is not impossoible. The narrator feels resnetful, however, about being "ordered and threatened and pushed around" (135). She convinces him to go by suggesting that the Rat may be "up to his neck in trouble?" Tying her hair back and showing him her ears, which he can't resist, they go to bed. His girlfriend asks him later if it has been a long ten years and he says "Along long time. Practically endless" (142). The narrator feels "truly alive" when he makes love to his girlfriend on the sofa. Significantly when she smiles he feels that it is a smile that he had seen before but couldn't remember where or when, He notes that "Women with their clothes off have a frightening similarity." She reassures him and says that when they go and look for the sheep "things'll fall into place" (143). Both the Rat and the narrator's girlfriend guide the narrator to compkete a mission for which he has little inclination or understanding. He is in a sense a less evolved being than them despite his obvious sense and sensibility. Significantly, the narrator refers to  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and quotes the opening sentence "My colleague Watson is limited in his thinking to rather narrow confines, but possesses the utmost tenacity." Of this sentence the narrator says, "Not bad for a lead-in sentence" (144). The reality is, of course, that the narrator is revealing his own limitations through the use of this quotation. When his girlfriend leaves eventually leaves him in Junitaki, there is a sense of inevitability despite his sense of bewilderment. This is how the narrow confines of his own thinking are revealed. He senses that she exists outside of time but he has no idea how she functions in his life, both providing him with the information he needs and the guidance he needs in order to help his friend and bring the trilogy to a conclusion.

It is his girlfriend who chooses the Dolphin Hotel saying she had "already got an image of a place." When they arrived there it was not 'Particularly old; still it was strikingly rundown" (163). Despite the narrator telling her that they could have stayed in a better hotel with all the money they have been given, she says "It's not a question of money. Our sheep hunt begins here. No argument, it had to be here" (166). Her awareness of the task on hand is on another level to that of the narrator who seems only concerned about his own comfort and how to spend the money that they have been given. They spend their first few days looking for a clue that may help them in their search for the sheep. After a while the narrator discovers from the clerk at the Dolphin Hotel that the hotel used to be the Hokkaido Ovine Hall. Furthermore the clerk is able to show them a photograph on the walls that shows the same scenery as in the photograph taken by the Rat. The narrator observes "Just great... Allt his time we've been passing right under this photograph." His girlfriend blurts out "That's why I told you it had to be at the Dolphin Hotel" (178). The narrator hasn't quite come to grips yet with the nature of the task that he has been given. In order to help them locate the scenery in the photograph, the clerk sends them upstairs to meet his father, the sheep professor.

The clerk recounts his father, the sheep professor's life story. After an excellent academic career he went to Korea toconduct resarch into rice cultivation. After that he was sent to Manchuria to develop a self-sufficiency program based on sheep. Here he disappeared for several days. After claiming that he had had a special relationships with a sheep he was sent back to Tokyo in disgrace. Having been pruged from his elite post he was abandoned by the sheep that had possessed him. Eventually  he became the director of the Hokkaido Ovine Association before opening the Dolphin Hotel. The sheep professor has no interest in talking to the narrator until he is shown thre cigarette lighter with the image of the sheep engraved upon it. The professor then describes his life since he was abandoned by thre sheep. "It's hell. A maze of a subterranean hell... That's been my life for fourty-two years" (186). The sheep he says came back to japan with him with a "monumental plan to to transform humanity and the human world" (189). The sheep professor says that before the narrator another young man had been to the hotel asking about the photograph. That of course was the Rat. After telling his story the sheep professor tells the narrator where to find the location in the photograph.

The narrator's journey takes him and his girlfriend to the town of Junitaki established by an Ainu youth and eighteen dirt farmers in the nineteenth century. The site for the village was chosen because of its inacessability. The dirt farmers didn't want to be found. The narrator upon his arrival in the village describes it as a "singularly dull town" (210). Having discovered from one of the the locals where the sheep farm was located, the narrator is annoyed with himself for forgetting that the Rat's father had a vacation villa in Hokkaido. He says of himself, "I always remember important details long afterward" (224). The caretaker agrees to give them a lift to the villa in his car but warned them that the road might be unpassable and they may need to walk part of the way, which is what they have to do. The narrator says "We were totally alone. As if we'd been dropped off at the edge of thew world" (233). They arrive at the villa and find that it is empty. There is no sign of the Rat. The narrator asks his girlfriend if her ears are telling her anything but she says she can't open them because she will get a headache.  They decide to wait for the Rat. The narrator goes to sleep on the sofa and when he awakes he knows that his girlfriend has gone. He fills his time waiting for the Rat to come by continuing to read Sherlock Holmes.

