Haruki Murakami, part 3: The transition - short stories and a sequel

Haruki Murakami. Photo credit: Kevin Trageser / Redux. Image source: The New Yorker

In this post series I am discussing three Haruki Murakami-related works:

• David Karashima's Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami (Soft Skull, 2020), an examination of the English-language publication of Murakami's books from his first novella through his international breakthrough The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995/1997).
• Jay Rubin's Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words (Harvill, 2002/Vintage 2005), a survey of Murakami's life and work up through the publication of Umibe no Kafuka (Kafka on the Shore, 2002/2005).
• Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car (2021), the Academy-Award-winning film based on two Murakami short stories published in the collection Men Without Women (2014).

For a discussion of the three Murakami novels that were published in the Kodansha English Library series for Japanese readers learning English, please see Haruki Murakami, part 1: The English Library novels. For a discussion of the first two Murakami novels published in the U.S., please see Haruki Murakami, part 2: The hard-boiled wonderland.

Cover design: Chip Kidd. Image source: BoekMeter

After the U.S. publication of A Wild Sheep Chase in 1989, Haruki Murakami had begun to have short stories published in The New Yorker: Birnbaum's translation of "TV People" in the issue of 10 September 1990, and "The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women," later to become the first chapter of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995/1997), on 26 November 1990. Over the next two years three more stories would follow, two translated by Jay Rubin ("The Elephant Vanishes," 18 November 1991, and "Sleep," 30 March 1992) and one by Philip Gabriel ("Barn Burning," 2 November 1992).

The New Yorker stories interested the U.S. publisher Alfred Knopf, and Murakami, disappointed in his sales with Kodansha, soon came to an agreement with the American publisher. As Murakami's next book for the U.S. market, Knopf decided to issue a collection of seventeen short stories, The Elephant Vanishes (1993), which included the five New Yorker stories ("Barn Burning" in a retranslation by Birnbaum), five that appeared elsewhere (Granta, The [Mobil] Magazine, Playboy, The Threepenny Review, and Zyzzyva), and seven that had never before been published in English. In the order of their appearance in English, here are summaries of a half-dozen stories from The Elephant Vanishes:

• "The Kangaroo Communiqué" (first English publication: Zyzzyva, Spring 1988, translated by J. Philip Gabriel; retranslated by Birnbaum for The Elephant Vanishes):

A rambling communication about kangaroos quickly veers into disturbingly personal territory. It turns out to be a transcript of a cassette tape recorded by a department store worker in response to a customer's letter of complaint. Between expressing his feelings about kangaroos, rejecting the complaint, and confessing his desire to sleep with the customer (whom he has never met), the narrator says, "Somehow I've talked too much about myself. But if you think about it, it can't be helped. 'Cause I don't know anything about you." This was the introduction to Murakami's deadpan humor for American readers, preceding the publication of A Wild Sheep Chase by more than a year.

• "TV People" (first English publication: The New Yorker, 10 September 1990, translated by Birnbaum)

On an aimless Sunday evening, the miniature TV People appear at the narrator's apartment and set up a television set in his living room. Once the TV is in place, the narrator can't focus on anything other than the screen, even though it displays no picture. His wife does not notice the rearrangement of the room, the TV, or the TV People. The next day at work the narrator sees the TV People again, but his co-workers don't respond to his comments about them. When he returns to his apartment at the end of the day, his wife is gone. The TV is still there, and the TV People seem to have multiplied. "Shame about your wife," they say to him. The narrator looks around: has he begun to shrink?

• "The Elephant Vanishes" (first English publication: The New Yorker, 18 November 1991)

As the title suggests, a parable about memory. One day it's discovered that a suburban town's captive elephant and his keeper have disappeared. There are searches of the nearby area, news conferences by the mayor, calls for an investigation by the political opposition, and general consternation among the citizens of the town. As time passes, though, news stories stop appearing, and "people seem to have forgotten that their town once owned an elephant." But the narrator saw something strange the night of the disappearance. . .

• "The Second Bakery Attack" (first English publication: Playboy, January 1992, translated by Jay Rubin)

A young married couple wake up hungry in the middle of the night, but their refrigerator is empty. The husband-narrator (Boku, "I") recalls the time roughly a decade ago when he and a college friend (the Rat?) decided to completely reject the capitalist system. Although they refused to work out of principle, they still needed to eat and had no money. The logical thing to do was to rob a bakery. But the baker they chose was a Wagner fanatic, and offered them all the bread they could eat if they would listen to the overtures to Tannhäuser and The Flying Dutchman—perhaps 25 minutes of music. They put their knives away, dutifully sat and listened, and took their bread home.

