Time and the Demon and the Waste of Time

It is only the judge who says ever that time is being wasted, the rest of the time we are just dreaming of something. The truth that happens when all the colors have run dry is that we simply carry on. Time and the Demon, the Daimon: Milosz writes, again:

That's why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion,
though it's an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel.

Poetry that is without soul is poetry that lacks experience, innocent though it may be of its own fleeting magic, we still have to wake up from this sort of dream. "Look, I'm waking. Into what? Being in overwhelming abundance wells up in my heart." (a paraphrase of Rilke's Ninth Duino Elegie, which I would say in itself is insufficient, but it is the best I have to offer in this circumstance as a connecting web, so just please forgive me). We only wake when we know that there is something out there saying to us that we are wasting our time: that we have got to get up and pull that pick axe up again and hoist it high enough to till the ground or to mine for minerals, or something that has to do with our labor: sometimes we wake up and it is hard work. Then there is no more wasting time in some pleasant and perfumed garden. Plunder and murder, the lot of man then is pure labor, it is unforgiving work and it condemns the man who makes it to another twenty years with a pick-axe... now that is hard labor!

But soul makes things more simple: soul makes a dream that comes from the pain. This much is right out of Peter Gabriel:

From the pain come the dream
From the dream come the vision
From the vision come the people
From the people come the power
From this power come the change

"I do not have the strength to bring these words nor the world quite round," now that is another quote from Wallace Stephens, I seem to be filled with a lot of quotes from a lot of great people, but it is all to say that it is another riff on just how much we have to go, on how long we have to go to make any change whatsoever, and this "change" itself may be too optimistic. How do we know if it is the real change? And what if it is only your change? Then we have the dilemma of so much suffering, that I myself have to find my own way to be liberated, liberated without your change, or your wish or your invocation that welcomes the world about you to change... once again: "oh ever into ourselves, whoever we turn out to be in the end." Yes, whomever we turn out to be. That is a mystery, that is my blues song for the evening, frought with broken glass and the sound of these brass pipes that keep unloading something into my consciousness, this broken consciousness, "ungluckliche Bewustsein" that much Hegel was right: with "unhappy consciousness" even Hegel got the blues.

This is enough, even a Hegel got the blues is a good sign, from now until we set forth into some other starry firmament, some other continent, we will go on living, and writing, and to some this will be a complete waste of time, because it's only writing and it's only thinking. A thought can be part of the waking, that is all.

Faith and Imagination and Annihilation

Faith IS imagination. In the imagination of the Jews, escaping from Pharo, after they had got something in Egypt... after Joseph had been a teller of dreams, one who infused the random, rambling images of dreams with his own faith, and a juxtaposition of them in reality. Joseph's people got something, and it is more than just safe harbor.

What was it? The tools that infuse modern culture? Money and writing?

02:013:019 And Moses took the bones of Joseph with him: for he had
straitly sworn the children of Israel, saying, God will surely
visit you; and ye shall carry up my bones away hence with you.

Moses' account is epic. It is the founding of history in the manner that Noah or Adam could not yet imagine. That is why Noah and Adam belong to a past before a history of a land and a state of Israel. Even father Abraham rests before this. All this is before the founding of the state of Israel. It took Moses' great magic to take the people and displace them, a forced migration away from the land that was the land of the Pharo in Egypt. And he wandered the desert for 40 years, looking for something, looking for the promised land. Thus speaks our earliest myth, the myth of the people of the cloth.

Is it our earliest myth?

In reality there is great compulsion to view into the myths of Innana in Summeria, or the myths of the Gods of India as somehow earlier. But Moses' myth is a myth about faith in the face of total annihilation. It is a myth about mortal humankind. It is a myth about mortals wandering in the desert. It is not a myth of heroes: it is a myth of a group of men and women. These mortals struggle through their own self-deception, their own lack of faith, their raising of the golden calf. If it is not the spears and lances of Pharo's army, then it is the spears and lances of lascivious nature, that wishes to dance and become inflamed upon the gleaming skin of a golden idol.

Moses first was driven down to the ocean, and he and the people who thought he had a good idea and saw fit to follow him were threatened with annihilation.

02:014:021 And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the LORD
caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that
night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.

This is when faith ACTS. Faith is the slenderest chord of all. It is the imagination set forth into the daunting sphere of this corruptible world. The waters of the deep, the unconscious, are parted; the people escape, and the armies of the Pharo were drowned.

