The final week of Murakami Fest 2021! Here are the previous posts:

Year 1: Boobs, The Wind, Baseball, Lederhosen, Eels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year 2: Hotel Lobby Oysters, Condoms, Spinning Around and Around, 街・町, The Town and Its Uncertain Wall, A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year 3: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and Weirs, The Library, Old Dreams, Saying Goodbye, Lastly
Year 4: More Drawers, Phone Calls, Metaphors, Eight-year-olds, dude, Ushikawa, Last Line
Year 5: Jurassic Sapporo, Gerry Mulligan, All Growns Up, Dance, Mountain Climbing
Year 6: Sex With Fat Women, Coffee With the Colonel, The Librarian, Old Man, Watermelons
Year 7: Warmth, Rebirth, Wasteland, Hard-ons, Seventeen, Embrace
Year 8: Pigeon, Edits, Magazines, Awkwardness, Back Issues
Year 9: Water, Snæfellsnes, Cannonball, Distant Drumming
Year 10: Vermonters, Wandering and Belonging, Peter Cat, Sushi Counter, Murakami Fucks First
Year 11: Embers, Escape, Window Seats, The End of the World
Year 12: Distant Drums, Exhaustion, Kiss, Lack of Pretense, Rotemburo
Year 13: Murakami Preparedness, Pacing Norwegian Wood, Character Studies and Murakami’s Financial Situation, Mental Retreat, Writing is Hard
Year 14: Prostitutes and Novelists, Villa Tre Colli and Norwegian Wood, Surge of Death, On the Road to Meta

Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

The next chapter is メータ村 (Meta). Ubi takes the group off the highway and they drive into the mountains through several small villages. It’s Palm Sunday and everyone walking around is holding olive branches. Ubi gives the background on some of the surrounding villages of Peschiera and San Savino. Despite their proximity to Meta, the people there walk differently and have a different worldview, or so Ubi claims. His father is from San Savino, his mother from Meta.

They see the father’s cottage he keeps in San Savnio, animals that he has around, and then they arrive at Meta, meet his mother at the family house and eat. Ubi’s dad comes in and is clearly a drunk; Murakami describes him as having a red nose like Santa Claus.

They head to a bar and meet the brothers, one who works in trade and another as a town council member. Then they go to the mother’s family home, which is made of stone and has a hidden area where the family secreted away an English pilot who crashed nearby during the war. The Nazis actually came to the village looking for the pilot, and when they couldn’t find him, they took away some of the young men (? – Murakami gives it as 若者) from the town.

The chapter is a return to form, for the most part. It does feel a little scattered, which I’ll chalk up to Ubi being scattered himself. Murakami does a nice job with the dialogue, keeping a running joke with Ubi’s catchphrase シンジラレナイ (“Unbelievable!”).

Here’s the closing section which is pretty nicely penned:

Evening approaches, and Meta gets colder and colder. Ubi and his mother and Usako and me and my wife go up to the old town at the top of the mountain. (Batista is wasted and shuts himself away in his hideaway in San Savino.) All we can see are mountains. And here and there in the mountains, small villages like Meta (but with different outlooks on the world and ways of walking) exist, fixed firmly to the mountain surface. A frigid wind whistles between abandoned homes. I can’t believe the German army made it to a place like this. I’m absolutely impressed. The Germans really are a diligent people.

“You see those mountains over there,” Ubi says and points. “When I was little, I thought that was the end of the world. Honestly no one knew anything about what was beyond. No one told me anything. So to me that was the end of the world. And this—Meta—was the center of the world.”

He puts a cigarette in his mouth in the wind and lights it.

“Shinjirarenai (Unbelievable),” he says. And he laughs.