Of course the Rat doesn't come, or rather when he does come he is not the same old Rat that the narrator is expecting. It is the sheep man who at two o'clock announcing his arrival with three knocks on the door. They share a drink and the sheep man tells the narrator that he gave his girlfriend a lift out of the valley. She went back to the Dolphin Hotel. The sheepman tells the narrator off for confusing his girlfriend. He says "All you think about is yourself" (252). The sheep man tells the narrator that she "wasn't meant to come here." Finally he tells the narrator "You'll never see that woman again... Because you only thought about yourself" (253). The narrator tells the sheep man that he is waiting for hisa friend but thr sheep man seems uninterested. he says he will be back in a few days.

 After several days waiting the narrator sees the newspaper clipping in the living room which had advertised thre fact that he was looking for the Rat and he realises that the Rat knows he is looking for him. This raises a whole lot of questions and he comes to the realisation tat the rat doesn't want to face him. Yet he wasn't rejecting him either. he suspects that the sheep man knows something. The narrator goes out for a walk and has a second encounter with the sheep man. Back at the villa he reads a book about pan-Asianists and discovers that the right wing boss had grown up in a poor farming community in Hokkaido which was, of course, Junitaki. The narrator realises the boss would know that h would eventually discover this and he wonders if he is to be a pawn why he wasn't told in the first place? He realises that "At every turn, I'd been way off base, way off the mark" (266). With the arrival of the snow comes the narrator's third encounter witht erh sheep man. he expresses anger thatb his friend ahsn't come to see him and thre sheep man is unnerved. Looking into a mirror the narrator notices that there was no reflection of the sheep man in the mirror. "In the mirror world" observes the narrator, "I was alone. Terror shot through my spine" (272).  In the darkness the narrator reflects on time and decided to let time carry him to "where a new darkness was configuring yet newer patterns" (275). It is at this point that the Rat arrives.

The Rat tells the narrator about his suicide and how it was the only way to kill the sheep. He had been drawn up to the farm by the story of the sheep with the star on its back. Once he had been possessed he says that he had no choice, but to kill himself. "If I had waited, the sheep would have contrrolled me absolutely. It was my last chance" (281). One last thing remains to be done, however. This is why the rat lured the narrator to the farm. The Rat had been chosen by the sheep to create a "realm of total conceptual anarchy. A scheme in which all opposites would be resolved into unity. With me and the sheep at the centre" (284). The Rat, however, for reasons unknown to himself was not convinced. In the morning on the Rat's instructions the narrator connects some wires and winds up the clock. As he connects the wires the sheep man reassures him while his ex-wife tells him that the "cells replace themselves" as she holds on to her white slip. His girlfriend then accuses him of not knowing anything to which he agrees. After that the narrator does as he is told and leaves the valley. On his way down from the mountain he meets the boss' right hand man who tells him "I've got him right where I want him." The narrator takes his car and boards a train at the station. In the distance he hears an explosion. "It's all over" says the sheep professor... Heading back to Tokyo, the narrator stops in and sees J. Handing over a substantial amount of money he tells J that as his new partner, he wants a pinball and jukebox machine.

 

SOUL FLOWER UNION LIVE AT THE BIG CAT IN OSAKA

Amerika Mura in downtown Osaka is where the night owls go... Bars and restaurants, pubs and clubs, coming down from the northern side you take the Midosuji subway line from Umeda. The Midosuji line is of note because of the unseemly behaviour of some of the passengers. It used to be easy to see why there were female only carriages during peak hour. On day I saw a homeless man harassing a young female office worker as she stood in the doorway. No-one in the carriage came to her help her. She finally snapped and walked away but he stood there until another young woman got onto the carriage and the started all over again. It is hard to tell who to feel more sorry for, the young women who are being so blatantly sexually harassed or the homeless man who was to all intents and purposes invisible?

 

The Big cat is easy enough to find and like most shows in Japan the concert started early at about 6.30. The band is popular in their native Osaka and there was a big turn-out. There were a few other foreigners in the audience but mostly the audience were Japanese. I had first seen Nakagawa Takashi on TV when he had put a smaller unit together called Soul Flower Mononoke Summit which played Ching dong (street songs) from the war period played on old instruments of the non-electric variety. This was after the Kobe earthquake which had devastated parts of the region. Thousands died and my wife's parents were without gas for weeks and had to visit friends so they could have a bath. The band did lots of performances in the street to bring music to the people. For Nakagawa it was about playing music from the heart and through this kind of traditional music he also wanted to reconnect the Japanese people with their past free of its associations with the war and emperor worship.