The message is that simple: have faith and in the hour of need there will be some UNREALITY some miracle will happen which will dismay the faces of the man of common sense and reason. Unreality will happen. If it does not then we are doomed.

Now unreality could be from the wealth of the abundance of the universe that we have not yet imagined could exist. It could happen because there are conditions we have not yet imagined a priori. The categories (literally "accusations" or "indictments" as the word is used first in Socrates Trial and then in Aristotle's metaphysics...

ὅτι μὲν ὑμεῖς, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, πεπόνθατε ὑπὸ τῶν ἐμῶν κατηγόρων, οὐκ οἶδα·

The Aristotelian categories are a tangle of the variant possibilities of ways of working things out: always the possible ways that are known: the idea behind the category is that in some way it pre-figures or acts as a template of a greater cosmic condition: the world we see through these categories (as in the parameters of a stain glass window) color the valence and rhythm of our experience. Accusations are the facts, and strictly the facts (ma'am).

But accusations always come at one as one is standing down by the ocean, with one's back up against a wall of impossibility or death. You cannot go there any longer. There is nothing there if you would like to go there. Impossibility is death.

With face pressed up against the window pane of death
Nothing but blackness outside
Your breath against this window-pane
Leaves a fog
Extend your finger to leave a trace.
Where is the miracle on this side of the window?

The miracle is that we were able to tell a story, whether you believe it or not, of someone getting through:

"When the great Rabbi Israel Baal Shem-Tov saw misfortune threatening the Jews, it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and the misfortune averted. Later, when his disciple, the celebrated Magid of Mezritch had occasion, for the same reason, to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say: 'Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer.' And again, the miracle would be accomplished. Still later, Rabbi Moshe-Leib of Sasov, in order to save his people once more, would go into the forest and say: 'I do not know how to light the fire, I do not know the prayer, but I know the place and this must be sufficient.' It was sufficient and the miracle was accomplished. Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: 'I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer. I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is tell the story, and this must be sufficient.' And it was." (I originally attributed this to Ellie Wiesel's "Gates of the Forest" but it's origin seems to come from the Midrash. Here is the link for comparison:
http://www.uscj.org/Vayikra6631.html
Note that there is one last phrase in "Gates of the Forest": "God made humankind because He loves stories." (I really loathe the sexist, possibly racist, language round this, but we will just have to imagine our way to a better place than "humankind" because there has to be some way of phrasing our condition: maybe it would have been better to say: "The Holy One brought us here because we are the love that is mortal, we burn with the love, and the holy one loves us because we become consumed with the light of our own stories turning into love, the stories of our soul-substance (hupokeimeinon) as it is consumed in compassion and love.")

May your story become a light (Zohar).

The Kabbalist Michael Shapiro related a story of entering into a hospital room of Arab people and offering to play a song for them. He said he asked for help. He said that he and the people in that room were delivered. It was deliverance that he uttered when he sang. He and the people of that room were delivered from annihilation by some kind of grace. He says that this kind of grace comes into our language as "Fear of the kingdom of Heaven." (http://www.scottsdaletorahinstitute.org/). We (I) speak too easily about grace. God help me! But in point of fact you must go on helping yourself until you can help yourself no more. What would it mean to help oneself? As to help oneself to a feast really means to offer oneself to the feast, and thus to become the feast.

This kind of kingdom of heaven comes when the ego is almost totally annihilated in a given situation, and certainly not of its own willing accord (laughing! as all my great and annihhilated yogi teachers would explain!).
We were speaking of the mosaic faith, its particular place in the imagination as leading one out from sheer annihilation. Now we have added the yogic faith: that through practice of increasing rings of renunciation one could somehow attain ...the truest survival. The point for Buddhism however is to be on our way out: it is looking for ultimate release: the great wind: "WE" Nirvanna. The beauty of the Mosaic myth is that it preserves the fragile, and less than admirable, human condition: its is not the perfected Buddha but these "Miserable Schmucks" that get saved!

And this part I admire: this part about a band of less than perfect believers, with their less than perfect imagination. What is there to believe in? I mean the Golden Calf is pretty damn voluptuous

(Depiction from Emil Nolde: Worship of the Golden Calf)

02:032:019 And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount.

02:032:020 And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it.

