Tokyo Strange Stories

Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-07-01
Features: The preface to After Dark was written less than a year ago, and Murakami has now published another short story collection, Tokyo Strange Tales. "Tan" means general talk, and "qitan" refers to strange tales or odd anecdotes. As is well known, most of Murakami's story titles are deliberately misleading, evading the main point, but this short story collection is straightforward, telling true-to-life strange tales that happen in Tokyo. Five stories, each more bizarre than the last. Whimsical, extraordinary, and rare, they are truly stories worth savoring. In the story "The Accidental Traveler," Murakami begins by recounting two odd events that happened to him in the past. One occurred during his stay in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1993 to 1995. He went to a bar to listen to the jazz piano player Frank Lang's performance. After hearing the music, he suddenly thought: "If I could play my favorite songs, 'Barbados' and 'Lovers Born Under a Bad Star,' that would be wonderful!" Just as he was thinking this, Frank Lang indeed played both songs in succession, and they were brilliant. Murakami, stunned, lost all words. Because the probability of choosing these two songs from among countless jazz pieces and playing them consecutively was purely astronomical. Yet, this probability actually happened right before his eyes! The second event was similar and occurred around the same time. One afternoon, Murakami entered an old record shop and found a record titled "10to4atthe5spot." It was a live recording of Pepper Adams performing at a jazz club called "fivespot" in New York. "10to4" means ten to four in the morning. Just as he was about to leave with the record, a young man passing by casually struck up a conversation: "Hey, what time is it?" I glanced at my watch and mechanically replied, "Yeah, it's 10to4." After answering, I couldn't help but hold my breath: "What on earth is happening around me?" This is the opening of the story. The rest of the story tells a tale told to Murakami from a personal perspective. The protagonist is a piano tuner and a homosexual. When a very charming woman offered to go with him to a quiet place, he refused, but to comfort her, he stroked her hair for a long time and discovered that she had a black mole on her right earlobe, just like her sister. The woman sadly told him that she would go to the hospital the day after tomorrow for a follow-up breast cancer check-up. Subsequently, he called his already married sister to meet, and she also said that she would be hospitalized the day after tomorrow for breast cancer surgery, and indeed, she underwent the surgery. As for what happened to that woman later, I don't know.
The second story, "Hana Lei Bay," tells of the protagonist's nineteen-year-old son who was tragically bitten by a shark and lost a leg while surfing at Hana Lei Bay in Kauai, Hawaii. Every year on the anniversary of his death, she flies from Tokyo to the beach where her son died and sits quietly by the sea from morning till evening. One day, two Japanese surfing instructors firmly told her that they had seen a one-legged Japanese surfer on the beach. She was greatly surprised and searched everywhere but couldn't find him. That evening, lying on her pillow, she choked back tears, wondering why others could see her son, but she, as his mother, couldn't. Was she not worthy?
The third story, "In All the Places Where One Might Be Found," tells of a stockbroker who mysteriously disappeared between the 24th and 26th floors of his apartment on a Sunday morning. His wife hired a private detective, but no trace was found. Unexpectedly, twenty days later, she learned that her husband was lying on a bench at Sendai Station, far from Tokyo, and had been under police custody. He had no memory of how he got to Sendai or what he did during those twenty days. His memory had vanished completely.
The fourth story, "The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day," is the main body of a bizarre story conceived by a novelist. A female intern doctor in her thirties picks up a kidney-shaped black stone while traveling and takes it back to her hospital office to use as a paperweight. A few days later, she notices a strange phenomenon: when she comes to work in the morning, the stone is not on the desk. Sometimes it's on the swivel chair, sometimes by the vase, and sometimes on the floor. She can't figure it out. Later, she throws the stone into Tokyo Bay on a ferry, but the next morning, when she arrives at the hospital office, the stone is still waiting for her on the desk.
The most peculiar part is the last story, "The Monkey of Shinagawa." A young woman named Atsushi Takiho occasionally forgets her own name. After some investigation, it is revealed that the cause of her "name amnesia" is a monkey that stole her high school dormitory key from her closet. The monkey can talk and reveals a personal secret about her that she has never told anyone, not even herself. However, the key is recovered, and so is her name. She will once again live with this name—this is her name, and there is no other.
Overall, in this short story collection, Murakami, as always, quietly dismantles the fence between reality and the supernatural, or between this world and the other world. He still circles above the subconscious realm like an eagle, searching for deeper, darker depths, and still tries to extract soul messages and human subtleties from the ordinary secular life. These are in line with his other short stories like The Disappearance of the Elephant, The Ghost of Lexington, and The Man on the Taxi, as well as his longer works like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, and After Dark. But Murakami is a writer with a strong artistic pursuit and ambition. He is unlikely to be complacent about clichés and must always create something new compared to the past. And this difference is reflected in this short story collection through his focus on and portrayal of accidental elements.
