The title of this blog comes from a line in Haruki Murakami’s novel Dance Dance Dance and if you’d asked me in 2005, when I started this thing, I would probably have said that Murakami was my favourite living writer. He was certainly the only one whose books I’d automatically buy as soon as they appeared, in hardback, without reference to the reviews. I was a completist, hoovering up his hard-to-find early books, his non-fiction, the various critical works (at one point I considered a name change to Cultural Scentlessness) and then, and then... I’m not sure if I changed or he did, but I realised the hardback of Killing Commendatore had sat on my shelf unread all the way through lockdown and poor old Nobel bridesmaid Haruki-san became one of his own passive anti-heroes, dumped and left alone with his spaghetti and jazz records and cat.

But then, just before Christmas, I needed to buy a last-minute Secret Santa gift and the only useful shop in the vicinity was a branch of Waterstone’s and the gift I chose wasn’t a book and I always feel awkward if I go into a bookshop and buy only non-book things (and if you’re reading this, I suspect you’re the same) and I chanced upon a Murakami I hadn’t noticed before, his non-fiction anthology Novelist As A Vocation. So I bought it. And now I’ve read it.

Two takeaways. One is a quotation:

People who absolutely love school, and feel sad when they can’t go, probably won’t become novelists.

And the other is an anecdote from Murakami’s early writing life (and not that one about the revelation at the baseball game). When he was grappling with his first book, Hear The Wind Sing, he translated it into his decent but imperfect English, thus simplifying the style and sentence structure, and then put it back into Japanese.

Which ties nicely into my two resolutions for the coming year. First, to rationalise all the half-formed story ideas on my hard drive, and prompted by the fact that great many of my friends (here and here and here and here and here) have got their authorial arses in gear in recent months, I’m going to knuckle down and actually write another bloody book. (I mean, Julian Barnes has retired so I guess there’s a vacancy.) And because I’m frequently shamed by the hard grind that my students put in to perfect their English language skills, I need to get my own grasp of French back to some semblance of adequacy. So, let’s begin. From a novel that’s been simmering for the past few years:

La dernière chose que j’ai goûtée, c’était un pigeon.

Let’s see where that takes us. 

PS: Also from the book, the normally apolitical Murakami dips a toe into the murky waters of identity:

I might, at one time, become a twenty-year-old lesbian. Another time I’ll be a thirty-year-old unemployed househusband. I put my feet into the shoes I’m given then, and make my foot size fit those shoes, and then start to act... Basically I just go with the flow. And as long as I’m following that flow I can freely do all sorts of things that are hardly possible. This is indeed one of the main joys of writing novels.

And, possibly a touch of that cultural scentlessness:

...I get the sense that in Japan and Asian countries the “modern” that necessarily precedes the “postmodern” did not, in a precise sense, exist.

Nobody reads this blog any more, so there’s little point in writing this. That said, there would seem to be little point in Blogger telling me that several of my posts have been put behind a warning (akin to those apocryphal ruffles that Victorians supposedly used to cover the shame of piano legs) but this is indeed what they’ve done. 

The problem is, beyond a bland ticking-off that they “contain sensitive content” and may not “adhere to Blogger’s community guidelines” there’s no indication as to what may have given the Blog Gods a fit of the moral vapours. Unless, of course, I realise that a post asking why Lisa Jardine privileges the reading tastes of women over men, and one pondering the extent to which Jade Goody’s stupidity is real are linked by one crucial element: since the posts were written, both Professor Jardine and Ms Goody have died. All that I can infer is that we are no longer permitted to speak ill of the dead* and I’m just waiting for Blogger’s AI to stumble over my Jimmy Savile post.

Incidentally, they also found fault in a third post, in which the only potential offence I can deduce is the contention that Haruki Murakami’s first book isn’t terribly good. And since pretty much the only person who gets offended by that sort of thing any more is, uh, me, I’m not sure what the problem is.

*Of course, I have to bring up Bette Davis’s line: “You should never say bad things about the dead, only good. Joan Crawford is dead? Good.”

I’ve long admired Samuel Beckett’s exasperated response to overreaching critics, that if he’d really meant his play to be about God he would have called it Waiting for God. Haruki Murakami (who, as I usually point out at moments like this, bequeathed the title of this blog) is inevitably more polite, but he comes from pretty much the same place:

I’ve had a number of opportunities to discuss my work with college students in their classes, and the students always seem to end up confused, because they can’t find the theme or the point of my stories. But that doesn’t bother me at all.

