Favorites of 2023: Music - Our year of French Baroque opera

Amanda Forsythe (Éolie) and Karina Gauvin (Circé) in Henri Desmarest's Circé, centerpiece opera of the Boston Early Music Festival (seen 11 June 2023). Photo credit: Kathy Wittman. Image source: BEMF.org

It's the time of year when once again I choose my favorite music, books, and films first experienced in the past 12 months. To begin I'm going to review my favorite live, streamed, and recorded musical performances.  

Our year of French Baroque opera

Ordinarily I order my selections chronologically, but in this first installment I'm organizing them thematically as well, because for us this was the year of French Baroque opera.

I have been listening to French Baroque opera for about as long as I've been listening to opera, over three decades. But until this year I'd often felt that I generally preferred Italian opera to the operas of Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and especially Jean-Baptiste Lully.

Lully, the man who defined French opera in opposition to Italian opera, ironically was himself an Italian. He was born in Florence as Giovanni Battista Lulli in 1631 and did not become a French subject until 1661. His operas, which became the model in France for the next century, are characterized by five-act structure plus an allegorical prologue. Airs are often short and are generally sung without repeats (except perhaps a refrain), and there are extensive passages of recitative (sometimes comprising whole scenes). The chorus, a large group separate from the soloists, has a prominent role, and extensive instrumental or dance sequences are often featured. The distribution of voices includes sopranos, high tenors, and basses, but rarely altos (the range of most castrati, who were not popular in France).

Pygmalion et Galatée by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1890. Image source: American Bach Soloists

There are, of course, exceptions to this five-act structure, such as Rameau's Pygmalion, a one-act opera composed in 1748. The artist Pygmalion spurns his lover Céphise because he has fallen in love with his own creation, a Statue. L'Amour brings the Statue to life, and she and Pygmalion declare their mutual love. L'Amour consoles Céphise by finding her another lover, and everyone rejoices. This 45-minute work was enchantingly performed by the singers and musicians of American Bach Soloists led by director Jeffrey Thomas (seen 8 May 2023). The excellent soloists were Matthew Hill (Pygmalion), Morgan Balfour (Céphise), Amy Broadbent (La Statue Animée), and Mary Wilson (L'Amour). Coupled with Handel's lovely Italian cantata Apollo e Dafne, featuring Hadleigh Adams (Apollo) and Mary Wilson (Daphne), Pygmalion was the ideal work to inaugurate our season of French Baroque opera.

While in London during late May and early June, if we didn't have a concert or other evening activity planned we tended to stay in. Our thanks to the generous relative who gave us a subscription to the streaming service Medici.tv, which gave us the opportunity to revisit director Jean-Marie Villégier's production of Lully's Atys (1675). Filmed in Paris in 2011 and featuring Les Arts Florissants conducted by William Christie, it's your typical Baroque love quadrangle: the nymph Sangaride (Emmanuelle de Negri) is betrothed to the Phrygian King Celenus (Nicolas Rivenq) in obedience to her father, a river god (Bernard Deletré). However, she secretly loves the youth Atys (Bernard Richter), and he loves her. The goddess Cybèle (Stéphanie d'Oustrac) descends to bless the nuptials of King Celenus and Sangaride, and to declare her love for Atys. Now, if Atys and Sangaride's love is discovered it will offend father, King and goddess. It can't end well. . .

The closing minutes of Act I, the arrival of the goddess Cybèle ("Venez tous dans mon temple"):

https://youtu.be/hmy1PwW1RmU

Villégier's production, with Patrice Cauchetier's black, silver and gold period costumes, stylized gestures, and the Baroque dancers of Compagnie Fêtes galantes, was groundbreaking when it was first introduced in 1987. Decades later it remains extraordinarily handsome, and the cast could not be bettered.

