Yoko Ogawa - Revenge

Deciding exactly what Yoko Ogawa’s collection Revenge is in a top-down, definitional fashion does not work particularly well. The collection is subtitled “Eleven Dark Tales,” and that is certainly accurate. But dark is not the most precise of terms, even if it may end up being all that we are left with. Of course, any reader that has held the volume in their hands (but not yet turned its pages) is likely unsure what I am so confused about. True, the blurbs come from varied sources. Hilary Mantel and Junot Diaz, figures of Literature both, serve to somewhat complicate the picture. But the cover quote from Joe Hill and the large-font of Peter Straub’s endorsement seem, at least insofar as marketing is concerned, to seal the deal: this is horror.

Indeed, Revenge does achieve many of the same effects as Horror – but its meaning of achieving them are so different from those used in the Horror genre that, while Horror may be its destination, that leaves the journey unilluminated, and this is very much a work about the journey and the process. To be fair, there are some moments of genuine Horror-style horror. There are murders here and grisly disfigurements. Lurid descriptions of torture, too. For the most part, those moments did not work particularly well for me. They felt like some of the collection’s weakest. The heart of the collection was not those few violent motions but the general picture that it built, the quiet collection of observations and experiences. This is not a book about a grand event that is seen but rather about the process of observing.

 The eleven stories in Revenge are each told by a different first person narrator. Though this is not a mosaic novel – there is no single story that is being crafted throughout – the narrators do encounter one another, and those passing glimpses of another’s pain or catharsis give the reader a powerful reminder of how different those experiences look from outside that character’s head. The effect does not end there. Within the stories themselves, Ogawa is always playing with differences, with what we see of each other. Often, the answer is not much. Near the beginning of the collection’s opening piece, “Afternoon at the Bakery,” Ogawa writes that You could gaze at this perfect picture all day – an afternoon bathed in light and comfort – and perhaps never notice a single detail out of place, or missing (pp. 1-2). From there, the collection becomes a subtle teasing out of what is out of place – and how horrifically off it is – and a reminder of how all pain is hidden in plain sight.

Crowded together in this modern world that we inhabit, it’s easy to think that nothing is hidden anymore. The narrator of “Old Mrs. J.” certainly thinks that. Living in close proximity to innumerable neighbors, he believes that: Just as I could see everything that went on in her apartment, she missed nothing that happened in mine (p. 30). But such surface transparency really serves to hide so much. This can be seen when Mrs. J. is in his apartment. Such encounters are uncomfortable. But, more than that, they show how much we miss. Mrs. J. reads the titles off of the narrator’s bookcase and, even standing right there, “got them all wrong” (p. 28). No matter how clearly we see, the world is not exactly as we perceive it. And that lesson is rammed home at the story’s close, as no one in any of these seemingly transparent, seemingly visible apartment notices the murder in their midst.

Direct, onscreen action is a rarity in Ogawa’s stories. It would remove all the layers of ambiguity and perception that underlie so much of what she is doing here. Rather, the tragedies in these stories are glimpsed out of the corners of our eyes, are talked about or remembered or even just imagined. “Welcome to the Museum of Torture,” my favorite tale in the collection, is composed of the last of those and also serves to tie together and comment upon the collection as a whole. The narrator, questioned by the police about a murder that occurred in one of the other stories, finds the whole procedure exciting. Her boyfriend finds that disgusting. “Do you find it amusing that someone died?” (p. 84) he asks. That’s not an unfair question, really, to ask of readers of Ogawa in particular and of Horror in general, but Ogawa does not simply ask it and wander off.

Pained by her boyfriend’s leaving her for her answer, the narrator enters the nearby Museum of Torture to take her mind off of things. What happens next is not what you think. She is not tied down and brutally tortured. No, she is simply shown through the museum, and the kindly, attentive curator describes the exhibits to her. The interactions between the curator and her are some of the easiest, most connected conversation to be found in the whole collection, and the narrator knows it: “He certainly was interested in what I had to say, unlike my boyfriend” (p. 93). This moment of genuine human interaction occurs amidst pain. None of the torture devices are used onscreen, but each is described, and the narrator and reader imagine their implementation. It is horrific. To give just one example, in the curator’s words: “Next we have this leather strap and those pliers. The victim’s wrist was attached to a table with the strap, and the pliers were used to extract the fingernails. Note the unusually delicate tips of the pliers” (p. 90). Yeesh!

But why wander the halls of the museum of torture? Well, the aforementioned connection is part of it, but it’s not the only part. To start with, it must be admitted that, yes, there is something (horribly) amusing about death. As the curator says, “The desires of the human heart know no reason or rules” (p. 90). But even that is not the whole picture, for to say that we encounter death because we are interested in it is to wholly flip the equation. After all, as the narrator knows, “torture was everywhere” (p. 91). This is confirmed by how, throughout her tour of the museum, the narrator hears of devices that the reader has seen in previous stories, albeit in less extreme contexts. Those encounters, too, were torturous. And if pain is all around us, then our choice is not whether to seek it out because it is amusing or to healthily prevent it. Our choice is whether to acknowledge reality or to pretend.

Ogawa, needless to say, does not pretend. She approaches pain in all its guises, approaches loneliness and vulnerability and murder. Very occasionally, Ogawa does break the slowly woven web with a moment of abrupt violence, or at least the sudden revelation of one. This occurs in “Lab Coats,” where a conversation takes a sudden and drastic shift at its end with the disclosure that one of the participants killed her boyfriend. Though twists like that do shock the reader, they were my least favorite parts of Revenge, because the sudden upset left me less rather than more engaged with the narrator’s perceptions. Thankfully, such sharp turns are rare. Generally, the hurt at the center of each story is only slowly brought out as the narrator tries to go about their life. It comes on stage calmly, gently, until it is, by the end, all that the reader can see or think about.