Apparently Blogger is enforcing its new interface from tomorrow and I can’t get it to work on my venerable laptop so there may be a bit of a hiatus. To keep you nourished in the meantime, here’s a first attempt at a 21st-century canon of literary fiction. Will such a concept (in fact, either concept, lit fic and/or the canon) survive to the 22nd?

(Incidentally, Murakami’s in there, which ties things up quite neatly.)

Will Self on Kazuo Ishiguro winning the Nobel Prize:

“He’s a fairly good writer and surely doesn’t deserve the dread ossification and disregard that garnishes such laurels.”

It finally struck him: he was far from Japan, in another country. No matter where he was, he almost always ate alone, so that didn’t particularly bother him. But here he wasn’t simply alone. He was alone in two senses of the word. He was also a foreigner, the people speaking a language he couldn’t understand. It was a different sense of isolation from what he normally felt in Japan.

Tamaru was silent again for a moment, and then spoke. “Have you heard about the final tests given to candidates to become interrogators for Stalin’s secret police?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“A candidate would be put in a square room. The only thing in the room is an ordinary small wooden chair. And the interrogator’s boss gives him an order. He says, ‘Get this chair to confess and write up a report on it. Until you do this, you can’t leave this room...’”
“So what kind of confession did the interrogator candidates extract from the chairs?”
“That is a question definitely worth considering,” Tamaru said. “Sort of like a Zen koan.”
“Stalinist Zen,” Aomame said.
After a short pause, Tamaru hung up.

(Via Buzzfeed. The Kafka earrings are pretty cool too.)

BIRD ARCHITECTS - CULTURAL SNOW

Bird Architects | Myspace Music Videos

I’ve been reading A Wild Haruki Chase, a collection of pieces about Haruki Murakami, written mainly by those tasked with the translation of his works into other languages. It’s a mixed bag; some of the pieces are witty and perceptive; others are as clunky and pedestrian as those stock essays you can lift from the internet (the Russian contribution is especially bad). It’s inevitable, given that most of the pieces were written in Japanese by non-native Japanese speakers, then translated into English by native Japanese speakers, that some stylistic nuances are bound to disappear. But a question arises: if you’re translating something that’s badly written in the first place, do you have an obligation to convey that badly-writtenness in the new version?

In one of the better chapters, academic and critic Inuhiko Yomota points out that Murakami’s initial success on the international market came because he was one of the first Japanese authors who transcended Western notions of what Japan was – until the late 1980s/early 1990s, a hodgepodge of samurai, geishas, kamikaze pilots and yakuza. Given a name-change or two, his jazz-loving, spaghetti-eating protagonists could just as easily have been Danish or Polish.

But then, argues Yomota, just as Murakami’s global success began to build, our image of Japan began to change, and Murakami’s Japan became ours; to gaijin readers, his characters acquired a Japaneseness they had previously lacked, because Japan no longer equated samurai or geisha. Which opens up all sorts of chicken-and-egg arguments about stereotypes and perception and reality that I don’t have time for right now, but I would just like to highlight Yomota’s phrase for the transnational accessibility of Murakami’s world: “cultural scentlessness”.

In case you've missed (or avoided) my previous ramblings on the subject, the name of this blog is a quotation from the Japanese author Haruki Murakami, whose latest book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running has recently made its way to the tottering pile at my pillowside. As the title suggests, it's the author's thoughts on distance running, a pastime that he took up in 1982; not coincidentally, also the year that he became a full-time writer.

At first the link between job and hobby was a purely pragmatic one, to the point of banality: he gave up his job as owner/manager of a jazz bar to write, and running was the simplest way to keep his weight down in his newly sedentary occupation. But at some point, the connection became deeper:

In the novelist's profession, as far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as winning or losing. Maybe numbers of copies sold, awards won, and critics' praise serve as outward standards for accomplishment in literature, but none of them really matter. What's crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you've set for yourself. Failure to reach that bar is not something you can easily explain away. When it comes to other people, you can always come up with a reasonable explanation, but you can't fool yourself. In this sense, writing novels and running full marathons are very much alike. Basically a writer has a quiet, inner motivation, and doesn't seek validation in the outwardly visible.

Now, this strikes me as a little disingenuous. After all, Murakami is in a small minority of published authors, in that he can make a comfortable living from book sales alone; no more wiping tables and rolling drunks to the sound of 'Autumn Leaves'. And, speaking as a published author who certainly can't retire on his royalties, critics' praise is always an issue, if only to offer a distraction from the lack of cash. Maybe it shouldn't be, but it is.