This worship of the voluptuous is no more dangerous than the present. It may be that there is out there in the desert some tremendous clash between the voluptuous nature of the imagination, literally a conflict between the feminine and the masculine: the priestess and the heirophant. It is not the priestess who is abandoned when the people are led through. She and her ready "perversions" are ready to be "delivered" from Pharo's army of accusators. But there in the desert she sets up sedition against the mosaic God. And this sedition is in one sense profound: if one can be loving and faithful enough. The image of the bacchanal is an imediate imperilment to the god of order and transcendence. And I feel horrified and impelled to conjecture about the proportional cost of what is done to "purify" the people:

02:032:028 "And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men."

Such an act of genocidal intent toward the people worshipping the goddess is itself more repugnant and an abomination than the lewd and lascivious acts that prompted it. This loving of death over the vulnerable/broken/corruptable forces of life brings an intense indictment (category) down upon the Judeo-Christian faith: is it a religion of ultimate intolerance and slaughter? What is it about this worship that we should resist, and what should we remember? The "golden calf" stereotypically is related to capitalism: to the driving engine of a society based on greed and the selfish accumulation of wealth. This hording is where the problems begin. Compare to this the sanctity of devoted marriage, in these days to a single wife, always seeing the many sacrificed into the one, yes I understand the meaning of this sacrifice if only it offers up some piece of selfishness for the sake of suffering through years of resentment to enable us for one moment in this to maybe be kind: we embrace such devoted marriage to the one, without infidelity because we somehow seek to be compassionate.

David Whyte writes about faith:

I want to write about faith:

About the way the moon rises over cold snow,
Night after night
Faithful
Even in its fading from fullness
Slowly becoming that last curling and impossible
Sliver of light before the final darkness.

But I have no faith myself.
I do not give it the smallest entry.

Let this, then, my small poem
Like a new moon, slender and barely open
Be the first prayer
That opens me to faith.

Image taken from an Islamic website of the lunar crescent:
http://www.icoproject.org/icop/ram27.html

And here we see the syncretism of the faith of Islam and Israel: the horn of the golden calf? The calf has no horn, that is the bull, Taurus, that carries the horns of fully developed instinct. But the crescent of Islam belongs in myth to Artemis, the virgin.

According to legend in 339 BC the city of Byzantium, (later known as Constantinople and then Istanbul), won a decisive battle under a brilliant waxing moon which they attributed to their patron Goddess Artemis (Diana in Roman mythology) whose symbol was the crescent moon.^[1] In honor of Artemis the citizens adopted the crescent moon as their symbol (though some legends attribute the adoption to a Roman victory against the Goths on the first day of the lunar month). When the city became the Christian Roman Constantinople in 330 AD, Constantine also added the Virgin Mary's star on the flag.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_and_crescent

Moses (Heirophant, borne under the sign of Taurus, ruled by Luna) does away with the golden calf of material (and maternal?) desire, but the cost in terms of the woman's religion may not entirely be right. In the dark of the moon we face at best the cold emptiness of the black sky and endless night. The return of the faintest waxing crescent is the barest trace of the feminine, and one must remember the principle effect of the moon upon the tides: this ability of the moon to part the waters and to use them to fullest effect. May we have some way to enter into a relation to the feminine? The lyrics to "Teardrop" by the musical collective "Massive Attack" enter my mind and heart (I am not certain if in a matter of a week or a year I will be able to tolerate this song, it may become cliche too quickly, but I am hoping...) for some form to hold in the form of Elizabeth Frazier's voice:

Love, love is a verb/ Love is a doing word/ Fearless on my breath/ Gentle impulsion/ Shakes me makes me lighter/ Fearless on my breath
Teardrop on the fire/ Fearless on my breath
Nine night of matter/ Black flowers blossom/ Fearless on my breath/ Black flowers blossom Fearless on my breath
Teardrop on the fire/ Fearless on my breath
Water is my eye/ Most faithful mirror/ Fearless on my breath/ Teardrop on the fire of a confession/ Fearless on my breath/ Most faithful mirror/ Fearless on my breath
Teardrop on the fire/ Fearless on my breath
Stumbling a little/ Stumbling a little

Here the image shifts and becomes shifty: blurred cigarette smoke? moonlight reflected and diffused through water? latex gloves? reflection of moonlight? We can only pray that this light bears hands of deliverance and help. Faith? The stumbling keeps us in this difficult form of who we are, vulnerable...