夕方が近くなって、メータ村はますます冷えこんでくる。ウビさんとお母さんとウサコと僕と女房とで、山の頂上にある古い町に上がってみる（バチスタは飲んだくれて例のサン・サヴィーノの隠遁所に引っ込んでしまった）。山しか見えない。そしてその山のあちこちにメータ村と同じような（しかし世界観と歩き方の違う）小さな村々が山肌にしっかりとへばりつくように存在している。冷やかなな風がひゅううっと廃屋のまわりを吹き抜けていく。よくこんなところまでドイツ軍がやってきたものだと思う。まったく感心してしまう。 ドイツ人というのは本当にまめな人類なんだろう。

「あそこに山が見えるでしょう」とウビさんが指していう。「僕が小さい頃、あれが世界の果てだと思っていた。事実誰もあの向こうのことを知らなかった。誰も教えてくれなかった。だから僕にはあれが世界の果てだったんだ。そしてここが、このメータ村が世界の中心だったんだ」

彼は風の中でタバコをくわえ、火をつける。

「シンジラレナイ」と彼は言う。そして笑う。 (236-237)

This appears to be a fortuitous ending to Murakami Fest this year: This is the end of a section, and in the next section it’s spring and the Murakamis are off to Greece. See y’all in 2022!

Week 4 of Murakami Fest Year 14. Previous posts:

Year 1: Boobs, The Wind, Baseball, Lederhosen, Eels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year 2: Hotel Lobby Oysters, Condoms, Spinning Around and Around, 街・町, The Town and Its Uncertain Wall, A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year 3: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and Weirs, The Library, Old Dreams, Saying Goodbye, Lastly
Year 4: More Drawers, Phone Calls, Metaphors, Eight-year-olds, dude, Ushikawa, Last Line
Year 5: Jurassic Sapporo, Gerry Mulligan, All Growns Up, Dance, Mountain Climbing
Year 6: Sex With Fat Women, Coffee With the Colonel, The Librarian, Old Man, Watermelons
Year 7: Warmth, Rebirth, Wasteland, Hard-ons, Seventeen, Embrace
Year 8: Pigeon, Edits, Magazines, Awkwardness, Back Issues
Year 9: Water, Snæfellsnes, Cannonball, Distant Drumming
Year 10: Vermonters, Wandering and Belonging, Peter Cat, Sushi Counter, Murakami Fucks First
Year 11: Embers, Escape, Window Seats, The End of the World
Year 12: Distant Drums, Exhaustion, Kiss, Lack of Pretense, Rotemburo
Year 13: Murakami Preparedness, Pacing Norwegian Wood, Character Studies and Murakami’s Financial Situation, Mental Retreat, Writing is Hard
Year 14: Prostitutes and Novelists, Villa Tre Colli and Norwegian Wood, Surge of Death

Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

The next chapter is “On the Way to Meta – April 1987 (メータ村までの道中　1987年4月).”

The chapter is a profile piece that Murakami attempts to use to characterize Italian culture. He and his wife are driving to the town Meta with Uvi (not sure if this would be the right spelling – the Japanese is ウビ) and Usako, an Italian man and his Japanese wife. Uvi is a bit tightly wound. He spends most of the trip complaining to Murakami about the Italian government (pensions are too expensive, the country is going to collapse) and Italian people (they don’t work hard enough, they cheat the government out of taxes), talking about past romantic conquests, and reminiscing about the time he spent living in Japan while their wives talk in the back seat.

He also finds time to tell a holocaust joke (!) which Murakami kind of laughs off—not a great look, but I think it could be argued that he’s just trying to present Uvi and all his warts to the audience.

To be honest, none of it is very compelling, so I think I may just translate a very brief introduction to the chapter Murakami provides before getting into the core of the content:

ボローニャで『ノルウェイの森』の原稿も渡してしまったし、しばらくのんびりと心と体を休めることにする。すごくいい気持ちである。背中に背負っていた荷物をいっぺんに全部おろしてしまったような気分である。 (219)

After I handed over the manuscript for Norwegian Wood in Bologna, I decide to take it easy and rest my mind and body. It feels incredible. It feels like I completely unloaded everything I was carrying around with me.

It’s nothing special, but it’s an interesting little note and somewhat representative of how Murakami treats the book in general; each chapter is mostly independent, but he’ll sometimes tie them all together through loose narratives at the beginning to give readers a sense of how his writing is going.