Which is as good a moment as any to offer up the results of a recent, despondent self-Google. First, a mention in The Independent of a biography of the doomed R&B princess Aaliyah. Laurence Phelan describes it as:

...sugary and a bit tacky.

Which is probably fair enough. Over at Amazon, one David Navarrete describes my tome about one-joke gitpunks Blink 182 thus:

This was a present for my sister, in Chile, she said that is a berry god book, I dont know realy because i'm living in spain right now.

The only response to which is a recent, anonymous addition to my Wikipedia page:

From 1999 to 2001 he was the editor of Guinness World Records during which time its emphasis became markedly more light-hearted.

I'm not sure about you, but I need a break after that lot. Here's Creedence Clearwater Revival, for no reason other than Murakami's fondness for them as running music. (He uses a MiniDisc, which is endearingly perverse.)



Of course, not all of my writing is done for money, or even for critical praise. There's blogging, for a start. Now, I certainly don't "seek validation in the outwardly visible" when I slam down my thoughts here. (While we're in this quadrant, do check out Merlin Mann at 43 Folders on why just slamming down thoughts is a no-no: "Blog posts are written, not defecated," he says, which made me smile. Thanks to Dr Ian for the tip.)

But not even blogging exists in a vacuum. I've never understood bloggers who disable the comments facility. Patroclus got it right when she called blogging a conversation: if you want to get more poncy and theoretical than that, you can always pull Roland Barthes out from under the laundry van and get him to explain his "multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash". The point is that writing may well be a solitary activity, but it usually needs to brush up against other people for it to have value; a fresh pair of reading eyes can be transformative.

Incidentally, the same applies to running, although some of you may remember some of the humiliations I've endured while bashing the tarmac, so I'm not going to pontificate too much on that subject. Even if Murakami is only aiming for a self-imposed target as he notches up yet another 26.2 miles, the simple presence of other participants can only affect his thinking, and thus his performance. At one point in the book he describes a run from Athens to Marathon, accompanied only by a support van, which makes for an utterly different experience from the bustle of a big race. After all, his final dedication is "to all the runners I've encountered on the road - those I've passed, and those who've passed me."

Go on. Treat yourselves to a lap of honour.

One of the dangers of modern media is that it encourages us to hold value judgements about people - the sort of thing we'd ordinarily develop from actual, meatspace interaction - on very limited and possibly spurious information. A single, unsourced one-liner on Holy Moly is enough to classify someone as hero or villain, genius or dolt, Madonna or Katona. We feel we know these people; we feel entitled to hold opinions, not about what they do or say, but what they're like.

A couple of years ago, I made some catty remarks about sometime Waterstone's buyer Scott Pack; subsequently I revised those because: a) his blog is quite good; and b) he's a serious Murakami fan.

Is the revision any less shallow than my initial prejudices, based as they were on a purist, kneejerk revulsion regarding the power of vast bookshop chains? (Which I can't really maintain without hypocrisy if they're kind enough to sell books that I write. That said, though, I'll just note that Waterstone's is currently doing a promotion on "Books you know you should read"; when they offer a similar selection of "Books you know you shouldn't read", I'll pay more serious attention to their recommendations, thanks.)

And how far can I take the if-he-likes-Murakami-he-must-be-a-good-chap meme? Especially when I discover that Alastair bloody Campbell is a Haruki junkie as well.

Lost in the supermarket, something catches my eye and imagination: the Chicken Soup for the Soul stable of 'inspirational' books (that shifts millions of units a year although nobody you know will ever admit to ever having bought one) has diversified into, uh, pet food.

A few thoughts trickle through: the old-school literati complaint about retailers 'selling books like baked beans'; wondering whether, say, Paulo Coelho is furious at having missed a trick; but above all, the idiocy of punters who react with Pavlovian inevitability to the clicked fingers of the brandmeister. I like the books with their inanely heartwarming platitudes: therefore my cat will enjoy the food, with its bits of reconstituted chicken.

And then I read about the 2009 Murakami diary and I'm horrified at the depths to which the publishing industry has fallen, and at the same time, y'know, I kinda wouldn't mind one...

