Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (63 page)

He had never written a word. His major at Waseda University had been theater arts.

"I went home and started a novel."

And in time he finished it. Called
Hear the Wind Sing,
it was published in 1979. The story of the epiphany at the baseball game is one that he has told many of his interviewers. It has the elements of a traditional creation myth—a suddenness of spontaneous combustion, a vastation of utter certainty. But its mystical quality is in keeping with the mood of Murakami's fiction, which often has an ungraspable serenity in the narrative shifts, his characters with one foot in Eden, the other in Japan, their motives enigmatic. The other aspect of this story of inspiration in the bleachers—the downdraft of afflatus, a Diamond Sutra in the baseball sense—is that Murakami believes it.

"The book is—what?—not the best. Then I wrote
Pinball.
And then my first good book,
A Wild Sheep Chase.
After that, I've never stopped. It's my passion. It's my love. I have never had writer's block. I've never wanted to do anything else."

He is Japan's best-known and most widely translated writer. Bursting with health, full of ideas, deeply curious, he is beloved in Japan. Yet he is invisible, never recognized, so he told me; another ghost figure.

The cold day I met him in Tokyo he was wearing blue jeans and a leather jacket, a wool scarf, and leather track shoes. Of medium height, mild by nature, watchful and laconic, he radiated innocence as well as toughness. In a profession notable for its self-doubt, Murakami's belief in himself—the sense of his literary vocation being part mission, part love affair—is one of his most remarkable traits. He is so sure of himself you might mistake his confidence for arrogance, but it is mental toughness, of a kind that helps a person run up and down hills for sixty-five miles without letup, rising the next day to continue a long fictional narrative.

"You've probably already written a chapter today," I said when we met that day. It was ten in the morning.

"Not a whole chapter," Murakami said and smiled. "What do you want to do?"

"Just walk." I had told him once, some time before, in an aside, that I was curious about Japanese implements—cookware, woodworking tools, and knives. The paraphernalia unique to Japanese culture—soba bowls and pots, chisels and carving knives—is still made in Japan.
Strangely shaped saws, highly specific, for shaping cedar boards, for trimming the edges of chests and tansus, are never seen anywhere else. They are the last designs of traditional tools.

Murakami remembered that I'd mentioned this, and reminded me of it. He said some of these things were sold on a particular street. He showed me the street on a map he'd downloaded from the Internet. It was in a file folder with a set of maps that he planned as a long day's tour of alternative Tokyo—underground in every sense.

Examining this material culture pleased him, because the tools were peculiar to Japan and so well made. Murakami denies that his books have any deep meaning, and he has said he stands against interpretation of his texts, yet hovering over his work, and of
Underground
especially, is the notion that Japan has lost its way.

I mentioned this to him as we walked through the park in front of my hotel, skirting Ueno Station.

"We had pride and anxiety during wartime," he said. "Early successes, then defeat. Occupation was hard—U.S. soldiers..."

He waved his hand as though to suggest GIs lounging among the cedars and willows at the edge of Shinobazu Pond, and Americans in fatigues and big boots watching us through sunglasses. The reminder of Japan's surrender was a humiliation, but the graceful way Murakami accepted it put me in mind of Borges, who said, "Defeat has a dignity which noisy victory does not deserve."

Murakami's way of speaking was abrupt and almost telegraphic. He would say something, and interrupt himself, and lapse into silence. His concentrated silences I took to be proof of his confidence rather than shyness. He had few questions. He was almost absent at times, in a shadow of watchful circumspection.

"We admired MacArthur—we still do. He's like a father figure."

"Not many Americans think about him," I said. "He was fired and forgotten."

"He helped us rebuild. And we had to work hard to rebuild. The bombing destroyed so much—especially over there."

He was pointing across a wide busy street towards Kappa Bashi, the street of kitchenware, baskets, lacquerware, knives, strainers, teapots, woodworking tools. He meant the firebombing of Tokyo, which killed more people than the atom bombs. In 1945 Japan was destroyed. Every city except Kyoto had been wrecked. Half the buildings in Tokyo were
reduced to ashes. MacArthur's orders, as supreme commander of the Allied powers, had been "Remake Japan."