This chapter was the group on the road to Meta, so next week we’ll look at what they do once they arrive.

Week 3 of Murakami Fest Year 14. Previous posts:

Year 1: Boobs, The Wind, Baseball, Lederhosen, Eels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year 2: Hotel Lobby Oysters, Condoms, Spinning Around and Around, 街・町, The Town and Its Uncertain Wall, A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year 3: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and Weirs, The Library, Old Dreams, Saying Goodbye, Lastly
Year 4: More Drawers, Phone Calls, Metaphors, Eight-year-olds, dude, Ushikawa, Last Line
Year 5: Jurassic Sapporo, Gerry Mulligan, All Growns Up, Dance, Mountain Climbing
Year 6: Sex With Fat Women, Coffee With the Colonel, The Librarian, Old Man, Watermelons
Year 7: Warmth, Rebirth, Wasteland, Hard-ons, Seventeen, Embrace
Year 8: Pigeon, Edits, Magazines, Awkwardness, Back Issues
Year 9: Water, Snæfellsnes, Cannonball, Distant Drumming
Year 10: Vermonters, Wandering and Belonging, Peter Cat, Sushi Counter, Murakami Fucks First
Year 11: Embers, Escape, Window Seats, The End of the World
Year 12: Distant Drums, Exhaustion, Kiss, Lack of Pretense, Rotemburo
Year 13: Murakami Preparedness, Pacing Norwegian Wood, Character Studies and Murakami’s Financial Situation, Mental Retreat, Writing is Hard
Year 14: Prostitutes and Novelists, Villa Tre Colli and Norwegian Wood

The next chapter “A Small Death at 3:50am (午前三字五十分の小さな死)” is another very short chapter. Murakami introduces the mood he gets into when writing a longer novel—he thinks constantly of death, specifically of avoiding death. He prays almost compulsively for random acts of violence not to happen to him so that he can finish the novel. Not that he expects it to be good, but that it will be a piece of himself. This mindset only happens when he’s writing.

So on March 18, 1987 at 3:50am, he awakes in a cold sweat from a nightmare. Murakami rarely dreams, and he notes this again here. Even if he does dream, he usually forgets it immediately. But this dream feels more real than reality.

He spends a long time describing a gory (but pretty boring) dream about being in a large hangar with decapitated cows. 500 of them, with the heads lined up looking at him and their blood running into rivets, then into a central rivet out of the building out over a cliff into the sea.

Seagulls are flocking, drinking the blood and eating bits of meat, wanting to get in to the building where the bodies of the cows are.

When he wakes up, it’s dark out, and he drinks water and sits in the darkness, wishing he could listen to some music.

The chapter is…fine, I guess. A bit boring compared to the rest of the book where Murakami is looking outward rather than inward. He mentions F. Scott Fitzgerald dying suddenly while still working on The Last Tycoon. And there is a little bit of well imagery. But other than that it’s kind of an unremarkable chapter.

The only interesting detail we have is that this was during the 19-day period when he was working on the second draft of Norwegian Wood from March 7 to March 26. So presumably he was stressed trying to finish up in time.

Here’s the last paragraph, which is somewhat nicely penned:

朝が訪れる前のこの小さな時刻に、僕はそのような死のたかまりを感じる。死のたかまりが遠い海鳴りのように、僕に身体を震わせるのだ。長い小説を書いていると、よくそういうことが起こる。僕は小説を書くことによって、少しずつ生の深みへと降りていく。小さな梯子をつたって、僕は一歩、また一歩下降していく。でもそのようにして生の中心に近づけば近づくほど、僕ははっきりと感じることになる。そのほんのわずか先の暗闇の中で、しもまた同時に激しい高まりを見せていることを。 (218)

In the wee hours before morning breaks, I feel this surge of death. Like the distant roar of the sea, this surge makes me shake. This often happens when I’m writing a long novel. By writing a novel, I slowly plumb the depths of life. I descend a small ladder rung by rung. But the closer I get to the center of life, the more clearly I can sense it: the aggressive surge that death reveals in the same instant in the darkness just in front of me.