Though not a speculative fiction author exactly, Ogawa does toy with impossibilities and fantastic metaphors. This can be best seen in “Sewing the Heart,” in which the narrator meets a women with a bizarre defect: her heart is outside of her chest. Just before seeing it for himself, the narrator realizes that he has “never seen a human heart before, and the thought filled me with fear and disgust” (p. 65). The moment of true and very literalized insight into another, though, does not actually leave him disgusted. Rather, he finds it impossibly alluring. He wants to caress her heart. By the end of the story, he wants to possess it. The story, before long, becomes one of the collection’s most troubling. We are too far from one another to ever truly see them, it seems to say, save in the most extraordinary circumstances. But, if we actually could, that might not help matters. It might be only our distance that prevents us from doing even more harm to one another.

No matter how far from each other we may ultimately be, though, writers as skilled as Yoko Ogawa can give us a glimpse behind the curtain of other minds. In the way that it builds and progresses, Revenge is a soft collection filled with pathos. It is also a cutting knife.

Félix J. Palma - The Map of Time

My review of The Map of Time is now up at Strange Horizons. It's not the most positive one I've done, not by a rather long shot. I will, though, be returning to Palma's writing before too long with its sequel, The Map of the Sky, which was sent to me for review by the publisher.

Haruki Murakami - Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

There are things that cannot and should not be explained. (p. 85)

As a longtime reader or two might know, this is not the first time that I've read Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. It was, actually, the first of the Murakami novels I read and, at the time, I knew that I liked it but didn't know what to make of it besides that. Since, and as a result of that first exposure, I've read, reviewed, and loved several of Murakami's novels, and yet, as time went on, it was this one that outlasted them all in my thoughts. About a year after that first read, and several months after the book's in-absentia rise to the position of one of my favorite novels, I reread the book and found it lived up to every one of my expectations. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is Murakami at his best, at his most playful and his most insightful. [A note before we begin: there are SPOILERS aplenty in the following.]

Information is key and king in Hard-Boiled Wonderland's Tokyo, and, from the beginning, the conflict over it is what dominates and threatens the world. Devoted to the preservation of knowledge and its exclusivity we have the system, and the system is the state. (p. 160) Arrayed against them are the factory, dedicated to the breaking of the system's codes and the revealing of its revelations. Our dear protagonist, a member of the system, is drawn into the conflict by a neutral, eccentric and brilliant scientist whose breakthrough discoveries, we're told, could spell the end of the world. (p. 128)

All of this is, as the narrator observes, your classic cops-and-robbers routine, (p. 33) and it's from there that the book's noir comes from for this is as much a crime novel as it is a Science Fiction one, a surreal fantasy, or a work of pure Literature (much as I hate the term applied as a genre) – which is to say, of course, that's it's somehow both not at all and the very exemplar of the form. Of course, Murakami's usual vivid colors are in full force here, as is his floating and flowing surrealism, all of which is obviously antithetical to the orthodox noir of a Hammett or a Goodis. 

That dismissal, though, misses the narrator's endlessly witty and even insightful observations, often, in the very purest tradition of noir, showing the bizarre nature of it all and the narrator's insignificance and even powerlessness before it, albeit always with a special Murakami twist:  I was a leftover wrapped in black plastic and shoved into the cooler. (p. 21) The writing here is a constant toying with intentional absurdity (Walls a toasted off-white, like the muffins I eat for breakfast. (p. 7)) and profundity, blurring and even obliterating the lines between them: There must be as many paths of human fat as there are ways of human death (p. 8) or: Even cast aside, clothes know a permanence that eludes their wearers. (p. 374)

But while the System/Factory conflict drives the first part of the novel, and while it's never really silent, the reader comes to realize that it's the symptom rather than the cause of the problem. Progress is pure, devoid of good or evil intent, but the pursuit of it and the actualization of its fruits are deathly dangerous: It's this pure focus, exclusive of all view to loss or gain, that's seen science achieve such uninterrupted advances. […] [But] the purity of science often hurts many people, just like pure natural phenomena do. (p. 253) Ultimately, the question of its possession by good or evil is irrelevant, for progress and knowledge hold all the potential for our misery and harm: Civilization […] faces serious crises because science is used for evil – or good. (p. 29) 

The promised end of the world does come, or at least the end of a world: Actually speaking, it isn't this world. It's the world in your mind that's going to end. (p. 270) The looming apocalypse does come, but it does so in personal form, the scientifically-caused dissolution of the narrator's mind and soul, leaving him in an inner world of his own consciousness, cut off forever from what we view as reality. 

That brings us to the second of the book's two threads, that entitled The End of the World and taking place entirely within that unreal world created by the scientist's machinations and growing in prominence as the novel progresses. This is a world made up of a single, isolated town, surrounded by a perfect wall, overlooked by a clock tower that has long forfeited its role as a timepiece. (p. 38) It's a world that's the opposite of the outside, one that remains forever unchanged (p. 14) and where absolute peace can be found in mindlessness, motionless existence, for it's our intellect that leads to all the so-beyond-natural ills of the world. As one character in this inner setting says, lay down your mind and a peace come. A peace deeper than anything you have known. (p. 318) 

Murakami does not just allude to this deeper realm and leave us to draw our own conclusions. No, he shows it to us in chapters that alternate with the jagged coolness of the Hard-Boiled Wonderland and could not be more different. As the narrator is more and more submersed into this peace the tale circles absolute stillness and absolute zero, each chapter resplendent with the fading remnants of true awareness and bursting with a languor so brilliantly evoked that the reader's thoughts, too, drift in ever smaller currents, relaxing and weakening as the heartbeat slows and wonder grows. Here, in this world, there is everything and here there is nothing, (p. 385) and it's a perfect nothing. (p. 86)

Murakami doesn't just raise questions. No, as crushing waves of melancholy and an almost agonizing beauty imbue every word of the novel's ending chapters, Murakami's brief but deep epic of thought reaches two successive peaks. The first is the justification of progress and striving, no matter its cost. For the utopia of absence that the End of the World shows us is not only devoid of loss but also of gain, not only misery but also joy: The absence of fighting or hatred or desire also means the opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope. (p. 334) For, as we come to see, Love is a state of mind (p. 334) and cannot exist for those who have no mind. But then comes the so-understandable, so heartbreaking finale to it all. For the narrator, though now fully conscious of the costs, cannot leave behind the peace that he's found. He stays, immersed in the harmony and perfect nothing of that dreamed and conflict-free world.