It was excellent preparation for our next live experience of French Baroque opera, the Boston Early Music Festival's production of Henri Desmarest's Circé (1694). The scenic design, costumes and dance were inspired by Baroque models. You can read my full description of this performance in Music in London and Boston, where I wrote that "Circé was a spectacular triumph for the BEMF performers and production team." From the BEMF recording of Circé, the opening aria of Act III, "Désirs, transports, cruelle impatience," sung by Amanda Forsythe (Éolie) [1]:

https://youtu.be/pVdthstyaSk

On our return home, eager to see more, we continued our explorations on Medici.tv. Two productions of Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie (1733) caught our eye. The first, director Jonathan Kent's 2013 production from Glyndebourne, features William Christie conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment with soloists that include Sarah Connolly as Phèdre and Stéphane Degout as her husband Thesée. Interestingly, they are also the Phèdre and Thesée in director Ivan Alexandre's 2012 production from the Opéra Bastille, featuring Emmanuelle Haïm conducting Le Concert d'Astrée. Both versions are highly recommendable. The Glyndebourne production uses hunting and consumption as governing metaphors (the Prologue, which takes place in a giant refrigerator, is a highlight). Christie's tempi are well-judged, and the soloists and the Glyndebourne Chorus are second to none. The Opéra Bastille production employs Baroque costumes, staging and dancing, and is visually and aurally splendid.

Amazingly, although Rameau was 50 years old at the time of the first performance of Hippolyte et Aricie, it was his first opera. Rameau's fellow composer André Campra famously remarked of Hippolyte that "there is enough music in this opera to make ten of them; this man will eclipse us all." [2] From the Opéra Bastille production, the Deuxième Air des Chasseurs, "A la chasse" ("To the hunt!"; the Huntress is sung by Andrea Hill):

https://youtu.be/-OksrK1ulHg

To close out our French Baroque opera discoveries this year I'll mention two more Lully operas seen on Medici.tv. Lully's Cadmus et Hermione (1673) was his first full-scale success, and determined the form of French opera for the next 100 years. The hero Cadmus is forced to undergo a series of trials to win the hand of Hermione, daughter of Mars and Venus. The 2008 production from the Opéra-Comique is directed by Benjamin Lazar with lavish Baroque costumes, scenery and staging. Musically it is superb, featuring the forces of Le Poème Harmonique conducted by Vincente Dumestre.

The final scene of Act IV, in which Cadmus (André Morsch) is reunited with Hermione (Claire Lefilliâtre) after rescuing her, with Athena's aid, from a giant. "Ah, how sweet is the memory of pain," they sing, "when at last one finds happiness!" But not so fast: a cloud descends from the heavens, and Hermione is abducted:

https://youtu.be/hknfcgh3jL8

Speaking of heros aided by Athena, our final French Baroque opera was Lully's Persée (1682). The hero Persée loves the daughter of King Céphée, Andromède, who is betrothed to her uncle Phinée. Andromède returns the love of Persée, but Mérope, Queen Cassiope's sister, also secretly loves him. Meanwhile the snake-haired monster Méduse is wreaking havoc on the kingdom; anyone who gazes at her is instantly turned to stone. Persée must slay Méduse and rescue Andromède from a sea monster before the couple can be united. But not so fast: the lovelorn Mérope interrupts the wedding ceremony to warn that Phinée and his assassins are about to attack the wedding to kill Persée.

The 2004 production by Toronto's Opera Atelier directed by Marshall Pynkoski features Cyril Auvity as Persée, Marie Lenormand as Andromède, and Monica Whicher as Mérope, with Tafelmusik Chamber Orchestra and Choir conducted by Hervé Niquet. In Act II's "Infortunés, qu'un monstre affreux," Mérope and Andromède meet, and each recognizes the other's love for the hero about risk his life to save the kingdom:

https://youtu.be/OBdcDpd6AIo

The intelligent direction and ravishing visuals of these productions are certainly an important part of their appeal. But what we find most compelling are the emotional dilemmas at their center: the impossible love of Sangaride and Atys, the separations faced by Cadmus and Hermione and Persée and Andromède, and the thwarted passions of Céphise for Pygmalion, Circé for Ulisse, Phèdre for her stepson Hippolyte, and Mérope for Persée. And we find that these dilemmas are heightened, rather than diminished, by the stylizations of Baroque stagings. Enhanced by their spectacular settings and costumes, these stagings also demonstrate the power of emotional restraint and understatement.

Posts in this series:

• Favorites of 2023: Our year of Byron
• Favorites of 2023: Our year of Agatha Christie
• Favorites of 2023: Movies and television
• Favorites of 2023: Our year of Alec Guinness
• Favorites of 2023: Music
• Favorites of 2023: Our year of French Baroque Opera

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1. A minor issue for us, although it may be a sticking point for some: BEMF co-director Stephen Stubbs employs Baroque guitar liberally throughout the Circé recording. Although we don't have an exact list of the instruments in the orchestra of the Académie Royale de Musique, the records we do have mention theorbos (generally plucked) rather than Baroque guitar (generally strummed). See James R. Anthony, French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau, Revised and expanded edition, Amadeus Press, 1997, p. 123.
2. Quoted in Anthony, French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau, p. 162.

