I’ve finally caught my breath after a crazy first third of the year, so I’ve had a moment to get back to my project of reading Murakami’s travel memoir. I now have an index page and am slowly going back through the chapters I didn’t take an excerpt from. So check out the previous entries to get some context. This post is from the beginning of the trip, so not too much context is needed.
When Murakami first arrives in Europe, he’s exhausted. When I wrote about the chapter after this, I mentioned that he personifies this exhaustion in the form of two bees buzzing around in his head, but I didn’t take a passage from this specific chapter, perhaps because the chapter, titled “Giorgio and Carlo, the Bees – October 4, 1986” (蜂のジョルジョと蜂のカルロ 1986年10月4日), is mostly Murakami spinning his wheels. He even tells readers directly that they should skip on to the next section if they aren’t interested in reading about his exhaustion:
…他人の疲弊になんかまったく興味ないという方は、とばして読んでいただきたいと思う。(28)
…for anyone with zero interest in someone’s exhaustion, I’d like you to skip and read ahead.
I do wonder if this exhaustion is partially just because of his long trip from Japan:
そんなこんなで、僕はすごく歳を取ってしまったような気がする。昨日は女房の誕生日だった。彼女の誕生日に我々は日本を出てきたのだ。時差の関係で、彼女はとても長い誕生日をもつことがだきた。とてもとても長い三十八回めの誕生日。僕が初めて彼女に会ったのは、僕らが二人ともまだ十八のときだった。十八で、酒を飲めば必ずぐでんぐでんに酔っ払っていた頃。あれから二十年。
でも僕が年をとったように感じるのはその二十年という年月のせいではない。それはジョルジョとカルロのせいなのだ。 (30-31)
With this and that, I feel like I’ve gotten incredibly old. Yesterday was my wife’s birthday. We left Japan on her birthday. Because of the time change, she was able to have a very long birthday. A very, very long thirty-eighth birthday. When I first met her, we were both still just eighteen. Eighteen, the age when you get fall-down drunk anytime you have a drink. Twenty years since that time.
But I don’t feel old because of those twenty years. I feel it because of Giorgio and Carlo.
Clearly he’s jet lagged here. And at the beginning of the chapter, he also notes that he’s on his fourth glass of red wine. Which is maybe why you see the lack of consistency with the kanji (we see both 歳を取る and 年をとる).
So while I’m sure that he’s tired from the writing work in Japan, I think maybe he just traveled half way around the world when air travel was much less convenient, hasn’t had a chance to decompress, is dehydrated, and has put back nearly a full bottle of wine. I’d wager that has something to do with it as well.