The level of cool and grandeur, in their corresponding sections, does come at the expense of plot. As the narrator quips at one point, this isn't the kind of thing they show on TV. This drama was a lot more complex and with no discernible plot. (pp. 112-3) While "no discernible plot" really is going a bit too far, it's not far off in terms of effect. Though a lot happens here, none of it is gripping in a roller coaster, plot boiler, gotta find out what happens next kind of way. This is, rather, the kind of book where the narrator can observations and wit power on unhindered through a scene where he may be, say, stabbed in the gut with a knife. While such a distance could certainly leave many a book powerless, though, Murakami effortlessly keeps you engaged with his characters, prose, absurdity, and with the reality of his setting. What's most surprising about the last of those is how real the day to day world of the characters is, no matter how impossible the events within it become. Murakami accomplishes this through a deft weaving of the mundane into the fantastic, having his characters prepare food and live their lives all around the plot and, of course, by utilizing his characteristic barrage of references, which here include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 2011: A Space Odyssey, Turgenev, and Borges, to name just a few.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was written early in Haruki Murakami's career but exemplifies, nonetheless, so many of his strengths. It's true that this is the most out and out genre of the Murakami novels and stories that I've read, but my affinity for it goes deeper than that. The world here is filled with fantastically daring ideas glimpsed from the shadows and approached head on. The writing is filled with, in one section, always dancing wit and, in the other, surreal majesty. The book, throughout, is a entertaining to read, fun from first word to last, and also a work of stunning power and sorrow, a novel that's joyous, poignant, and profound.

Haruki Murakami - 1Q84

"And also," the driver said, facing the mirror, "please remember: things are not what they seem." (p. 9)

1Q84 is the Japanese novelist Haruku Murakami's third novel since 2000, though the word "novel" might be a tad misleading, as it's a trilogy in Japan. Fittingly enough for its three-in-one background, it's a brick of a book. Nonetheless, it's an easy and pleasurable read, Murakami's smooth and sonorous prose floating you through a narrative that, right up until you turn the last page, seems to make perfect sense. When you look back on it, however, all the easy associations you picked up as you read turn out to be rather hollow, the book's meaning something that has to be cobbled together from bits and pieces throughout its massive, lifelike sprawl.

An easy looking thematic starting point seems to be the reference in the title, the contrasts and, of course, similarities between Orwell's so-famous 1984 and this year of 1Q84, this world-with-a-question-mark, as Auomame puts it. But that association's too easy, and Murakami's true intent at once rises above that one-to-one correlation/interpretation and also sidesteps the comparison entirely. As one character says:  Now, in the real year 1984, Big Brother is all too famous, and all too obvious. If Big Brother were to appear before us now, we'd point to him and say, 'Watch out! He's Big Brother!' There's no longer any place for a Big Brother in this real world of ours. Instead, these so-called Little People have come on the scene. Interesting verbal contrast, don't you think? (p. 236) Those Little People are nothing near as concrete as Big Brother and his police force. No, the Little People are something nigh entirely ephemeral, a force of magic and thought that only touches the world, if it does at all, through implication and faith and the most subtle of maneuverings.

In the end, the comparison does, of course, seem valid to some extent, but the despotism shown here is not one of force or even of nation, but rather a despotism of thought and will, of past and intent and even of love. The Sakigake Cult is the clearest example of this. It takes the circuits out of [its member's] brains that make it possible for them to think for themselves. […] It makes life a lot easier. You don't have to think about different things, just shut up and do what your superiors tell you to do. You never have to starve. (pp. 120-1) but while it might be the most obvious example of the intellectual and individual atrophy at the novel's core, it’s the least focused on. Sakigake is mostly a specter in the shadows, an example of how dominating the Little People's manipulations can become so that we may better see and fear them in the rest of the text.

[People] have to move with a purpose, (p. 29) we hear towards the novel's beginning, and it could be said that attempts to find that purpose and carry it through, no matter the circumstances or obstacles, dominate. And the greatest of all barriers seems to be one's birth. Both Auomame and Tengo had parents locked in narrow roles, and each had to escape those roles to try and become who they needed to be. More important than just escape, though, is reconciliation, or at least understanding, of the past. Much of Tengo's storyline is in fact his desire and need to understand his origins and father, to comprehend how half of the genes that made his existence possible could come from this narrow, uneducated man. (p. 176) But while Murakami's adept at Tengo's personal conflict, the ramifications of it do not, of course, end there. No, in 1Q84 the world seems made wholly of an endless battle of contrasting memories, (p. 293) and it seems that the effects and maybe even purpose of life might be the rewriting of those memories and the past.

Love is another thing central to 1Q84, but that's not to say that it's pure. No, the characters need love, but it's often what destroys them, a cruel jailor and torturer that feeds on their flaws and often leaves them destroyed. It's through love, here, or at least love's approximation, that true loneliness is reached, and Murakami proves devastatingly able to hammer those moments home: Ayumi had a great emptiness inside her, like a desert at the edge of the earth. You could try watering it all you wanted, but everything would be sucked down to the bottom of the world, leaving no trace of moisture. No life could take root there. Not even birds would fly over it. […]Though she tried to forget it, the nothingness would visit her periodically – on a lonely rainy afternoon, or at dawn when she woke from a nightmare. What she needed at such times was to be held by someone, anyone. (pp. 368-9) That's where Auomame comes into her role as assassin. She, with few friends and fewer emotional attachments, has become an avenger of sorts, a slayer of those who abuse and destroy the object of their desires.