Soul Flower Union was a congolomeration of two bands from the '80s, Mescaline Overdrive featuring Itami Hideko and Nakagawa's old band Newest Model. The combination of male and female members in the new band made for a more exciting blend of costume, nostalgia and genre hopping music ranging from Celtic swing, folk, reggae to rock and roll. With his 1970s style side burns, Nakagawa was an uncompromising songwriter prepared to take on the enemies of peace wherever he found them. Highly political, he wrote songs about East Timor and the Middle East in an effort to raise awareness of the plight of various minority groups caught up in military conflicts. He has also written about social injustices in Japan such as the problems (or even existence) of the burakumin (the untouchables) and on the album Screwball Comedy he had written a song about the right-wing Tokyo governor, Ishihara Shintaro, 'The Man Who Said No'.

SCRAPS FROM A READING JOURNAL

Carl Jung: Quoted in The Age newspaper 19/5/1990

"Are we our dreams, or are our dreams us? A Japanese poet once dreamt he was a butterfly, and ever after he wondered if he was a man who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who dreamt he was a man?"

Saigyo

"The mind for truth
Begins, like a stream, shallow
At first, but then
Adds more and more depth
While growing greater clarity."

Mishima Yukio: The Golden Temple

"He did not try to assert his individuality by perceiving something that he and no-one else could see, but saw the object just as anyone else would see it." (p 246)

Natsume Soseki: Kokoro

"As a matter of fact, country people tend to be worse than city people. You said just now that there was no-one amongst your relatives that you would consider particularly bad. You seem to be under the impression that there is a special breed of bad humans. There is no such thing as a stereotype bad man in this world. Under normal circumstances, everybody is more or less good, or, at least, ordinary. But tempt them, and they may suddenly change. That is what is so frightening about men. One must always be on one's guard."

Natsume Soseki: The Three Cornered Hat

“Life is an inescapable rat-race in which you are constantly being spurred on my materialistic values to wrangle and squabble with your neighbour...The poet and the artist, however, come to know absolute purity by concerning themselves only with those things which constitute the innermost essence of this world of relativity. They dine on the summer haze, and drink the evening dew. They discuss purple, and weigh the merits of crimson, and when death comes they have no regrets. For them, pleasure does not lie in becoming attached to things, but, in becoming a part of them by a process of assimilation” (87)

Natsume Soseki: The Three Cornered Hat

“Anywhere that you can find railway train must be classed as the world of reality, for there is nothing more typical of twentieth-century civilization. It is an unsympathetic and heartless contraption which rumbles along carrying hundreds of people crammed together in one box. It takes them all at a uniform speed to the same station, and then proceeds to lavish the benefits of steam upon every one of them without exception. People are said to board and travel by train, but I call it being loaded and transported. Nothing shows a greater contempt for individuality than the train” (181)

Extracts from an overview of contemporary Japanese culture in The Age newspaper from the 1990s...

 

"There's a death wish operating through Japanese literature" says Masao Miyoshi, a Japanese literary scholar (Accomplices of Silence). "Writing in Japan is always something of an act of defiance. Silence not only invites and seduces all would be speakers and writers, it is in fact a powerful compulsion throughout the whole society... Yet there have been those writers who refuse to be seduced (Kobo Abe, Hirase Inoue, Shusaku Endo (Japanese Graham Greene), Shohei Ooka, Otohiko Kaga, Saburo Shinogawa). In addition says Tokyo professor Shoichi Saeki, "The Japanese literary scene is now showing a return to ancient times where women were engaged in creative writing. Today, women writers both young and old are very, very active.

 

Yuko Tsushima, (A Bed of Grass) examines the roots of family distress and fake nostalgia... Taeko Tamioka, 57, "is a poet turned novelist celebrated for her unflinching analyses of social despair. For these women, says anthropologist Yukiko Tanaka "writing is the anithesis of the selfless submission described by Japanese authors. Women writers have needed great courage to surmount the many obstacles to their attempts at such self assertion.

 

... The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice, Sando the Bailiff, Uegetsu, Tokyo Story, Yojimbo, Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Narayama... Part of the appeal of these films lay in their strangeness: Japan seemed not just another country but a different world full of mystery, elegance, violence, surprise."
 