Haruki Murakami, part 5: Drive My Car

Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and Misaki Watari (Toko Miura) in Drive My Car. Image source: The Film Stage

Writer-director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's film Drive My Car (2021) seamlessly combines elements from two Haruki Murakami short stories, "Drive My Car" and "Scheherezade," from the collection Men Without Women (2014).

Theater actor and director Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) lives in Tokyo with his younger wife Oto (Reika Kirishima), a television screenwriter. In the opening scenes we see their post-coital ritual, where Oto narrates a story to Yusuke.

Oto's story is about a high-school girl with a crush on a classmate. She starts breaking into his house when she knows no one will be there and entering his room. Each time she takes some small object whose absence won't be noticed, and somewhere in the room hides a token of herself.

As Yusuke is driving Oto to work the next day in his vintage red Saab 900 Turbo, they go over the story together, shaping it and teasing out its meanings. Oto is writing a screenplay for a late-night TV program, but Yusuke asks her to wait until they make love again to complete the story, whose ending she hasn't yet imagined.

Oto (Reika Kirishima) and Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) in Drive My Car. Image source: The Film Stage

That evening Yusuke is appearing as Vladimir in a performance of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. We see the last moments of the play. Hamaguchi cuts away just before the final lines:

vladimir:  Well? Shall we go?
estragon: Yes, let's go.
They do not move.
Curtain.

The omission of these lines is significant: it will turn out that one of the themes of the movie is movement versus stasis.

Later, Oto continues her story. The girl feels herself drawn to the boy's room, where "time stands still. Past and present fade away." She removes her clothes and begins to masturbate on the boy's bed when she hears someone entering the house and coming up the stairs. "Now she can stop at last. . .she'll become a new person. The door opens." Is Oto trying to tell Yusuke something? [1]

The next day as Yusuke is leaving, Oto asks him if they can talk when he returns that evening. "Of course," he responds. But Yusuke has lied. Instead of going to teach a workshop, as he'd told Oto, he drives around Tokyo rehearsing his lines for an upcoming production of Uncle Vanya to a cassette tape of the lines for the other characters recorded by his wife. The play seems to comment on their situation; is Yusuke rehearsing for the conversation with Oto, which he clearly dreads?. . .

Two years later, Yusuke has come to Hiroshima to stage a multilingual production of Chekov's Uncle Vanya. Thanks to a past accident, the festival requires their artists to have drivers rather than drive themselves. Yusuke is a bit obsessive about driving—he hates to be a passenger—and about his car. Like most drivers he thinks that other drivers are either too aggressive, too timid, or too distracted. Driving is also how he runs his lines, by playing the cassettes recorded by his wife of the other characters' parts. Those cassettes are also a connection to her, and Chekhov's lines often seem to be commenting on Yusuke's past and current emotional state.

So Yusuke is not happy when he is assigned a young woman, Misaki (Toko Miura), as his chauffeuse. But the taciturn Misaki is a skilled driver and, if Yusuke is never quite fully comfortable as a passenger, he slowly comes to accept her. As he begins to unbend, they both begin to reveal more about themselves; ultimately, each helps the other come to terms with a trauma from the past.

Drive My Car. Image source: Japan Society Film Club

As Yusuke and Misaki slowly reach an understanding, we also watch the casting, rehearsals and performance of Uncle Vanya. Yusuke is renowned for his unconventional casting choices. One of the actors who has auditioned is Koji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), a TV heartthrob who had starred in a show that Oto was writing. Yusuke unexpectedly casts him as the middle-aged Vanya, a role that Yusuke himself is famous for. The two men go drinking after rehearsals, but we learn that Yusuke has a ulterior motive for getting to know Takatsuki. And unfortunately Takatsuki is involved in a sensationalistic subplot added by Hamaguchi that seems both implausible and jarringly out of place in this quiet, reflective film.

