by Manuel Gonzales

Haruki Murakami

Hemingway and Fellini both espoused the idea that the writer, the creator, should know the story, know it well and completely -- every thought, every action, the way it begins, the way it ends, down to the last and final minor detail -- the writer should know all these things, but that the writer should never tell the whole story. As readers, we should not always know everything that happens, or why. The hows, the whys, the wheres, the whats -- leave these trappings to journalism, dailies, weeklies, news, life. Fiction requires mystery, questions unanswered, thoughts unheard, actions unseen. What a writer leaves out of a story is as poignant as those details left in, and it is a good and powerful writer who knows what should be guarded and what should be revealed.

Everything I had heard about Haruki Murakami's work led me to the conclusion that he would be this kind of good writer, if possibly too extreme -- leaving out too much information, throwing us too blindly into a confusing and unintelligible sortie. I was anxious to test the murk of the Murakami waters with South of the Border, West of the Sun, and found a strong first few paragraphs and a narrator who struck me as similar to many of Salman Rushdie's narrators -- light, whimsical, stuttering characters who cannot be trusted for a second. Soon, though, Murakami had buried me in page after page of wasted and, worse yet, dull information. Facts and thoughts and opinions that did not further the story or give me any great insight to the character, Hajime (Japanese, for "beginning" and fitting as this novel seems more like a beginner's), filled every page in long and thoughtful internal monologues.

Hajime is a middle-aged man who owns two jazz bars, leads a successful life with his not unattractive wife and two daughters, and who, in the course of the novel, finds himself unsatisfied with where he is going, where he has gone, and where he came from -- thoughts not unlike those of anyone who is still alive at forty-five. He is an only child, and he quickly and frequently points out that being an only child in Japan causes misery and grief through the school years. He befriends Shimamoto, another only child who is also different because a twisted foot causes her to limp, and together they form a bond that only children can form -- strong until someone moves away. He moves away, loses contact with his friend, lives his life, makes his mistakes, breaks someone's heart, falls into some long, dark misery spanning his twenties, and then meets a girl he likes enough to marry, a girl he cheats on only while she's pregnant and never with any one woman more than once or twice...okay, three times, tops, and by the middle of the novel, he's related all this with exact and unrelenting detail so that soon, the need for action overwhelms the soul, until action occurs and then dies, talked to death by Hajime, the narrator whose mouth spans wide like a river and who talks enough for three dull novels.

But, Murakami cannot be entirely blamed for this tragic over-narration.

He had help, that twister of words and phrases, and foiler of form and style, the translator. When reading any foreign work not written with its native tongue, translation is key. Consider Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate: in Spanish a nice and smartly written novel; in English, nothing more than a breezy and ditzy afternoon read. Garcia Marquez's Hundred Years of Solitude so expertly written and then translated that little is lost between the two versions. Clearly, Philip Gabriel had something to do with the unraveling of narrative style and garbling of clear prose that often has been associated with Murakami, and so to test this theory, I went to the bookstore and scanned a few of his other works. The results: Alfred Birnbaum is an excellent translator who grasps not only the words of the language but the intricacies and subtext of Murakami's plots and characters and the language his characters, his narrators, speak. Philip Gabriel, on the other hand, is not so good. After a quick browse, I picked up Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and was astounded.

Murakami's world, intricately imagined and detailed (but not too detailed), grabs you by your fingertips so that you cannot let go and then emanates a soft warm glow, as if you were dreamreading a unicorn's skull. Set sometime after the War (which war?) and amidst huge information wars and then in some otherworldly existence known as the Town, surrounded by the Wall, dissected by the River, the novel picks you up, tosses you over its shoulder like you're a sack of potatoes, and carries you in a way that you can only see bits of what's happening and only by straining and turning and twisting, looking for the little clues scattered on the ground like paperclips or pieces of bread, a Hansel and Gretel trail that guides you through the incredible and elaborate maze that is Murakami's mind. No one is named -- the narrator is the narrator, the Librarian, the Librarian, the chubby girl in pink, the chubby girl in pink, the old man, the old man, and they are all surrounded by Calcutecs and Semiotecs, and thugs and suits sent by the System and the Factory, two sides of the same coin constantly waging their information wars, one safeguarding, the other stealing. And in the balance hangs the choice for independence or immortality. After the first two chapters, you are in, but those first two (maybe three) chapters you are lost, blindfolded, perhaps, and nothing makes sense and for a second you wonder if maybe the work wasn't really translated, or if it was, perhaps Murakami didn't write sentences, but instead, strings of unrelated, made-up words that do not coincide with anybody's reality. Patience, though, will be well rewarded. The prose is sharp and quick, and the story and characters make as important a statement about independence and the future of mankind as Orwell's 1984. This is a book to be read more than once. It is to be savored, tasted like good wine and good cheese over stale bread. And it was translated by Alfred Birnbaum, and the difference is large.

But what I cannot understand is how Murakami could write such a static, frenetic wholly enjoyable and important novel as Hard-Boiled Wonderland only eight years ago and then publish such a plodding, normal, John Updike-ish novel today. Because, bad translating or not, the story itself is old, has been told and re-told and demonstrates none of the power and ingenuity and talent of Murakami. But flukes do happen, and perhaps South of the Border, West of the Sun is nothing more than just that.

South of the Border, West of the Sun, Haruki Murakami, $22; Hard Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami, $11 paper.