Shushin - Dotoku

"Again the aim was to instruct youngsters in the importance of respect for the common good. In a sense, it is what makes the Japanese education system truly Japanese... Individuals are diverse, but academic achievement is a group endeavour. Everybody is expected ot learn and everybody does."

Murakami Haruki: Norwegian Wood

The guitar... "Still, I like the instrument. It's light, simple, straight forward, like a warm little room, nice and cosy."

George Ohsawa: Jack and  Mitie in the West

"Japanese, Chinese and Erewhonian are all similar languages. In them there is no thought of possession and certainly none of monopolization. Thus, there are no quarrels. Such distinctions are the beginnings of all arguments." (p 56)

"I love sensorial beauty, but I love ugliness much more; the weak, sick, and ignorant much more than the strong, healthy and wise. I love the ingrate, the thief, and the assassin. That's why I am so happy. There is nothing to hate, nothing to attack, nothing to destroy, I love everything." (p 152)

"Dualism is one of the most serious diseases of man, a partial blindness that allows him to see only the spiritual or only the materialistic. It is a form of schizophrenia that produces all kinds of evil and that finally destroys itself." (p 52) 

"Japanese films such as Rashomon, Seven Samurai etc are quite highly admired in the West. But in Japan they are considered to be second rate stories for the masses - those with sensory and sentimental levels of judgement." (p 90)

 

Fukuoka Masanobu: The natural Way of Farming: The Theory and Practice of Green Philosophy

 

"People in the small, humble villages of which Lao Tzu spoke were unaware that the Great Way of man lay in living independently and self sufficiently, yet they knew this in their hearts... there is no need for philosophy in the farming village. It is the urban intellectual who ponders human existance, who goes in search of truth and questiuons the purpose of life." (p 30)

 

Tanazaki Junichiro: Some Prefer Nettles

 

"Had she not been his wife he might have been able to look on her as a play thing, and the fact that she was his wife made it impossible for him to find her interesting." (p 101)

 

Humphrey McQueen: Tokyo World

 

On Murakami's Norweigan Wood: "I's quite erotic, comic in places, but depressing. Almost everyone dies, or goes mad or both. At its worst Norwegian Wood could be described as a Mills and Boon rewrite of The Magic Mountain." (p 285)

 

"Are Japanese atrocities in World War Two the vindication of a half century of White Australian policy, Australian nationalsim, Australian militarism? What went wrong? Were Japanese attitudes the result of deficiencies in Japanese character or the result of western racism?" (p 84) 

 

Jack Kerouac: Haiku

 

"The sound of silence

Is all the instruction

You'll get."

 

Oe Kenzaburo: Prize Stock

 

"Inside a sticky black bag my hot eyelids, my burning throat, my searing hand began to knit me and give me shape. But I could not pierce the sticky membrane and break free of the bag. Like a lamb prematurely born I was wrapped in a bag that stuck to my fingers." (p161)

 

Oe Kenzaburo: The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away

 

"The small childthat is himself has just noticed that his own hands are grotesque, alien, terrifying "things" and, unable to throw them away, stands paralyzed. Immediately he pales, his eyes recede into their sockets and roll upward, exposing the white, while the skin around his eyes beads with sweat like delicate milk. His beautiful mother in her early thirties, her manner unlike that of the people in the valley beacause she has grown up in China, holds out her own hands and tries to distract the child, "Look, mine are the same, the same human hands." (p 39)

 

Ian Buruma: A Japanese Mirror

 

"I myself have worked as a lowly assistant to as a photographer in Tokyo, whom in the traditional artisan style, we had to call Master. Neither the Master, nor his assistants would tell me what to do, let alone how to do it. One had to "learn with the body" as they called it. One acquires the kata (the paper form) by sharpening one's instinct, by making mistakes and being humiliated. "But you never told me..." is never an excuse in Japan." (p 56)

 

"Heroes are by definition reactionary, fighting with their backs against the walls of history." (p 162)

 

Edward Seidensticker: Low City, High City

 

"Kawabata used to say that, though he found abundant sadness in the culture of the Orient, he had never come upon the bleakness that he sensed in the West." (p 209-210)

 

"The literature known as modern... is obsessively, gnawingly intellectual. If a single theme runs through it, that theme is the quest for identity, an insistence upon what it is that establishes the individual as individual... The rebellion against the family and the casting of the authoritarian father into nether regions... (p 250)