Haruki Murakami (the author who gave this blog its name) has a new book due out in August, but this one isn't about mysterious girls offering manual relief to shy jazz musicians while spaghetti falls from the sky and a cat watches. Instead, it's an extended meditation on his chosen profession (writing, often about the previously mentioned spaghetti, handjobs, etc) and the relationship it has with his preferred pastime (distance running, specifically marathons).

In this extract, he describes his preparation for the 2005 New York Marathon, and his experience of the race itself:

An understated, rainy-day-sneakers sort of conclusion. An anticlimax, if you will. Turn it into a screenplay, and the Hollywood producer would just glance at the last page and toss it back.

Which gives some sort of validation to my dislike of fiction that offers too neat a closure, and also explains why I love Murakami so much. Life isn't bound by a Robert McKee-ordained three-act structure; it's not designed to fit bloody narrative arcs. So why should fiction - if it has any relation to life - have to follow those rules? Murakami doesn't. Long may he, um, run.

PS: Ariel Leve on a similar theme in the Sunday Times.

So there was this e-mail from Amazon, single-breasted slayer of high street bookshops, informing me that "...customers who have purchased or rated books by Haruki Murakami have also purchased A Boy from Nowhere: v. 1 by David Mitchell."

That's fast work by the boy Mitchell, I thought. It doesn't seem so long ago that I was reviewing his last tome, Black Swan Green.

So, what's this one about?

"This is my story - an account of my life which began in the backstreets of the east end docklands and took me eventually through all kinds of experiences and adventures and raised me to a level that many years ago I thought would be impossible. It is a book that should be read by every young man or girl who comes from a disadvantaged background, as i did, but who still maintains a burning ambition to get on in this world of ours. There is little you cannot achieve provided you have the will and the determination to see things through to the very end."

Ah. I think they've mixed up this chap with the other, Booker-nominated and very definitely Murakami-influenced fellow. Although...

And this is where that whole postmodern, metafictional, let's-play-with-the-notion-of-authorship, every-writer's-entitled-to-a-Pierre-Menard-moment, bloody-Nabokov-got-away-with-it thing tips over into absurdity with a smidgeon of paranoia. Because I couldn't shake off the notion that this memoir might actually be an arch, literary jape by the other David Mitchell. There was something about the blurb on the publisher's website that just seemed too authory to be real:

"Leaving school at 14, as most working class lads did then, and without any educational qualifications the story plots his fight to gain success against all odds and tells how he rose to become UK Director responsible for the sale and distribution of all Czechoslovak confectionery products; this brought him into close contact with the communist world, with spies, and explains how and why he assisted MI6."

I think it's the reference to Czechoslovak confectionery products that does it for me. That's just too good to be real. And the problem with feelings like this is, even if I were to read A Boy from Nowhere, even if I were to meet its author, Mr Mitchell, even if I were to see the MI6 files that detailed the microfilms he secreted among the shipment of Curly-Wurlys from Bratislava (I'm guessing that bit), I'd still have the nagging instinct that the book was fiction, that this was all some benevolent con-trick, and that David Mitchell would whip off his latex mask and be replaced by, uh, the other David Mitchell. Or even the other other David Mitchell, the "...and Webb" one. Or maybe Murakami or Borges or Nabokov, or even Patrick McGoohan.

Poor Mr Mitchell (the confectionery one, that is). He's found himself embroiled in a web of intrigue and confusion that will make his dealings with MI6 seem positively humdrum.

After Dark, by Haruki Murakami (Harvill Secker, 2007)

You know, sometimes I think it's almost pointless to write about Haruki Murakami. You either get him or you don't, but it's just as laudable not to get him. From the blogroll, I know that Dr Hocking has tried to love him, but remains unconvinced; Scott Pack is pretty much a Haruki groupie. Amylola is even planning to teach his stuff next semester, which I suspect is just asking for trouble. Me? Well, I did borrow the title of this blog from one of his books. (I understand that Thom Yorke's a fanboy as well, but he doesn't return my calls.)

You see, Murakami bypasses normal critical criteria. For a start, there's the problem with any translated text. How can you address a writer's style when what you're really looking at is the craft of some intermediary (in this case, Jay Rubin)? Instead, everything's about the world he creates. Murakami (or his stooge) offers an engaging mix of deadpan humour, meandering description that seems to follow an almost musical logic (he's a big jazz fan) and occasional flashes of tender sadness and/or excruciating violence. He writes about loners, but loners who are at worst disgruntled, rather than tortured souls. He also seems to have a thing for pretty, damaged girls who won't go all the way, but don't mind giving you a hand.