Even more disturbing is the reference to the somewhat obscure (at least for me) term "Nine Night" from Jamaica:

"Song is central to the nine night ceremony. Most songs are taken from a hymnal known locally as the "sankey," and the singing takes place three days after the death and nine nights after the death. The night before the burial, tradition dictates a "set up" (wake), and 40 days after the death another singing must take place. This rite of passage is to placate the spirit of the deceased, which roams for 40 days and nights before finally resting. "
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1546/is_n5_v11/ai_18965680/pg_1

I suppose that facing death it is part of the course, and yet there may be raised a song so beautiful, bless the stumbling, bless the hands that come from some divine fire in our heart that catch us as we are consumed in the flame of life. C.G. Jung quotes C. Kerenyi: the sculpted bands of Neriads on ancient Greek sarcophagai reveal the essential relation: epithalmic to sepulchral. "For basic to the ancient mysteries ... is the identity of marriage and death on the one hand, and birth and the eternal resurgence of life from death on the other." This is to say that the dance and celebration of Nine Night itself dances the stiffened brittle corpse back into the supple dance of existence itself. We dance the dead into the universe.

This fire that consumes us (in a culture obsessed with fire) has the capacity to cause these annihilating waters to draw back, it lights the way, even for a moment, the onslaught of the waters, the overwhelming current, the water of grief which has no end to its depth. The hand that offers life and sustenance, carries the flame that consumes its soul substance, the love in us remains, the rest is some other person's dream.

Murakami Cutting and Releasement

Chapter 7:
Haruki Murakami: Cutting and Releasement:

Section 1: Introduction

(Please note: I am publishing an unused chapter of my dissertation on "Depth Psychological Research" on the web. I am continuing a theme of asking "what is Depth Psychology of Research?" And "What is research really? What does it really mean--when things get down far enough---when we get down to the core of our soul and find it in a story... what is the story we must tell in order to save our very soul?" This essay was written largely between the months of April 2004 and May of 2005.)

This essay will deal with a comparative analysis of several of Haruki Murakami’s Stories. It will play with a subtext, under-text, or underworld text, largely documented in the footnotes, of Jungian analytical psychology and Heideggerian existential phenomenology. Particularly this essay will deal with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997) so a brief synopsis is in order. Before I enter into a synopsis, I would make mention that a great deal of the action and movement of Murakami's books takes place on a shifting plane of dream and historical narrative, so it is difficult to pinpoint exactly one plot or axis of motion. There are many.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle takes place in Japan in Tokyo largely in what appears to be the 1980’s or 1990’s. The story is about the descent of a man, Toru Okada, in the wake of his wife Kumiko’s abrupt departure from their marriage. Toru Okada is first left by his cat, and then his wife leaves him. It is a descent. Toru Okada moves from his occupation at a law firm and his marriage wife in the day-world to unemployment and harsh separation in the light of her torrid love affairs. He is made to descend into a strange underworld, as he tries everything to get his wife and his life back. He won’t go back to another workaday job or move on to another woman – in other words he rejects the thoughtless violence of traditional research. He stays “stuck” so he must go down. Okada is in between everything, and he just wants to be left the hell alone so he can work everything out. He goes out to look for his cat in an alley that is in between houses and structures of modern life. Okada meets a girl, May Kasahara, while looking for his cat in the back alley. Their relationship is beautiful, not overly sexualized, but held in an awkward profound balance of a man in his thirties and a girl in her late teens. In looking for his cat, he discovers a well at the back of an abandoned house, where someone had hung himself ten or twenty years before. The well is a dried up well. No water flows, yet it is the place where the conscious and the unconscious meet in devastating reverie. Okada goes down to the bottom of the well and sits and sits for hours and days. Finally May Kasahara pulls up the ladder and abandons him to die in the well in one of the most truly horrifying moments of the novel. Okada is saved from the bottom of the well by a woman psychic, Creta Kano, who involves herself with him briefly… a story that leads strangely nowhere. Toru Okada is shadowed in all senses by the brother of his wife, Noboru Wataya. The confrontation between Toru and Noboru is probably the centerpiece of the work. The work is an interwoven pastiche of stories, accounts of the horror of the Japanese occupation of China during the Second World War. The best way one can get a foothold on the novel is through the romantic and erotic descent of Toru Okada into his own soul in relation to the women of the novel. It is highly relevant, and entirely to the novel’s favor that Toru and Kumiko are not reunited by any means at the end of the novel. The novel just painfully “cuts out.”
Section 2:Metaphor and Parable: the cut of independence

