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.