The one exception to the novel's two categories of emotionless and damaging is the idealized and intangible relationship between Tengo and Auomame, forged from just one moment of true contact many years ago and distinct by virtue of its improbability. Neither character will pollute it with their actions, will actively go out and find the other. If they are too meet again it must be by chance one day, like passing on the street, or getting on the same bus, (p. 190) for only flesh that does not exist will never die, and promises unmade are never broken. (p. 374)

1Q84 is anything but a realist novel. Its flow is a surreal drift. Strict analysis flounders here, the orderly march of cause and effect left behind for a tale as humanly logical as it is absurd. Like After Dard, 1Q84 is not constructed from the oft-contemplated yet depthless impossible but instead from the subtly unthinkable. Murakami's otherworldly agents – his Little People – do not replace our reality but rather alter it. Murakami's is a Tokyo-born Middle Earth made of nothing but an empty sandbox and swings, a mercury-vapor lamp, emitting its sterile light, the spreading branches of a zelkova tree, a locked public toilet, a new six-story condo (only four units of which had lighted windows), a war notice board, a red vending machine with a Coca-Cola logo, an illegally parked old-model green Volkswagen golf, telephone poles and electric lines, and primary-color neon signs in the distance. The usual city noise, the usual lights. (p. 548)

One of the text's key fantastical components is that of dohta and maza (p. 685) and the relationship between them, object and shadow, reality and afterimage, character and alter ego. It's a relationship that characterizes much of the text, for 1Q84 is a story of layers and careful shading, numerous perspectives and recurrences, images and events appearing again and again in slightly altered forms and viewed through drastically different eyes. Even the language comes to play the game, with Murakami often using one word, such as aroused (p. 43/4), twice in the same scene, but in vastly different connotations, with the first nonetheless impacting how we view the second.

Murakami's prose is brilliant and engaging without ever being flashy or openly attention seeking. It's the little things that make it what it is and often the descriptions of the smallest things that stick in your mind the longest. Murakami is an absolute master of similes and metaphors, twisting mundane images into wonderful new configurations, like when a character must fasten [their] feelings to the earth – firmly, like attaching an anchor to a balloon. (p. 185) or like when we're told how Tengo's past lovers had come and gone, like vividly colored birds perching momentarily on a branch before flying off somewhere. (p. 360) Furthermore, Murakami's a supremely playful author, often mercilessly poking fun of his own creations with a wray wit: The large crown of his head formed and abnormally flat bald area with lopsided edges. It was reminiscent of a military heliport that had been made by cutting away the peak of a small, strategically important hill. (p. 330) Not even revelation and life changing events are above such jibes:  At least once in his life [Tengo] had had the perfect erection, and the perfect orgasm. It was like the author of Gone With the Wind. Once you have achieved something so magnificent, you have to be content with it. (p. 727)

Despite all that, 1Q84 is a flawed novel, and a reviewer ever so slightly more concerned with snappy phrasing than accuracy might even say that those problems are half from excess and half from restraint. The first of those can, for the most part, be pinned down to the novel's aforementioned repetition. It's a technique that is, for the most part, effective, but, when used to the extent it is here, serves to further slow down and clog up the works. The repetition does give added insight, but it also serves to stifle any forward momentum the novel might otherwise have accumulated. This, and the novel's length, would both not be an issue if not for the fact that, put plainly, the book simply doesn't have enough significant events, at least not when one compares the number of those to the weight of its minutia and the sum of its page count. Though 1Q84 is more than twice the length of Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, it doesn't feel like it has any more content or depth, just like it's playing its melodies at half speed.

That's not to say, admittedly, that 1Q84 is never a tightly paced, gripping work, just that it almost never is. One of the novel's key set pieces is a long, long time building, but, when it comes in the midst of the second book, is composed of chapter after chapter of almost unbreakable tension, each word exquisitely backed by the weight of our expectations and by the omnipresent feel of imminent revelation. Alas, the novel never again reaches the magic of those chapters, and some of the later significant events actually serve to simply underscore the weightlessness of much of the narrative. The third book introduces a new viewpoint character, a private detective in the employ of Sakigake. His chapters are generally enjoyable, but the moment when he pieces together the connections between Tengo and Auomame is one of the novel's weakest. In the main thrust of the narrative, enraptured by Murakami's prose, the link between the two is delightful and even magical because of its slightness. When uncovered and explained in terms of the detective's supposed logic, however, the connection ends up viewed by the reader's regular, discerning gaze and the link is, when considered in that light, of course ridiculous.

The other contender for the much-coveted prize for the novel's weakest section comes when the reader is finally allowed to glimpse some of the text of Air Chrysalis, the book-within-a-book that first exposes the Little People and that, when rewritten by Tengo, goes on to win prizes and top bestseller lists. Everything from cap-i-tal-izum to peese and for-tress (p. 532) is rendered in the grating, garish, and juvenile manner of an adult doing his ham-handed best to cram a child's perspective down our throats. The main effect, besides conveying boundless immaturity, was making me wonder about the sanity of the judges and reading populace of this alternate reality Tokyo.

I would say that most of my criticisms of logic and pacing, though, wouldn't come as any surprise at all to Murakami. After the publication of Air Chrysalis, Tengo reads several of its reviews, one of which says that: As a story, the work is put together in an exceptionally interesting way and it carries the reader along to the very end, but when it comes to the question of what is an air chrysalis, or who are the Little People, we are left in a pool of mysterious question marks. This may well be the author's intention, but many readers are likely to this lack of clarification as a sign of 'authorial laziness.' (p. 380) This confuses Tengo. He knows that, as a story, Air Chrysalis was fascinating to many people […]. What more did it have to do? (p. 381)

That, really, seems to sum up much of Murakami's philosophy in reading this work and the mindset that must be used to read it. Speaking of life, a character at one point thinks: The warmth and the pain came as a pair, and unless he accepted the pain, he wouldn't feel the warmth. It was a kind of trade-off. (p. 803) 1Q84 is a magical and sprawling work, one resplendent with depth, and also one loaded down with a number of flaws. It's a tapestry of dreams that might just be too delicate to be perfect without being ruined.

