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

Week Two in Murakami Fest 2023. The next chapter is a bit more substantial, as suggested by the longer title “Going to Crete from Mykonos / The Bathtub Battle / The Light and Dark of the Route 101 Booze Bus” (ミコノスからクレタ島に行く・バスタブをめぐる攻防・酒盛りバス101号の光と影).

It’s just after Easter in Athens. Prime Minister Nakasone is meeting with Reagan. There’s 137 yen to the dollar. Murakami watches Platoon in a movie theater. They head back to Mykonos and stay with Vangelis again, who is glad to see the Murakamis and thrilled that they brought shoes for his grandchild.

Unfortunately, the weather, which was beautiful and perhaps unseasonably warm in Athens, has gotten cold, so they can’t take advantage of the beaches. They are even unable to escape to Crete: The wind grounds planes for the next few days, necessitating a frustrating back and forth between the airport and the hotel due to the lack of information readily available about when the next flight will leave. On the fourth day they finally make it out.

The hotel in Crete is under construction, so unfortunately the bathtub they went out of their way to ensure they would have is rendered useless: There’s no hot water until their final day at the hotel. Murakami goes through a long description of his conversation with the hotel worker and the delays.

While there, they take a bus to the beach where backpackers are kind of wandering around since it’s too cold to actually swim. The bus ride back, however, is eventful. The driver and conductor make a stops at two small villages, acquiring a large bottle of wine and a wheel of cheese. A Greek woman asks the driver if he’s been drinking. He laughs and says he’s been drinking water before encouraging the woman to try some wine. It isn’t long before the conductor is wielding a sharp knife on the bumpy road, distributing cheese and wine to the passengers. Murakami says it’s the best wine and cheese he’s had on the trip, and fortunately they make it to their destination without any issue.

But this isn’t the only encounter with Bus 101. They happen to ride with the same driver, different conductor, a couple days later:

So, the premonition I’d had at the time about the Route 101 party bus ended up being right on the money. While the bus was running, the luggage compartment opened—the conductor hadn’t shut it securely—and two pieces of passenger luggage inside tumbled out onto the road. The bus was going around 100 km/h, and neither the driver nor the conductor realized they’d fallen out, but luckily a backpacker sitting in the back row noticed and yelled out and the bus managed to stop. Then we backed up to collect the fallen luggage. This is probably when I should write “Well that’s nice” or something, but it actually wasn’t nice at all. That’s because those two pieces of luggage were both our luggage. One was a large Millet backpack I carried and the other was my wife’s nylon bag. We got out of the bus to inspect the damage, and the Millet had a hole in it from where it had hit the ground. Of course, I complained to the conductor, but would my complaints result in anything? Of course not. Language would just fruitlessly move the air around. They could barely understand English. There wasn’t anything I could do, so I showed the conductor the hole in the backpack. And then using my body language, here’s what I told him: What the hell are you going to do about this? Look at this hole. The conductor shrugged and spread out his hands. Then he pointed to the door. Look, the door opened up. Come on, man, you don’t have to tell me that. It’s your fault that it opened. You do understand that it’s your fault, I yelled in English and French and Japanese. (When I get angry people can understand my Japanese.) But no matter what I did it was a waste of time. It was like asking an Irish elk I’d run into on the road for directions in Spanish. “Excuse me, Mr. Elk. Where’s the entrance to the forest?” Everything I did and said would be useless. Asking the elk for directions in the first place was a mistake. I wanted to say something but just inhaled and let it out the breath. I shook my head in vain. The conductor shook his head in the same way. Then he patted me on the shoulder as if to say, what a disaster.

さて宴会バス101号についてのそのときの僕の不吉な予感も、また見事に的中した。バスが走っている最中にバスの荷物室の蓋が開いて―車掌が蓋をきちんと閉めなかったのだ―中に入れてあった乗客の荷物がふたつ道路にころげ落ちてしまった。バスは百キロくらいのスピードを出していて、荷物が落ちたことには運転手も車掌も気が付かなかったのだが、幸いなことに一番後ろの席に座っていたバックパッカーがそれに気づいて大声を上げ、なんんとかバスは停車した。そしてバックして落ちた荷物を回収した。まあ、良かった……というべきところだが、実はあまり良くない。何故ならその二つの荷物というのは二つとも我々の荷物だったからだ。ひとつは僕がかついでいるミレの大型のバックパック、もう一つは女房の持っているナイロンのバッグ。バスから降りて調べてみると、ミレのバックパックの方は路面に叩きつけられて見事に穴があいている。もちろん僕は車掌に文句を言うけれど、文句を言ってそれで何かの結論に到達するだろうか？もちろんしない。言語が虚しく空間を行き来するだけである。英語は殆ど通じない。しかたないから僕は車掌にバックパックに開いた穴を見せる。そしてボディー・ランゲージでこう言う。どうするんだよ、穴開いたんだぞ。車掌は肩をすくめ、両手を広げる。そして扉を指差す。ここ、開いてたんだ。おいおい、そんなこと言われなくったってわかってんだよ、だから、それお前のせいだろうが。わかるか、それお前のせいなんだ、と僕は英語とフランス語と日本語で叫ぶ（はらがたっているときには結構日本語が通じるのだ）。でも何をしたところで時間の無駄なのだ。道で出会ったオオツノジカに向かってスペイン語で道を尋ねているのと同じなのだ。「すみませんが、オオツノジカさん、森の出口はどちらでしょうか？」何をしても何を言っても無駄なのだ。オオツノジカに道を訊くほうが間違っているのだ。僕は何かを言おうと思って吸い込んだ息をそのまま吐き出す。そして虚しく頭を振る。車掌も同じように頭を振る。そして僕の肩をとんとんと叩く。まったく災難だったね、というように。
(262-263)

This is the “shadow” from the title of the chapter. A bit of a long and winding chapter but very entertaining. It’s always a pleasure to be on the road with Murakami.