That experience was a turning point: afterwards Boku went back to classes, graduated, went to work in a law firm and got married. On the surface, he is living a complacent bourgeois existence. But his wife senses that beneath the placid surface of their marriage linger repressed urges, manifested by their sudden hunger, that may erupt at any time. Her solution: "Attack another bakery. Right now." And, to her husband's astonishment, she brings out a shotgun and two ski masks. "Why my wife owned a shotgun, I had no idea. Or ski masks. Neither of us had ever skied. But she didn't explain and I didn't ask. Married life is weird, I felt."

"'Thirty Big Macs. For takeout.' The manager looked into the muzzle of the shotgun and resigned himself to fate." Illustration for "The Second Bakery Attack" by Kinuko Y. Craft, Playboy, January 1992, pp. 130-131. Image courtesy of the University of California's Northern Regional Library Facility.

• "Sleep" (first English publication: The New Yorker, 30 March 1992, translated by Rubin)

Of Murakami's short stories, this is perhaps the eeriest and most unsettling (and that's saying a good deal). A first-person female narrator (uncommon in Murakami's fiction) discovers that she is unable to sleep. This is not ordinary restlessness or insomnia: at the beginning of the story she states that she has gone without sleep for 17 days straight.

Her sleeplessness seems to have released something within her. Although she continues to efficiently manage the routine tasks demanded of her by her household, children, and husband, she indulges in guilty pleasures she last experienced in high school: reading Anna Karenina and gorging herself on chocolate (something frowned on by her dentist husband). "Where had the old me gone, the one who used to read a book as though possessed by it?" she asks herself. "What had those days—and that almost abnormally intense passion—meant to me?"

But as her sleeplessness continues, the memories from her past seem to fade: "All the memories I have from the time before I stopped sleeping seem to be moving away with accelerating speed. It feels so strange, as if the me who used to go to sleep every night is not the real me, and the memories from back then are not really mine. This is how people change."

She has begun to take long nighttime drives as a self-soothing activity. That night she parks down by the waterfront, and is staring at the water when men approach out of the darkness. As the story ends, they are rocking the car, trying to turn it over as she remains trapped inside. . .

• "Barn Burning" (first English publication: The New Yorker, 2 November 1992, translated by Gabriel; retranslated for The Elephant Vanishes by Birnbaum)

The narrator becomes enmeshed in the lives of a beautiful young woman and her well-to-do boyfriend. One day the boyfriend confesses to the narrator that every few months he sets fire to a barn. He makes sure that no people or animals are hurt, but feels that run-down barns are just waiting to be torched. His revelation changes the narrator's perspective. After their conversation, he looks at every barn and weighs its potential for burning, but can never successfully identify the boyfriend's next target. And the urge to burn barns becomes contagious: "Sometimes, I could swear he was trying to get me to burn a barn. . .I'll grant you, there were times that, well, as long as I was waiting around for him to do the deed, I half considered striking the match myself" (p. 146). In 2018 this story was made into an Academy-Award-nominated film, Burning, by Korean writer-director Chang-dong Lee.

Of the seventeen stories, nine translations were by Birnbaum and eight were by Rubin. At the time of publication Birnbaum was living in Mexico, had just begun a degree program in Burmese Studies at the University of London, and would soon move to Myanmar with his wife. He was unable to commit to translating Murakami's next novel; in an email to Karashima, Birnbaum called this period in his life "a troubled, lost, disruptive passage" (Karashima, p. 203). After Birnbaum withdrew, Rubin became the obvious choice to translate the next book Murakami would publish with Knopf, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997).

From the point of view of sales, publishing a short-story collection was a curious choice, as in the U.S. they generally sell less well than novels. And indeed, Murakami's sales didn't increase: The Elephant Vanishes sold only about as well as Hard-Boiled Wonderland. Murakami was again disappointed: "Whenever I published a book in Japan I was selling at least 100,000 copies, so I thought 10,000 copies was low" (Karashima, p. 181. Karashima reports that the hardback actually sold 5,500 copies). But perhaps by publishing a short story collection Knopf intended to signal that Murakami was a Serious Writer. If so, that strategy may have paid off later on.

In the meantime, an odd situation was unfolding: Murakami's old publisher and translator had one last project in the pipeline.