Murakami's voice was so uncharacteristically tremulous and aggrieved I did not mention the obvious—that Japan had drawn us into the war with the unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor. But clearly his thinking of the postwar struggle put him in mind of the present mood.

"We're in a state of defeat now," he said. "We were doing very well—making money. You know the story. Cameras, cars, TV sets. The banks were lending money to anyone."

And then it ended. He described how the bursting of the
baburu keizei,
the economic bubble, in 1991 and '92 had left people dazed, and in some cases bankrupt. This period of uncertainty was followed by two events in 1995 that shattered the Japanese notion of itself as solid and immutable: the Kobe earthquake and the gas attack, in January and March. Murakami had been traveling for almost a decade, first in Italy and Greece—a Greek island is the setting for the drama in his novel
Sputnik Sweetheart
—then in the United States, where he taught at Harvard, Princeton, MIT, and Stanford. The shocking news stirred Murakami, who was far away.

"I wanted to come back, to do something for my people," he said. He became somewhat self-conscious saying it, perhaps sensing that it sounded vain. "Not for the country—country is nothing. But Japan's people are its treasure."

We were walking down the wide street through Kappa Bashi, past shops, but not the ones he intended to show me.

"Before '95, to get rich was everything," he said. "And we succeeded, through ingenuity and hard work. We thought that would make us happy." He had an athlete's upright posture, square shoulders and springy step, and he was moving briskly.

"Did it? Make you happy?"

He didn't answer. He spoke, as he walked, at his own speed. It was a Murakami trait: he wouldn't be hurried or interrupted; he always completed his thought. "We thought, 'Money can solve anything at all.'"

We came to a street corner and waited for the signal to cross. For the duration of the crossing he said nothing, but on the other side he picked up where he left off.

"But hard work didn't bring us to a better place. We found that money is not the answer." He fell silent, noticed that I was scribbling
notes, and after a while he resumed. "We had our goals. We achieved them, but the achievement didn't bring us happiness."

"So what are the goals now?" I asked.

"Our goal is still to be happy and proud," he said. "And we're looking for a new goal."

"I always thought of Japanese culture as an unchangeable set of traditions and symbols. Like the Yasukuni Shrine."

The shrine was in my mind because it was controversial (it has been compared to a Nazi monument), because its presence was another victory for the yakuza ("steering Japan backward and to the right," as one observer put it), and because it was mentioned in
Underground,
in a question posed by Murakami to an Aum cultist. "People who believed in the emperor thought that if you died for him your soul would rest in Yasukuni Shrine and find peace," Murakami said. That included enshrined memories of the murderers and rapists of Nanking, the torturers of enemy prisoners of war, the looters of Singapore, the sadists on the Bataan Death March, the suicide bombers of Pearl Harbor, the abductors and debauchers of Korean women, forcing them to be sex slaves for the imperial army, and many others regarded by non-Japanese as war criminals.

"The Yasukuni Shrine is for politicians. They want to show their patriotism," Murakami said when I asked him.

And it was a fact that every prime minister visited the shrine—that repository of the souls of soldiers—in the spring and fall, and on August 15, the anniversary of the Japanese surrender.

"Before 1945 we were militaristic," he said. "After that, we were peace-loving and gentle. But we were the same people. The soldiers who massacred the Chinese in Nanking came home and were peaceful. Let's stop here. Want a cup of coffee?"

The small coffee shop was of traditional Japanese design, all wood paneling and wooden tables and stools. Murakami said he chose it because such mom-and-pop places were disappearing, being forced out of business by the larger, mostly American coffee shop chains. And the coffee was better here too.

"Is this an old place?" I asked.

He said, "Because of the American bombing, every building around here is less than sixty years old."

"Do people hanker for the old days?"

"My mother used to say that Osaka is better now," he said. "That it's a better world now. A more peaceful one than before."

"What do you think?"