Roland Topor - The Tenant

Written in 1964 in French, Roland Topor's The Tenant is a mundane and horrific example of the most depressive strains of horror. As the novel opens, Trelkovsky learns of an apartment just vacated by a suicide. Nominally in order to pay his respects, and really to ascertain if she'll die so he can move in, he visits her in the hospital. Semi-conscious at best, the former tenant opens one eye to see a friend and Trelkovsky, and she responds with an "unbreakable scream." (p. 20) At the time, neither Trelkovsky nor the reader can understand her terror. By the end of the book, both will know all too well, for Topor's world is one where all of humanity is at once utterly absurd and grotesquely terrifying, and there is no escape.

I came to The Tenant, as a fair few others no doubt did, because of Thomas Ligotti. In The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Ligotti discusses Topor as both an outsider and as an exemplar of the "anti-idealist position." (p. 195, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race) As far as those goals go, Topor does not disappoint, and it's easy to see why Ligotti – and the man's fans – found the novel so captivating. That being said, my Ligottian expectations were not perfectly accurate. It's true that, in the end, Topor's bleak vision is one comparable to Ligotti's, but his method of achieving that darkness is quite different.

Topor's writing is clear and rational throughout, conveying description and action in a carefully controlled fashion. This is a novel filled with both insanity and the most caustic of humors, but the organized nature of the prose proves a stabilizing bulwark against both. Like all the best of the hapless, Trelkovsky is unaware that his life is a source of bleak amusement, and, as for the madness, it's the logical way it's shown that makes this such a harrowing read. Topor describes the impossible, but he does so with such a straight face that, even in the midst of the climax's melodrama, you may take a few lines to catch the absurdity.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Topor and Ligotti, however, is that The Tenant is a fundamentally interpersonal story, one focused almost entirely on each man's relationship to both his friend's and his neighbors. Moments of eroticism, too, pervade the text. All of those however, proves hollow, sex a goal not for its own ends but for what it averts: And little by little, in the presence of swooning women and writhing flesh, the image of death became less clear, faded into the distance, and eventually vanished completely, like a vampire at the first light of dawn. (p. 27) Friendship, too, is, by the end of the novel, a tool to avoid loneliness rather than a boon on its own. Trelkovsky's interactions with his old pals is forced and unbearably awkward, and his romance with Stella is worse, a mixture of self deception and disgusting detachment sewn together by a talismanic fixation on her breasts and body.

Trelkovsky spends much of the novel studying those neighbors, spying into the building's toilet with a set of binoculars from his apartment window, and therein comes the second authorial comparison that I want to make. While the theme of The Tenant might be pure Ligotti, the execution is more similar to Cornell Woolrich's It Had to be Murder, which may nowadays be better known by the film adaptations by Alfred Hitchcock (entitled Rear Window, which the story itself now often seems to goes as in anthologies) and the more recent Disturbia. Like Trelkovsky, Woolrich's main character is a people watcher, spying on the inhabitants of the apartment building across the way with a set of binoculars and, eventually, he catches a murder by observing the subtle signs of nervousness he displays. That story's greatest quotation, too, applies just as well to both tales: The chain of little habits that were their lives unreeled themselves. They were all bound in them tighter than the tightest straitjacket any jailer ever devised, though they all thought themselves free. (p. 2, It Had to be Murder)

Both Woolrich and Topor believe that people reveal themselves with their habits and traits. Furthermore, I'd argue that both show that to break those traits is to transgress, to reveal your true self. That, however, is where the two stories diverge sharply. It Had to be Murder is a Crime story, and, as such, is exceedingly rational in its approach to the world. When the main character is cut off from the outside world, he remains connected to it in any way he can, but the villain reacts differently and abnormally. By deviating from the common path – a path that the protagonist, the other characters, the author, and the reader are all assumed to be adherents to – the antagonist gives himself away as a criminal. In Topor's tale, on the other hand, the common path is all there is. Underneath that, we humans are nothing. We're but a set of traits, but – as Ligotti might put it – puppets stumbling about their routines with no mind or soul underneath our felt skin, and we're only here because we delude ourselves into thinking that we are, as dear Trelkovsky realizes after passing street after street of grotesque humanity:

Martians – they were all Martians. But they were ashamed of it, and so they tried to conceal it. They had determined, once and for all, that their monstrous disproportions were, in reality, true proportion, and their inconceivable ugliness was beauty. They were strangers on this planet, but they refused to admit it. They played at being perfectly at home. He caught a glimpse of his own reflection in a shop window. He was no different. Identical, exactly the same likeness as that of the monsters. He belonged to their species, but for some unknown reason he had been banished from their company. They had no confidence in him. All they wanted from him was obedience to their incongruous rules and their ridiculous laws. Ridiculous only to him, because he could never fathom their intricacy and their subtlety. (pp. 97-8)

In Topor's world, humanity is omnipresent and oppressive, a corrupting force that can't be stopped. By knocking on his walls, they leave him a frightened animal cowering alone on his bed. They strip him of his personality and friends, turn him into a shut in too tamed to raise the slightest dispute. For dozens of pages, Trelkovsky tries to escape them by surrender, tries to turn into the perfect tenant. But they never stop. At some point, he begins to wonder if it's not simple malice that's driving them: The Bastards! What the hell do they want – for everyone to just roll over and play dead! And even that probably wouldn't be enough! (p. 95) But that's not it either, as Ligotti points out when discussing the book and that passage in the aforementioned Conspiracy Against the Human Race: [Trelkovsky] is more right than he knows. Because what they wants is for everyone to roll over and play them. (p. 198, Conspiracy…)

That, right there, is the core of The Tenant. This is a book, in the end, about the influence that we have on each other. So, Woolrich's solidly insider story written for insider readers, acts almost as proof of Topor's.  Here, the herd of humanity demands compliance and will achieve that end at all costs, forcing the outsider into whatever role it must to maintain the illusion of a sane society and a sane world, casting – as Woolrich's narrator does – the deviant unacceptable, a criminal, an enemy of all society. Trelkovsky, occupying the same apartment as the former tenant, finds the world pushing him into her role, and he can't refuse.

