It has been over a year since I updated this precious little trove of my ramblings, and somehow I feel like I've cheated the reading world of a few things. It is not that I suddenly ceased having thoughts over the last year; I simply desisted typing them up with a flare of sarcastic panache. I'll spare you my fully ramblomatic thoughts on all that has been going in the past year for some other time--namely the next several days when I'm posting such thoughts--for a thought I had today.
I read. A lot. Fiction books I've read over the last year:
- Emma by Jane Austen
- The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- A laundry list of Star Wars books
- Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger
- The Hunchbak of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- After Dark by Haruki Murakami
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling
- Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
- American Gods by Neil Gaiman
- Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
I've only listed books that a) I hadn't read prior to 2007 and b) readily came to mind while typing up this list. I generally finish a new book in about 3-4 days, over about 10 hours of cumulative reading time. There are more than this list, along with some non-fiction.
I digress, though. This post is entirely about Murakami's After Dark. I finished reading it at about 12:30 this afternoon. I don't know what made me check out the book from the library. I recognized the Murakami's name from somewhere at the time (since, I've come to realize it was from Ananth Panagariya's blogging on applegeeks.com), and the local library had his novel South of the Border, West of the Sun on display.
Murakami is, apparently, hailed as a modern master. I haven't read his other works (I'm reading South of the Border... right now), so I cannot attest to or deny this label. I can understand the praise, however, in that he is a talented writer. He knows how to vary sentence length and select words appropriate to the tone he is trying to capture, often using screenplay-esque sentence fragments ("The Skylark. Big neon sign. Bright seating area visible through the window.") to set up a primarily descriptive chunk of the book. He displays a great range of voice.
What he doesn't do, however, is finish his story. My creative writing teacher from fall quarter intimated that a story, whether it be in a novel, a piece of short fiction, or even a trilogy, does not convey a life story. It only presents something that happened within a specific window of time in a specific place to specific people. The one caveat I add to this is that a story has a conclusion. I'm sure everyone saw something like this in elementary school. Note the final part: resolution.
Murakami weaves a multi-thread narrative up until the final few chapters. He ends the story when daylight comes, so that the entirety of the book takes place, as the title says, "after dark." There's one problem though: it doesn't conclude any of the narratives.
A Chinese prostitute is mugged, and the organized crime group she works for promises to hunt down the assailant.
A damn-she's-fine Japanese girl has been sleeping for two months and gets sucked into a nightmare reality inside her TV.
Said damn-she's-fine Japanese girl's younger sister runs into some guy who plays trombone.
The publisher's summary, found on the front flap of the dust jacket, reads thus:
These "night people" are haunted by secrets and needs that draw them together more powerfully than the differing circumstances that might keep them apart, and it soon becomes clear that Eri's slumber--mysteriously tied to the businessman plagued by the mark of his crime--will either restore or annihilate her.
Okay, fine. Except we never learn how Eri's slumber is tied to the businessman, only that it is. We don't know if it restores or annihilates her. We dont' know what becomes with this businessman. The novel ends (it doesn't resolve or conclude, it just stops): "The night has begun to open up at last. There will be time until the next darkness arrives."
Murakami, "modern master." Let's take a look at the "old" masters: Shakespeare, Dickens, Hugo, Austen. Or the great legends: The Odyssey, The Aeneid. You know what? Shakespeare's plays have a final act. Dickens' novels have a definitive conclusion. Hugo's books finalize the social injustice. Austen's novels resolve the love disputes. The Odyssey doesn't end with Odysseus landing on Ithaca; it ends with him banishing the vulture suitors to his "widowed" wife. The Aeneid doesn't end when Troy falls; it ends when Aeneas kills Turnus--but we know that Virgil didn't finish the poem, 'cause he died.
The masters resolve their loose ends, tie up their conflicts. Murakami is a great writer, but a master he is not. So the fact that he garners such high praise baffles me when you put him next to the standards. Clearly the standards have been lowered or completely schucked aside. Somewhere, we stopped caring about standards, and it leads to a disturbing dissatisfaction with the world. We, as people, crave a complete story. Story is what drives us in everything, even in a day-to-day job, it is the story of tasks assigned and completed, the triumph of providing for a family. When we ignore our deepest desire because someone once told us that there is no end, that is something wrong with the world. We need to seek an end.
I'm usually not so crass as this, but when I boil everything away, all that needs to be said is this: f*@! postmodern literature.
