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.