 

"Modern literature is altogther more national and cosmopolitan than Edo literature... Modern literature calls to mind not specific places like Shibuya and Kanda but that great abstraction 'suburbia'" (250 - 251)

 

Katai Tayama: Quoted in Injurious to Public Morals by Jay Rubin

 

"Dopp generally looks upon women with contempt.  There has been a tendancy in Japan since the beginning of Meiji to admire women, but of late it seems the tide has been turning and we have begun looking down on her again. There seems to be signs of this new tide in Europe as well. As far as I am concerned, the Japanese have always known woman for shat she is and have always taken an extrremely natural and proper attitude towards her.The post-Restoration tendency to admire women was nothing but a brief attempt to imitate Europe. The Europeans have always over-valued woman and worshipped her quite indiscriminately, but I suspect that they, too, have begun to wake up too late. be that as it may, I for one wish to express my complete agreement with Doppo's view of women... I fully recognise that there is a beauty in women to which none can ever aspire. But we can never recognise her true beauty until we realise fully that she is a thing to be despised. This may seem irrational, but it is not in the least." (p 62)

 

"... it is precisely the writer who has the ability to convey a sense of inner vitality and curiousity through powerful images, who contributes to the liberalization of society. If Natsume Soseki has emerged as Japan's greatest modern novelist, it is not because of the speeches his characters deliver, and certainly not because of any doctrines or slogans they spout, but because of the indelible imagery with which he conveys his view of the world - in otjer words, what he shares with a sensualist like Tanazaki (the second most likely candidate for "greatest") rather than with a liberal theoretician like Yoshino Sakuya." ( p 183)  

 

Karel van Wolferen: The Enigma of Japanese Power

 

"A popular sub-category of nihonjinron theories concerns the Japanese language, which is widely thought by Japanese to be particularly difficult to learn, not because of its insanely complicated writing system, but because it possesses a "spirit" unlike any other language..." (p 347)

Hal Porter: The Actors; An Image of the New Japan 1968

"Aware of the power of the white man, the Japanese are never free of – and cannot ever hope to be entirely free of – an internal warfare between rage and admiration, arrogance and servility, contempt and jealousy, a jealousy resembling that a crystal necklace might have for a diamond one. The thought of a white man is so heavy to the Japanese that he seems more than real. To a Westerner, on the other hand, the quicksand Japanese seem less than real, with a directness and naivete appalling to them, makes no bones about saying so" (p 87-8).

Interview with Ueno Chizuko and sandra Buckley in Broken Silence

‘Our primary goal is to not to be like men but to value what it means to be a woman. This aspect of Japanese feminism is deeply rooted in the history of the women’s movement in Japan as well as the individual experience of women. The emphasis on mothering over the individualism of American feminism is a characteristic shared by East Asian and some European women’ (280).

Ueno Chizuko: Nationalism and Gender (2004)

First wave feminism in Japan was not an ‘imported ideology brought from the West. Translations as a means of introducing culture always includes a screening process. From when it was first established, Japanese feminism  held an affinity for Scandinavian maternalism and rejected Anglo-Saxon individualism and egalitarianism’ (27).

 

Murakami Haruki on junbungaku, quoted in Jay Rubin: Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words (2003)

 

‘In Japan, with its relatively homogenous population, different literary customs have evolved. The language used in literary works tends to be the kind that communicates to a small group of like-minded people. Once a piece of writing is given the seal of approval with the label junbungaku – “pure literature” – the assumption takes hold that it only needs to communicate to a few critics and a small segment of the population. There’s nothing wrong with writing like that, of course, but there’s nothing that says that all novels have to be written this way. Such an attitude can only lead to suffocation. But fiction is a living thing. It needs fresh air (202).

Totman: The Green Archipeligo (1998)

‘Foreigners, and some Japanese as well, often speak fondly of a special Japanese “love of nature” that can be credited with this early modern forest recovery. To so argue, however, invites the tart query: did they love nature so much less during the ancient and early modern predations? More seriously, to advance this “love of nature” as an explanation would be to misconstrue terms. The “nature” of this sensibility is an aesthetic abstraction that has little relationship to the real “nature” of a real ecosystem. The sensibility associated with raising bonsai, viewing cherry blossoms, nurturing disciplined ornamental gardens, treasuring painted landscapes, and admiring chrysanthemums is an entirely different order of things from the concerns and feelings involved in policing woodland and planting trees…. (178)

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.