Tokyo Strange Tales is full of coincidences, giving a sense of the Chinese proverb "no coincidence without a story." The stories arise from coincidence and become strange due to coincidence, thus becoming strange tales. However, Murakami is not particularly interested in sensationalism, nor does he intend to play with coincidence or list strange tales just to attract attention. He is unwilling to treat chance as mere chance or as a strange tale to be laughed at. It is clear that he is carefully capturing and questioning chance. Exaggeratedly speaking, for Murakami, chance is like glue, used to mend the gap between the real world and the supernatural world (which he believes are already few), a slide to further dive into the basement of the soul to explore the hidden depths, and an endoscope to probe the mystery of fate and the cosmic order. For this, Murakami tries to connect chance with the inspiration that arises from his observations and intuition about life and existence, hoping to pierce through the fog of chance to reach the foothills of necessity and destiny, leaving us ample space for contemplation. There is little of the usual loneliness and melancholy that permeates his work, and more anxiety about soul, as well as concern and reverence for the mysterious.
Reading Tokyo Strange Tales, it seems as if there is a mysterious force guiding and controlling the protagonists' destinies. The turning points in their later lives often secretly align with some mysterious hint from their past memories or quietly echo with some accidental phenomenon in reality, such as the mole in "The Accidental Traveler," the kidney-shaped stone, or the warning "Don't let the monkey steal it" from the suicide note of "The Monkey of Shinagawa." Of course, Murakami does not provide answers to these strange tales; the endings remain open as always. It can be said that each of his short stories is a mystery outside common sense and reason, a silent call and temptation, waiting for readers to draw their own conclusions.
At the same time, Murakami also tries to explore transcendental matters through the element of chance, thereby enriching the transcendental dimension of literary works—the dimension of dialogue with the divine and the other world. In an interview in 2002, when asked about what writing a novel is like, Murakami said: "Writing novels, writing stories, is ultimately the task of 'combing memories of unexperienced things.' Simply put, it's like playing a role-playing game (an autonomous participation electronic game). But the game programmer is you, and the memory disappears from the personality of the person playing the game. Meanwhile, the programmer's personality does not play the game. This is a rather severe split task. The right hand does not know what the left hand is doing, and the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. The clearer this split, the more convincing the story becomes, that is, the closer it gets to your 'archetype.'" (Haruki Murakami, The, Shinchosha, June 2003)
One might think that Murakami's "unexperienced" refers less to indirect experience and more to the transcendental, a kind of transcendence similar to déjà vu. In fact, Murakami has shown great talent in this regard. He constantly tracks and uncovers, infusing his literary creations with the aesthetic connotations of the transcendental dimension. There, the narrative perspective he uses is neither purely humanistic from Eastern Confucian culture nor entirely divine from the perspective of the Bible and ancient Greek culture, but rather closer to a composite perspective of humanity and divinity with local color. Because he does not set a vast middle ground between the human world and the divine world, nor does he personify the divine (or supernatural) and transplant it directly to this world. He strives to get infinitely close to his own "archetype," the dark and primal core of the subconscious and self, the polar regions of life and death. And such works are undoubtedly more convincing and have a stronger soul resonance with readers (Murakami's words, see Literary World, April 2003 issue), thus possessing greater authenticity and reality. This is also a metaphorical mainstream that flows through almost all of Murakami's works. The difference is, as mentioned above, in this collection of strange tales, he focuses more on incorporating accidental elements, using chance to express the mystery of fate and convey reports from the depths of the archetype and the subconscious. This is not something that modern Chinese literature needs to strengthen.
Late October 2005, written at, Qingdao, Jinju in full bloom, red leaves urging autumn.
Related Product Recommendations: Murakami Haruki's Music Wonderland (3CD) — Collecting moving moments from Murakami Haruki's works from 1979 to 2008. Tokyo Strange Tales includes five strange tales: "The Accidental Traveler," "Hana Lei Bay," "In All the Places Where One Might Be Found," "The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day," and "The Monkey of Shinagawa." Among the five strange tales, the most peculiar is the last one, "The Monkey of Shinagawa." A young woman named Atsushi Takiho suffers from a form of amnesia where she occasionally forgets her own name. After some investigation, it is revealed that the cause of her "name amnesia" is a monkey that stole her high school dormitory key from her closet. The monkey can talk and reveals a personal secret about her that she has never told anyone, not even herself. However, the key is recovered, and so is her name. She will once again live with this name—this is her name, and there is no other.
As a whole, in this short story collection, Murakami, as always, quietly dismantles the fence between reality and the supernatural, or between this world and the other world. He still circles above the subconscious realm like an eagle, searching for deeper, darker depths, and still tries to extract soul messages and human subtleties from the ordinary secular life.