"We were given liberty. We were given the capitalist system. You know, we never had a revolution in Japan."

I was also thinking, but did not say: And you were delivered of the notion of conquering Asia and the Pacific, making it part of the Japanese empire. You were saved from that complex fate, and without an empire or an army you were able to concentrate your efforts on becoming prosperous. Murakami might have agreed with that, though he probably would have added: We were A-bombed and humiliated. Which was true.

"You were in college in '68," I said. "That was a time of tremendous student protest. Were you in those demonstrations?"

"I was a rebel at Waseda, yes. American soldiers were here on R and R from Vietnam. We held demonstrations. We occupied the university."

"Are there demonstrations now against the Iraq War?"

"None."

"Because the government discourages them?"

"No. Student apathy, probably."

"But there's repression of a cultural kind in Japan, isn't there?"

He nodded. The coffee had come, served by a little old woman in a blue apron and white mobcap. We were the only people in the shop. And it was easy to scribble notes in my notebook at the wooden table.

"Always the feeling you are watched," he said.

"Did you feel that way—conspicuous?"

"Yes. You have to make up your mind to be different."

"Your father was bookish," I said. "Wasn't that a help to you?"

"My father and I never talked about books. I wanted to escape Kyoto."

"There's this line in a Henry James essay about England where he says that every Englishman is a tight fit in society. Isn't that also true in Japan?"

"It's true here, but it's changing. I rebelled against it."

"How?"

"After college I became nothing. My father was disappointed. I was disappointed. Our relationship soured."

"But you wanted to be a writer."

"No. I had nothing in my mind." He stared at me over the top of his coffee cup. "I was married. I just wanted to listen to music."

That was when he told me about starting his jazz club, and how for years he indulged himself in listening to music—and also reading. And he had married so young, at twenty-two, his parents thought he was lost. He moved to Yoko's house, where he got on well with her father, who was a shopkeeper and made no demands.

"I loved Yoko. That was everything to me."

Murakami made these simple statements with a great deal of feeling, such unexpected intensity that I seemed to get a glimpse of both passion and a deep loneliness that love had relieved.

After that, we plunged into the shops of Kappa Bashi. At a place that sold cutlery he showed me the specialty knives, the cleavers and daggers and buck knives of dark tempered steel, and a long, narrow, sword-like knife for slicing big fish for sashimi. On the walls and in display cases were chisels and saws for shaping blocks of ice.

At another shop, selling lacquerware, I bought a pot in the shape of a big square teapot, for pouring soba broth. This same shop sold platters and trays. None of the knives or lacquer items had any application in Western culture, though they were fundamental to Japanese culture. Trays alone were essential items in everyday life here. They were big and small, plastic, wood, lacquered. In a bank, for example, money was never passed from hand to hand by a clerk, but instead always placed on a tray and presented. There were trays for food, trays for cups or bowls, trays for paper cards, for chopsticks, for shoes, for slippers.

We toured tool shops and examined saws and hammers, kitchenware shops, and basket shops. Some of the designs were ancient, yet they were still sold and used; they had not been displaced by novelties. The Japanese electronic culture of computers and gadgets was probably the most advanced in the world, yet it functioned alongside these old-fashioned tools. In a way, these were holdovers from an older world, a reassuring one.

It was the culture that endured in Namiki Yabu Soba, the noodle restaurant where we went next. The formal welcome, the low bow, the politeness—unexpected courtesies in such a hectic city. And while our table was a novelty, the past existed across the room, where a dozen people sat cross-legged on tatami mats.

"This place looks old."

Murakami smiled grimly. "Postwar. Like everything else."

Murakami took out a picture, part of the folder he had prepared for
our city tour. The panoramic photo showed twenty-five square miles of Tokyo flattened—not just flattened but scorched, burned to the ground.

"This is what the city looked like on the ninth of March, 1945."

A wasteland, just rubble and cinders, one or two blackened buildings still standing, the river coldly gleaming.

"People went there," he said, his finger tracing the river, "but even the river burned. Everything was napalmed."