Apart from the violent Takatsuki subplot, Hamaguchi's elaborations of his source material develop layers of meaning only hinted at in Murakami's stories—the scenes from Yusuke's stage productions, for example, which seem to enact and, in the end, provide a partial resolution for, Yusuke's emotional dilemmas. The acting is excellent, with special kudos for Nishijima, Kirishima, Miura, and Park Yu-Rim, as a mute actress who movingly delivers the final lines of Uncle Vanya in Korean Sign Language. The images are also beautifully composed by Hamaguchi and photographed and lit by cinematographer Hidetoshi Shinomiya. Drive My Car is a rich, subtle, and visually striking film.

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

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)
• The transition: The Elephant Vanishes (1980-91/1993) and Dance Dance Dance (1988/1994)
• International breakthrough: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995/1997)
• 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. This scene, by the way, is not from Murakami's short story, but is one of the many details in the film that have been added by Hamaguchi.

Haruki Murakami, part 4: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

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).

Cover design: Chip Kidd. Image source: Chip Kidd

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was written during Murakami's time as a visiting lecturer at Princeton University in the early 1990s. Perhaps distance invited reflection: it is the Murakami work that engages most directly with the legacy of Japan's imperial wars in Asia.

At the opening of the novel, the situation is familiar to readers of the short story "The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women": the aimless (but this time not nameless) 30-year-old narrator Toru Okada is sent by his wife Kumiko in search of their missing cat, who disappeared more than a week ago. It will come as no surprise to the reader that the cat has a larger significance:

"I want you to understand one thing," said Kumiko. "That cat is very important to me. Or should I say to us. We found it the week after we got married. Together. You remember?" (p. 47)

That the symbol of their union has gone missing is a strong clue to the reader, if not to Toru, that his marriage of six years is in trouble. Additional clues include the new earrings his wife is wearing, along with the unfamiliar perfume she's dabbed behind her ears. And the strongest clue: after returning increasingly late from work for the past few weeks, one night Kumiko does not return home at all.

Now Toru is searching for both his cat and his wife. His wife had told him to be sure to search for the cat at a vacant house at the dead end of the alley that runs behind their home. (The metaphors are multiplying.) At that house he encounters a neighbor, the boldly curious and precociously provocative 16-year-old May Kasahara. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle continues the pattern in Murakami's fiction of the semi-autobiographical narrator seemingly being irresistible to women of all ages, including an anonymous phone-sex caller, an about-to-be-married colleague who worked at the same law firm, and the psychic Creta Kano. May voices a question the reader may also be entertaining: "Just how many women do you have hanging around you?" (p. 215).

In the yard of the vacant house May shows Toru a dry well (another metaphor, of course; wells and subterranean spaces recur throughout Murakami's fiction). After his wife disappears Toru descends to the bottom of the well to think things through. Sitting at the bottom of the well he falls asleep, and May pulls up the rope ladder, stranding him in darkness. Memories of his marriage, encounters with an alternate reality, connections with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, and a dawning realization that his wife's brother is not only unlikeable but actively malign, will follow.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle includes elements familiar from previous Murakami works: it features a lone protagonist on a quest who crosses the barrier into an alternate reality and does battle with agents of evil in that world and this one. But the Manchuria sections show Murakami depicting the futility, waste, and horror of war with a descriptive power and moral complexity that he had rarely deployed before. The Manchuria sections portray a universe where all available choices are abhorrent, and yet choices still must be made.

The text was significantly shortened in its published U.S. version (just as Hard-Boiled Wonderland had been). Knopf had contracted for a 125,000 word novel. When translator Jay Rubin turned in a manuscript that was 290,000 words long (the book was published in three volumes in Japan), he was asked to cut. Rubin estimates that ultimately he removed about 25,000 words, requiring the rearrangement of some of the material.

Murakami's former editor at Kodansha, Elmer Luke, told David Karashima that "the prose—of the translation, that is—had no tightness, it was flabby, and the novel went on and on and on far too long. . .It should have been cut more" (p. 239). Even with Rubin's cuts the hardback is over 600 pages long. But Murakami's editor at Knopf, Gary Fisketjon, saw the novel as "a giant step forward. . .in terms of scale and scope and ambition" (Karashima, p. 232). [1]

The novel's length and structural complexity—it includes flashbacks/memories, events that happen in a dreamlike alternate reality, lengthy stories (which have their own flashbacks) told by several characters to the protagonist, as well as interpolated transcriptions of letters, a newspaper article and a computer chat session—did not daunt reviewers. With the exception of Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, the book received strong to glowing reviews, and garnered a readership for Murakami among other influential writers such as David Mitchell, Junot Diaz and Pico Iyer. The Japanese-American writer and critic Roland Kelts said of the novel,