In The Tenant, the only reality is the purely physical. As such, when Trelkovsky's apartment is burglarized by his neighbors, causing him to lose his pictures and mementos of his childhood, he realizes that he "no longer had a past." (p. 64) Later, when he dons a dress in a fit of submissive dementia, he realizes that: It was a picture of a woman he saw in the mirror now. Trelkovsky was astounded. It was no more difficult than this to create a woman? (p. 121) Stripped of what he has, what is Trelkovsky now? What was there that was uniquely his, that made him an individual? What was there that differentiated him from everyone else. What was his label, his point of reference? What made him think: this is me, or, that's not really me? He sought the answers in vain, and was forced to admit at last that he didn't know. (p. 128) When those around him take the old physical hallmarks of his life away, Trelkovsky ceases to exist.

But, you're no doubt thinking, such a conspiracy is ludicrous. What would his neighbors gain from forcing him into a dead woman's life? What advantage could they possibly achieve by pushing for his suicide? When it comes to those questions, Topor plays a fine game. To outright write such a conspiracy, devoid of the supernatural or any other mollifying factors, would be to immediately distance the reader via the unlikeness of the whole affair. Instead, Trelkovsky is clearly insane, and so the conspiracy is at first easily dismissible and more. The novel seems an exploration of dementia. And then, at the height of Trelkovsky's madness, proof piles up. Conversations become inexplicable, and the actions of those around him go from absurd to malevolent. But no conclusions can be drawn, for our narrator is, alas, quite far round the bend. So, as the neighbors cavort in an obscene parody of a circus beneath Trelkovsky's window, the reader can retain his suspension of belief while, of course, anticipating the final blow. But that anticipation renders the result no less effective, for, in the superb final scene – the only one in the book to directly show the supernatural – we finally see undeniable proof that Trelkovsky's mania was real. And it is far too late.

All that praise having been dispensed, and Topor's (sadly deceased) head having no doubt swelled to its full capacity, it's time to turn to the book's main flaw: the pacing. Now, condemnation here is difficult. As I discussed in the above paragraph, the normalcy at the beginning is absolutely necessary for the insanity at the end. That being said, the first two thirds of the book pass at a pace that can best be described as an amusing but near eventless crawl. Topor's dry, dry wit prevents the reader from ever growing genuinely bored, but little momentum is acquired until the reader's halfway through. I don't think it's a coincidence that the vast, vast majority of my memories of the book – and I only read it the morning of this writing – came from the final third, and so I was at least thirty or forty pages too early each and every time I went to search for a particular quotation.

Still, the Tenant is a labyrinthine and disquieting exploration of interaction and madness, with the ultimate conclusion that the two may not be all that far off. Though not the flawless gem that Ligotti's or Lovecraft's finest tales are, this is still one of the bleakest novels I've read. Beginning and ending on the same interminable note, The Tenant is a novel likely to haunt the back of your mind for weeks, coloring your every conversation. Upon finishing, you may cast about for what makes you you. And, if Topor's to be believed, that search will be at once brief and endless, fruitless and hopeless…

[A final word of caution: as I've no doubt made clear, Thomas Ligotti's analyses of the story in The Conspiracy Against the Human race is fantastic, and is – I believe – published in similar form in the introduction to the Centipde Press edition of the novel (which I, alas, do not own). That being said, his analysis of the story is filled with spoilers and reveals the end. While this is far from a twist based story, I would still advise reading the novel before the analysis.]

Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

A well without water. A bird that can't fly. An alley with no exit. (p. 66)

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the seventh novel of Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, and it is, from what I've read, often considered his best work. The book is filled with the exciting, the visceral, and the bizarre – but all of those elements are so loosely joined together that the overall work lacks the power of its components. If it was a song, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle would be a dynamic one, filled with different instruments, melodies and passages, but it would be played so quietly that you’d only be able to hear its power if you leaned close and listened hard.

Trying to sum up The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in a few words is an impossibility. It's easy to latch onto causes, but the effects soon spiral out of control and comprehension. In the beginning, main character Toru Okada takes brief breaks from his life to listen to the call of the Wind-Up Bird, a never glimpsed creature that makes a sound like a creaking spring. In his innocuous home, with the Wind-Up Bird’s call reverberating in his mind and with an unclaimed bird statue lording over the entryless and exitless alley, Toru Okada’s life falls apart. In Murakami’s world, the smallest of things can be momentous, and Kumiko – Toru’s wife – worries that their cat’s escape might herald the end of their marriage. Trying to placate her, Toru agrees to search for the cat, but, even once psychics are called in to aid in the hunt, the step is too little too late. The cat is not found, and Kumiko soon vanishes from Toru’s life, asking him to never try and contact her.

Throughout the book, Toru is the epitome of passivity. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a book filled with interesting characters, and that’s a good thing, because Toru has damn little will of his own. For most of the book, our narrator is simply a pinball knocked from one dominating presence to another. When Toru says that he will search for the cat, his conviction lasts just long enough for him to walk outside and get roped into a conversation with his sixteen year old neighbor, May Kasahara. When Toru says that he will search for Kumiko, what he means by that is that he will set at home and hope that she contacts him. When Toru first meets Kumiko’s brother, Noboru Wataya, Toru is disgusted by the man’s glitzy but empty persona and insists that he, too, is a worthwhile individual, even if his life is in every respect the opposite of Wataya’s. But, for the vast majority of the novel, he never does anything to even express his dislike of the man, let alone to actually harm him. Toru thinks by sitting in his house and listening to music, and he spends his free time staring at passersby and zoning out. The one active decision he makes in the first chunk of the novel (or, more accurately, just before the novel’s beginning) is his decision to quit his job, but that hardly leads to a series of self motivated actions.

