A wind up hero －ねじまき英雄－

If only life were like a Haruki Murakami novel.  You would simply live your life, doing relatively ordinary things: making pasta, listening to classical music and taking precise care over mundane tasks such as vacuuming the house.  Then a series of beautiful women would enter your life, or in some cases your mind, and force you to take your clothes off with them in a variety of interesting ways.  You would at the same time have some problem you had to overcome, such as a sinister and powerful figure trying to crush you.  You would be tempted by lots of easy ways out and chances to back down.  All you would have to do was to bear the difficulties, clinging stubbornly to your principles like a barnacle to the hull of a ship.  And in the end you would endure long enough to see the problem wash over you and let you go.

I am reading Haruki Murakami’s novel, “The wind up bird chronicles,” at the moment.  I read it once before many years ago.  I enjoyed it the first time and I am enjoying it again.

But it really struck me this time how passive the central character, Toru Okada, is.  As I summarised above, he is really just an ordinary guy.  If there is anything special about him, it is his meticulousness and his ability to endure.  He is extremely precise in all small details.  He doesn’t just whip up some pasta with little thought.  He boils it for exactly the right amount of time to have the ideal texture, even when he is cooking only for himself.  And he will calmly deal with any physical or psychological hardships that you throw his way, such as abandoning him for several days down the bottom of a deep well.

I find that this is true of most of Murakami’s central characters.  They are not active, or especially clever, or charming.  They are meticulous in all small details.  And they endure.  As a form of male hero, it is the exact opposite of James Bond.  James Bond triumphs because he is charming, intelligent and always ready for action.  Having said that, one point of similarity is that both James Bond and Toru Okada drink a lot of alcohol and sleep with a lot of women before the end of the adventure.  They are fantasy heroes after all.

People often say that Murakami’s writing style is very Western.  In some ways that is true, but there is also something very Japanese in the mindset of his characters.  To me, they embody the idea of “gaman”, or endurance in Japanese.  Putting up with individual difficulties, often in order to avoid inconveniencing the larger group, is stressed much more in Japan than in the West.

I think I have missed my chance to become James Bond.  It would take too much hard work.  But I could take time to make the perfect pasta, or more likely for me, the perfect curry and rice.  And I can sit quietly and not complain when things are difficult.  That brings me half way to being a Murakami hero.  All I need now is a knowledge of classical music and a string of beautiful women... 

Vocabulary:

mundane – ordinary; unexceptional or boring

to vacuum – to suck up dirt, dust etc. using a vacuum cleaner

sinister – seeming bad or evil

to back down – to withdraw after initially putting forward a claim, opinion etc.  For example: At first the company demanded compensation but they backed down when the other side hired a lawyer.

to bear – to put up with or endure

to cling – to hold tightly

a barnacle – a sea creature with a hard shell which often attaches itself tightly to rocks or the bottom of ships etc.

the hull of a ship – the outer part of a ship

meticulousness – the habit of taking precise care over small details; thoroughness

to whip something up – to prepare something, such as a dish of food, quickly and with little preparation

one’s mindset – the established set of ideas and principles someone has; one’s way of thinking

to embody – to be a strong example of; to physically represent