Cover design: Maki Sasaki. Image source: Raptis Rare Books

Murakami's sixth novel Dance Dance Dance, originally published as Dansu Dansu Dansu in 1988, is a sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase. [1] The narrator (Boku) returns to the Dolphin Hotel in Sapporo five years after the events of the earlier novel. But the old hotel is gone; in its place is a sleek new 26-story high-rise, "l'Hôtel Dauphin," a product of the Bubble Economy. Boku discovers that all the land in the district slated for redevelopment had been purchased by a single company well in advance of the public disclosure of the plan.

That's advanced capitalism for you: The player making the maximum capital investment gets the maximum critical information in order to reap the maximum desired profit with maximum capital efficiency—and nobody bats an eye. . .Fairness has got nothing to do with it.

. . .Everything is rigged, tied into that massive capital web, and beyond this web there's another web. Nobody's going anywhere. You throw a rock and it'll come right back at you. (pp. 54-55)

The high-tech hotel seems to have obliterated all traces of the old Dolphin. One night, though, the hotel elevator stops at a cold, pitch-black floor that seems to be a slice of an alternate reality in which the old hotel may still exist. On that floor Boku encounters the Sheep Man. It will turn out that he's not the only one to have done so: Yumiyoshi, a receptionist at the hotel, and Yuki, a 13-year-old girl with psychic powers who is a guest there, are also taken by the elevator to this strange floor.

Both women will become involved in Boku's search for the Girl with the Perfect Ears who left him at the old Dolphin Hotel without a goodbye five years previously. That search will lead Boku to Yuki's father, who is a bestselling writer and TV personality named Hiraku Makimura (an anagram of Haruki Murakami, and perhaps Murakami's vision of a possible alternate life he might have been tempted to lead). It will also reconnect him with Riyoichi Gotanda, a former high school classmate who is now a well-known actor. Through Gotanda, Boku will uncover a series of killings whose victims are Tokyo call girls, and through Yuki he will learn the fate of the Girl with the Perfect Ears. (In A Wild Sheep Chase she was nameless; here we learn that she called herself Kiki, which means "listening" in Japanese.)

The title of the novel comes from something the Sheep Man tells Boku:

"Yougottadance. Aslongasthemusicplays. Yougottadance. Don'teventhinkwhy. . .Dance. Danceyourbest, likeyourlifedependedonit. Yougottadance." (pp. 86-87)

The Sheep Man also tells him that the place of their encounter, a room on the alternate 16th floor of the hotel, is somehow Boku's:

"Youreallyarepartofhere, really. Alwayshavebeen, alwayswillbe. Itallstartshere, itallendshere. Thisisyourplace. It'stheknot. It'stiedtoeverything. . .Thingsyoulost. Thingsyou'regonnalose. Everything. Here'swhereitalltiestogether." (p. 83)

The choice to translate the Sheep Man's speech without spaces between words was Birnbaum's, and was continued from A Wild Sheep Chase. Written Japanese does not generally have spaces between words, and so in the original Japanese editions the Sheep Man speaks like all the other characters. However, Birnbaum told Karashima,

"I couldn't imagine a crazy guy in a sheep costume talking normal[ly]. I saw him as a genuinely original quirky character, hence a chance to inject a bit of zany cartoonish humor (Murakami included a funny drawing of him, after all [see part 2]). I wanted something close to baaaaa yet still intelligible." (Karashima, p. 186)

Dance Dance Dance did not break any new stylistic ground for Murakami, and of course it revisited characters and situations from A Wild Sheep Chase, which had been published five years before. It also continued Murakami's tendency to have his authorial stand-in Boku make pronouncements that thud on the mind's ear, at least in English. As an example, Boku tells Yuki, "As time goes on, you'll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn't, doesn't. Time solves most things. And what time can't solve, you have to solve yourself" (p. 312).

Perhaps as a result, Dance Dance Dance did not win Murakami a large number of new readers. That would change three years later with the publication of his international breathrough.

Next time: International breakthrough: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Other posts in this series:

• The English Library novels: Hear the Wind Sing (1979/1987), Pinball, 1973 (1980/1985), and Norwegian Wood (1987/1989)
• The first U.S. publications: A Wild Sheep Chase (1982/1989) and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985/1991)
• Film adaptation: Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car (2021)
• Comics adaptation: Jean-Christophe Deveney and PMGL's Manga Stories (2023)
• More film adaptations: Burning (2018) and Norwegian Wood (2010)

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1. Curiously, although it is the sequel to the third volume in the so-called "Trilogy of the Rat" (Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973, and A Wild Sheep Chase), Dance Dance Dance is not considered to belong to the series, perhaps because the Rat does not appear.