The idea of responsibility runs through The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the uncontrollable past a subtle and inexorable influence on the present, the grind of history coming forth with the spring-like call of the Wind-Up Bird. Kumiko is driven away from Toru because of what she did behind his back and because of what she did not tell him. Creta Kano spent much of her life simply drifting through, immune to all concepts of pleasure and pain, and she’s only now trying to build something from her past. Lieutenant Mamiya and Mr. Honda are both still coming to terms with Japan’s Manchurian war, and May Kasahara and her deceased boyfriend both lived on the edge to try and exert control over their fate, and it’s that need for power that drives her to do increasingly reckless things.

And yet, of all the characters, Toru Okada, our first person narrator, exhibits this theme the least. He simply drifts from one side character’s causal chain to another’s, barely affected by his own past for the simple reason that he’s done precious little to set anything in motion. May Kasahara might nickname him Mr. Wind-Up Bird, but our viewpoint character is, truth be told, more voyeur than participant in the vast majority of the novel’s events.

At the very end, Toru takes control of his own destiny for the first time. One could argue, then, that the novel’s central struggle was his attempt to overcome his own passivity – but such a claim simply does not hold up. For the first five hundred off pages of the book, Toru makes no attempt to overcome his personality, and, if the ending’s transition to motion is supposed to be our climax, the overall book would be built around a narrative conflict so underdeveloped as to be effectively nonexistent.

In lieu of our protagonist making decisions, the story is moved forward by the secondary characters. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a large, scattershot narrative with enough plot threads to easily strangle oneself in. On the surface, it would be easy to see the book as not merely messy but as a mess, as it seems to struggle against itself at every opportunity. Characters come in, dominate the story, and then depart forever without a backwards glance, the questions that they posed looking confused and lost in their wake.

And yet, as you read on, the threads begin to weave back upon one another. I don’t mean that there are nicely wrapped up climaxes and a careful laying out of cause and effect. Instead, Murakami builds a collage-like narratives out of similarities in theme and place, of faces that appear in two otherwise unconnected stories, and out of ideas that can be taken out of one life and applied to another.

Toru goes searching for his cat. He doesn’t find it, but he does meet May Kasahara. As a condition of their marrying, Toru and Kumiko are forced to see the clairvoyant Mr. Honda by Kumiko’s parents. He never ends up helping them with their marriage, but he does, after his death, send Lieutenant Mamiya to deliver a keepsake to Toru. Upon delivery, Toru asks Mamiya to tell him how Mamiya and Honda met. The story begins with that, but, by the time Mamiya and Toru’s acquaintance is through, it’s moved far beyond a simple meeting story and has left Honda behind in all senses but as a catalyst. The keepsake itself turns out to be empty. And so on. As the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that the lack of resolution is at its core, and so it’s fitting that the climax gives us a measure of understanding, but does not give us what we were seeking, leaving Toru’s ultimate goals unfulfilled even while salving a small portion of his need for knowledge.

Of course, there’s a vast difference between admiring and enjoying something, and Murakami’s narrative is in many ways the ultimate tease. Question after question is posed, but the board is never cleared, the answers never provided. Simulating all of life’s digressive messiness on the page is an impressive undertaking, but it’s not necessarily a satisfying one. All of which isn’t to imply that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a hollow read. In lesser hands, a game of unresolved tension would simply result in the reader putting down their chips and walking home. Murakami, however, is too gifted to allow one to disassociate oneself that easily.

Murakami’s writing provides an easy intimacy with his character’s and his world. His prose is descriptive and evocative, his characters as sympathetic as they are incomprehensible. Murakami has the rare gift of making the mundane feel bizarre, of making the little inconsistencies in life seem like the keys to comprehending our entire existence. For him, it's not even the question that matters but the possibility of questions. As our narrator learns towards the end of the novel : Fact may not be truth, and truth may not be factual. […] The important question for Cinnamon was not what his grandfather did but what his grandfather might have done. He learned the answer to this question as soon as he succeeded in telling the story. (p. 525)

All of which isn’t to demean the big events of the novel. When Murakami does decide to bring one of his various threads to a climax, the results are simply breathtaking. There are moments in this novel that are almost unbearably rich. In his tale to Toru, Lieutenant Mamiya recounts how he was trapped at the bottom of a well. For almost the entire day, everything was utterly dark. And then, for a few precious moments, the sun shone down. In the end, those rays of sun may represent everything or nothing, but while the light is illuminating Mamiya’s leg it is easy to feel that we are as close as the character to suddenly knowing and understanding everything that we’ve ever wanted to know.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a novel as powerful as it is messy. This is one of the best articulations of our search for meaning that I’ve ever read, but it’s also one of the most difficult, in large part due to Murakami’s refusal to ever step beyond his parameters and bring things to a conclusion that is deeply craved, if not necessarily fitting. There is no denying that this is an interesting work, but I’m not sure that it’s necessarily an enjoyable one.

Haruki Murakami - After Dark

My review of Haruki Murakami's After Dark is now up on Strange Horizons. I think the suspense of the whole matter (and yes, there was suspense) was broken when I mentioned that Strange Horizons had purchased one of my reviews a bit back, but it's still a damn fine day. I've already spent about half an hour staring at the thing (it says my name up at the top of the screen; how's that even possible?) but you guys are free to look too.

Leonid Andreyev - Visions

In the solemn silence, broken only by the sad sound of the minutes ebbing away, five people – three men and two women cut off from every living thing – waited for nightfall, dawn, and execution, and each prepared for it in his own way. (p. 281, The Seven Who Were Hanged)

Leonid Andreyev wrote over a hundred years ago, but his stories feel like things that are taking place all around us. Or, perhaps, that they are describing things that are in our very own life, a look at how man fits in with society so penetrating that you may just realize you are, at times, reading the articulation of your own thoughts.

