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, Unbelievable
Year 15: Baseball on TV, Kindness, Murakami in the Asahi Shimbun – 日記から – 1982, The Mythology of 1981, Winning and Losing
Year 16: The Closet Massacre, Booze Bus, Old Shoes, Editing Norwegian Wood, Prophecy
Year 17: Athens Marathon 1987, Infinite Appetites, Black Monday
Mitilini in 2010, via Wikimedia Commons.
In the next chapter, レスボス (Lesbos), Murakami continues his vibes-cation. He’s on Lesbos, as the title suggests, and there isn’t much to do. So they take a taxi outside the main town to see the Museum of Theophilus, a museum dedicated to the Greek folk artist.
Murakami seems impressed with the amateurish paintings and the way Theophilus is able to capture the awkward and frightening and suggestive, but part of the appeal is the moment in which he’s viewing the works. The Murakamis are the only people in the museum on a warm October day during the offseason.
They go to another museum right next door, which seems to be the Museum-Library Stratis Eleftheriadis-Tériade. Murakami describes it as containing works of Picasso, Matisse and others collected by a publisher who lived in Paris, which seems to correspond to Tériade.
They take their time, and when they finish, they head up the hill for a beer. Murakami ends the chapter in a nice way.
We go outside and up the hill a bit, go into the first kafenio we see, and order a cold beer. The beer is so cold it makes my eye sockets rattle. The afternoon is quiet, the light is warm. A tourist pamphlet notes, “Lesbos is known for having the most clear days in all of Greece.” I see a patrol boat heading into the port. A blue and white Greek flag flutters in the wind. Today feels like one of life’s sunny patches.
I wonder if someone could paint our picture. A 38-year-old writer and his wife, far from home. Beer on the table. Life is pretty good. And occasionally there are patches of sun in the afternoon.
外に出て少し丘を上がり、最初にみかけたカフェニオンに入って、冷たいビールを注文する。目の奥が痛くなるくらいよく冷えたビールである。静かな午後、暖かい光。「レスボス島はギリシャでいちばん晴天日の多いことで知られています」と観光パンフレットにはある。パトロール・ボートが港に入ってくるのが見える。青と白のギリシャの旗が風に揺れる。まるで人生の日だまりのような一日。
誰かが僕らの絵を描いてくれないかな、と思う。故郷から遠く離れた三十八歳の作家とその妻。テーブルの上のビール。そこそこの人生。そしてときには午後の日だまり。 (302)
It doesn’t feel as substantive as some of the other writing in the book, but it’s a nice little chapter. I do feel like the chapters have gotten shorter as we pass the midpoint of the book, which makes me wonder whether Murakami was writing these contemporaneously. We know that he kept a journal, so he very well could have written these out after the fact; the book wasn’t published until 1990. If he was writing them contemporaneously, however, it might make sense that we get these short, sparse vignettes rather than the extended travel writing at the beginning of the trip. These are maintenance pieces. Written after he finished literal and figurative marathons.
I think it again highlights exactly how quickly Murakami works. He left on the trip without having started Norwegian Wood, and finished it in less than a year. While traveling and writing (or at least journaling/taking notes) about everything he did while abroad. Say what you will about Murakami, but he’s not a slacker. These chapters, however, do feel a bit vibey and muted, but perhaps that’s what Murakami was going for.