"For anyone who'd read Murakami before, the book felt like the author had marshalled his talents and concentrated them into one dazzling performance. For readers new to Murakami, he was a portal to another universe, another way of looking at and experiencing both the isolation of urban anomie in Tokyo and the repressed, unprocessed memories of the war in Asia." (Quoted in Karashima, p. 234)

Sales of the hardback doubled in comparison to his earlier books, to 14,000. Even more importantly, his paperback backlist titles also surged. Fisketjon noted to Karashima that "each and every one of his books in Vintage paperback sold more copies year after year. . .This demonstrated that if a reader enjoyed his or her first Murakami, he or she would then read another and another, and introduce friends to his work, and then they would do the same. I can't overestimate how important this is, and how rare" (p. 233). Murakami's international success, so long sought by his translators and editors, was now established.

In writing this survey of Murakami's English-language translations from the first English Library titles through The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I've drawn heavily on two works:

Image source: Soft Skull Press

David Karashima's Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami recounts the story of Murakami's first appearances in English translation. It features interviews with many of the main figures involved, with a particular focus on his first translator, Alfred Birnbaum, and the editor with whom Birnbaum worked closely, Elmer Luke. Karashima approaches his task journalistically. While this allows the actors in this story to speak for themselves, it also means that Karashima passes virtually no judgments of his own on the relative quality of the translations he covers or on Murakami's original work.

Image source: The Fictional Julie Koh

For judgments (almost always highly positive, verging on the uncritical) about Murakami's work, and comments (sometimes misguided) on the relative quality of translations, readers can turn to Jay Rubin's Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words. Rubin offers a translator's perspective on the many issues involved in "carrying over" Murakami's work from Japanese to English. He also provides interpretive summaries of the books through Kafka on the Shore (2002/2005), and a valuable bibliography (now, of course, in need of updating).

Murakami in English, three decades on

My own re-encounter with Murakami's earlier fiction has left me with mixed feelings. When I first discovered him in my 20s through Alfred Birnbaum's translations, I was drawn to what I've described elsewhere as his "self-sufficient but emotionally incomplete protagonists, indifferent to or alienated from worldly measures of success, who find themselves unexpectedly thrust into the role of detective when they come into contact with a dreamlike alternate reality." I found his conversational prose style very readable (thanks to Birnbaum) and the alternate worlds he created brilliantly imaginative at times. He became one of my favorite contemporary writers, and I eagerly anticipated each new release.

Three decades later, I still perceive all those strengths; at the same time, I now find that the symbolism can be heavy-handed, the moral lessons banal, and the available roles for women often limited. The novels can also be contradictory; as an example, while they critique consumerism, they also celebrate it: brand names, especially of high-end stereo equipment and imported whiskey, are often specified. And my responses have also been complicated by the disappointments of some of his later novels, particularly the 900-page behemoth 1Q84 (2008-10/2011) and his next novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013/2014). 

Colorless Tsukuru is, and may remain, the last Murakami novel I've read. I confess that despite the allusion in its title to Mozart and Da Ponte's Don Giovanni, I haven't been tempted to read Killing Commendatore (2018), and I also doubt that I will pick up the forthcoming The City and Its Uncertain Walls. "Lately I've begun to wonder," I wrote in my post on Colorless Tsukuru, "whether I wasn't really a fan of his early translator, Alfred Birnbaum." It's a question which may not be resolvable.

Murakami on film

Murakami has long attracted filmmakers. The first film adaptation of his fiction, Kaze no uta o kike (Hear the Wind Sing), came out as early as 1982. Seven additional feature films, eight short films and a TV series episode based on various short stories and novels have followed. As a coda to this series, in my next post I will look a recent feature film adapted from Murakami's short stories.

Next time: Film adaptation: Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car (2021)

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)
• The transition: The Elephant Vanishes (1980-91/1993) and Dance Dance Dance (1988/1994)
• Comics adaptation: Jean-Christophe Deveney and PMGL's Haruki Murakami: Manga Stories (2021/2023)

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1. Also published within a year or so of Murakami's novel: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (Little, Brown, 1996), Don DeLillo's Underworld (Scribner, 1997), and Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (Holt, 1997), all of which were even longer than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Big books (by men, at least) were in fashion.

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.