The Thought, the story of a murderer trying to explain his murder and justify his sanity, begins the collection. Almost immediately, Andreyev points out one of his largest influences, Dostoevsky: Remember Raskalnikov, who perished so pitifully and so absurdly, and all those multitudes like him. (p. 39, The Thought) As for the second influence, I don’t know if Andreyev ever read Poe, but his fiction often reads like a best-of-both-worlds collaboration of the two, as if Dostoevsky took it upon himself to rework Poe’s tales in his own style. However you break it up, the themes that Dostoevsky explored in Crime and Punishment – a man’s relationship to his society, the morality implied by being one of many, the potential of the “extraordinary” defined by murder and transgression – are the themes of The Thought (and the rest of the collection as well).

Displayed to their fullest in The Thought are the two masterful extremes of Andreyev’s writing: that of contemplation and that of frenzy. The majority of the stories here are more the former than the latter, methodical and organic examinations of motivations and mental states rather than action. One of his greatest tools in this is his vivid grasp of both human thought and the means to illustrate this thought, allowing him to broach complex ideas in the simplest of ways, often using excellent metaphors to lure you into his vision:

The most frightening thing that I experienced was the realization that I do not know myself, and never did. As long as my “I” was to be found within my brightly lighted head, where everything moves and lives in regulated order, I understood and knew myself, and reflecting on my character and plans, it seemed to me that I was the master. Now I saw that I was not the master but the slave, wretched and powerless. Imagine that you live in a house with many rooms. You occupy only one room while thinking that you own the whole house. And suddenly you learn that in the other rooms there are occupants. Yes, occupants. Enigmatic creatures, people perhaps, but maybe not, and the house belongs to them. You would like to know who they are, but the door is closed. And behind it there is no voice or sound. At the same time you know that right there, behind that silent door, your fate is being decided. (p. 65-66, The Thought)

Andreyev’s grasp of dialogue is as sure as his grip upon his character’s thoughts. This is shown to superb effect in Darkness, a story that takes place almost entirely in one room and consists almost entirely of the conversation between a terrorist and a prostitute. Both characters, though extraordinary, sound perfectly natural in their roles, and the ebb and flow of conversation, and of reason and emotion, are rendered here excellently:

“What if I don’t stay?” he laughed, his lips turning pale.

“You’ll stay,” she said with assurance. “Where would you go now? You have nowhere to go. You’re honest. A scoundrel has many paths; an honest man has one. I understood this when you kissed my hand. A fool, I thought, but honest. You’re not offended that I thought of you as a fool? It’s your fault, anyway. Why did you offer me your innocence? You thought you’d offer me your innocence and I would back off. Ah, you poor little fool! At first I was even offended – he doesn’t even consider me human – and then I saw that it all came from your goodness. You had it all figured out: I’ll give her my innocence, and then I’ll become even more innocent, and it will be like a coin that’s never spent. You give it to a beggar, and he gives it back to you. No, my darling; that trick won’t work.” (p. 214, Darkness)

Andreyev’s art is, for the most part, looking in on society and trying to understand it. His character’s often stand outside, be that divide one of thought or temperament (The Thought), one of actions (The Thief), or one of ideology (Darkness). In fact, I would go so far as to say that only two stories, At the Station and The Abyss, do not start from such an outsider position. The second of those is one of the hardest hitting stories in the collection, beginning with a beautiful description of love and care and falling into an ending of depravity and horror.

The absolute pinnacle of Andreyev in his somber, emotional outlook is The Seven Who Were Hanged, the story of five revolutionaries and two ordinary murderers who are sentenced to die on the same day and the way that each of them prepare for their fate. The tale is about a hundred pages long and wholly devoid of surprises, particularly sympathetic characters, or invigorating action. All the same, the story is a breathtaking look into the lives of five men and two women, into death, and, by extension, into life.

As for the previously mentioned frenzy, it occurs at the climax of many of these tales. As Andreyev’s characters try and understand their thoughts, their lives, their worlds, events and ideas built in the text until the writing reaches a fever pitch. These moments of (near?) insanity and almost unbearable tension come across so well that the reader finds themselves reading so urgently that they can barely remember to breathe, the pressure of the text so tremendous that the only possible release come from the resolution – or immortalization – of the story’s dilemma.

In this, The Red Laugh stands supreme. This story is a horror story in every sense of the world, from the oppressive to the supernatural, and it is a grueling, endless, sixty-four page nightmare. Every scene here is a fragment, devoid of both beginnings and endings. The story’s characters are trying to get home to a home that may never have existed, and their story is meandering and runs into several dead ends from which there is no recovery. Reading this is not a fun experience, but it is a powerful one, and the red sky of the story will bleed into your mind until the only thing preventing you from suffocating under its weight is the compulsive need to reach the end of the story in the hope that Andreyev reaches down a hand and drags you free from his construction.

The same supernatural air, though always muted and perhaps imaginary, is evident in The Thief, the most Poe like story of the collection. Three times convicted peasant-thief Fyodor Yurasov longs to mingle with his fellow man as a respectable German, Heinrich Walter by name (p. 154) while praying upon them with his other hand. Instead, he finds himself chased through compartment after compartment of the moving train that he is trapped on. While he runs, every aspect of society seems to turn upon, from the people around him to the very material that the train is built from. By the end, it is all too clear that the only refuge Yurasov will ever find is fleeing from society entirely, jumping away from the train car to almost certain death, the whole tale told with the steadily growing urgency that Poe perfected in stories like The Telltale Heart.

Leonid Andreyev’s fiction is insightful and engrossing. His work is dark, but he does not glorify that darkness, and his thoughts are as varied as his characters. If you’re introduced in often unattractive looks into what it is to be human, the more contemplative sides of authors like Lovecraft and Ligotti, or just interested in Russian Literature in general, this collection will prove well worth your time.

FURTHER READING

Much of Andreyev’s work is available online with a minimum of searching, including both The Seven Who Were Hanged and The Red Laugh.