However, there's no manual relief this time round. Indeed, After Dark seems to offer a few new departures for Murakami. It's written in the present tense; there's no one main protagonist; the action all takes place within the space of a few hours. It's by far the most filmable of his books, controlled cuts between scenes replacing the improvisational detours of his longer works. There are references to Godard, specifically Alphaville, and much of J-LG's loping cool is present, but I also thought of Wenders's Wings of Desire. We join Murakami in his role as observer of the city, and we can almost feel his feathers brush against our face, but we're not asked to join in.

But alongside these new departures, he offers up some of the familiar riffs, like a musician who wants to plug his new album, but knows the punters have come for the familiar lollipops. There's Takahashi, a gawky young man, a lover of jazz and toast, who makes a hamfisted attempt at wooing Mari, a self-contained young woman bearing a mysterious sadness. His name suggests an earlier story of trombones and outsiders, 'Tony Takitani', in last year's Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman and also, interestingly, the first of Murakami's works to be filmed. But would Murakami ever be that obvious?

Then there are odd interludes somewhere on the border between dream sequence and magic realism, with reader and subject (a beautiful girl in a deep, deep sleep) and a faceless attendant, moving from one side of a TV screen to another. There's violence (although nothing to match the horrific torture sequence in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle); there's lots of jazz in the background; there's the exquisite lostness of Tokyo after the last train has left.

And best of all, there's no user-friendly resolution. Loose ends remain defiantly loose. We know who perpetrates the violence, but not why; nor why the beautiful girl sleeps. Retribution is threatened, but we don't know if it's carried out. Takahashi promises to write to Mari, but we never find out if he does. A cellphone lies in the chiller cabinet of a 7-11. It rings a few times, to be answered by the wrong person. But nobody takes it out of the fridge.

If you like Murakami, you'll like After Dark. If you don't, you won't. If you don't know, you may never find out. But if you don't read a book, is it, like the cellphone, still there?

Japanese couples are so keen to have Western-style weddings, local gaijin can make ready cash by pretending to be Christian priests. Which either follows the God-is-dead drift of this excellent article about The New Atheism in, of all publications, Wired, the Bible of all things geekoid; or offers an oblique commentary on the tragic, but at the same time terribly amusing tale of Pastor Ted Haggard and his drugs and massage (unconsumed and unconsummated, respectively); or suggests that Tokyo-based expats are so impoverished and/or shameless, they'll do half-arsed impressions of Derek Nimmo for a bowl of ramen.

Elsewhere: I offer a bit of PR advice to Al Quaeda; supposedly conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan calls Donald Rumsfeld an "incompetent maniac" and hopes that the Republicans are crucified in the midterms; and I also noticed the following quotation from William Burroughs on Treespotter's excellent blog:

"I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it. My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits."

Which I hadn't heard before, despite having spent many happy hours comparing Radiohead's 'Fitter Happier' to the cut-up texts of Burroughs and Bryon Gysin. It's somewhere between Swift's dictum on "the animal called Man", and Sturgeon's Revelation ("90% of everything is crud").

Tomorrow I'm off to Manila, to cover the annual envelope harvest, and I may be out of contact on Wednesday, which is the first anniversary of Cultural Snow. So, a couple of days early, here's that first post again.

"Welcome to Cultural Snow
In analogue times, people who were slightly drunk and at a loose end might begin writing bad poetry, or stand on a soapbox at Hyde Park Corner, or just phone the speaking clock and scream obscenities at it. In a similar, but defiantly digital mode, I've started a blog. What's it for? Where's it going? Will it change the world, or will it degenerate, like 97% of all known blogs, into tired harrumphing over the rights and/or wrongs of the Iraq War. I really have no idea, but maybe that Polish vodka does.

It's a bit like taking a pencil for a walk, that pastime beloved of well-meaning art teachers confronted by incompetent six-year-olds, but it's a long time since I wielded a pencil in anger. I took a dog for a walk this evening, however. Will that do?

A hint, though, to where this might all be going; the title, 'Cultural Snow' is a reference to the work of the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. I'm too lazy to track down the exact quotation in full, but I'm pretty sure it's from the novel Dance Dance Dance. So maybe you can expect occasional references to Murakami to crop up in future postings. Or maybe not.

I'm going to get a bit more of that Polish vodka from the fridge. Will be in touch. Soon. Unless the vodka beats me to it."

Note that I had yet to work out how to insert pictures or create links. And wot, no poncy invocations of Baudrillard?