I myself have been on my own and utterly independent since I graduated. I haven't belonged to any company or any system. It isn't easy to live like this in Japan. You are estimated by which company or which system you belong to. That is very important to us. In that sense, I've been an outsider all the time. It's been kind of hard, but I like that way of living. These days, young people are looking for this kind of living style. They don't trust any company. Ten years ago, Mitsubishi or other big companies were very solid, unshakable. But not anymore. Especially right now. Young people these days don't trust anything at all. They want to be free. This system, our society, they won't accept such people. So these people have to be outsiders, if they graduate from school and don't go to any company. These people are becoming a big group in our society these days. I can understand their feelings very well. I am 48, and they are in their 20s or 30s, but I have a Web page and we're corresponding with each other and they're sending me so many e-mails saying that they appreciate my books. It's very strange. We are so different, but we can understand each other very naturally. I like that naturalness. I feel that our society is changing. (Murakami, in December 16, 1997 interview with representatives of Salon Magazine, weblink: http://www.salon.com/books/int/1997/12/cov_si_16int2.html ).

The writing and work of Haruki Murakami is based on the cusp of modern life in transition; one might say it is a road of distinction between parable and reality. “Modern life” is in transition between embedded, local systems of knowing, and rootless globalism, capitalistic productivity/consumption, and cosmopolitan lifestyle. Between these two conditions, one finds a certain “independence.” The Wind Up Bird Chronicle (as is the Wild Sheep Chase) itself is a kind of phenomenology of being-left-by-one’s-wife, a phenomenology of “bautlessness.” It is a phenomenology of independence, “freedom” and hopelessness. It is a form of “independence” that leads both the characters of his works and the readers to the underworld. At the same time one is independent, one is also caught. One is caught on the one hand between the “parable” of what one ought to, or desires to, do, and on the other hand the “reality” of the concerns, exigencies and paroxysms of literal life. At least this “independence” (which can be thought through the endangered term, “freedom” ) is cutting between, and being cut by, the edge of “reality” and “fiction.”
So what is this “reality?” Unclear, but from Murakami’s books it wavers between the paranoid politics of everyday life/business, and the underground life of wells, visions, dreams, hallucinations and erotic desire. Reality is between two conditions. On one side are the brutalities of everyday life, guided by lurking horrors, demiougic shadows named “politicians” and “corporate magnates” who lust for the power to violate and control the misery of others. On the other side are the brutalities of the inner world, the world of memories and the past, the world of fantasy figures and psychic desire. Sometimes in the inner world there is a kind of grace or kindness (for example, the intensely weird “sheep man,” in The Wild Sheep Chase, 2002, and Dance, Dance, Dance, 2002). Both these realities, day or night, conscious or unconscious, have their own share of the underworld. Both sides have their share of the underworld because both sides equally serve life and death. What is more, there is a connection between the “above-ground” and “under-ground” world. The “underworld” winds and unwinds between them connecting in the moment of violence where worlds collide. The “underworld” is the beginning of research.
Does speaking of “modern life” make any discussion inherently micro/macro political sense of what “reality” is? It is true that Murakami’s writing does not ever venture too far into the macro-political field. And yet micro-politics ranges behind his writing, in the example of Noboru Wataya (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1998) cynically addressing the public with empty words (a televised “talking head” ) and simultaneously serving only his own needs to violate women to their core, and to take up power to allow him to do so. Micro-politics also is implied in Murakami’s (1998) discussion in Underground of the serin gas attacks of the Aum Shinyoko cult on the Tokyo subway system. In the case of a text like Underground however the politics is turned on the ethos of certain groups people representative the whole plight of late industrialist society: those people belonging to the Aum Shinyoko cult, or those people riding the Tokyo subway system are the representative groups. Murakami’s discussion of Aum Shinyoko in Underground is a form of criticism/research similar to Michael Moore’s (2002) Bowling for Columbine.
Cutting is one way of making a clearing. But the clearing is not the facelessness of the televised talking head of Noboru Wataya (Murakami, 1998, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), who speaks a cynical version of bleached European Enlightenment philosophy over the TV screen. One clears a line of trees in the dense forest either by felling them with an axe or by stumbling into a clearing that was already there to begin with. The clearing is a pocket of perspective and potential relationship, where before everything was the alchemical massa confusa, a forest that cannot be seen as a forest for the sake of the trees. The forest is both the tangled confusion of “primitive” consciousness and the tangled confusion of modern life. The forest is also green and alive.
A clearing is also a fiction of displacement, where people are already astray from the flock of sheep. They are about to stray deeper (in the same manner that Dante’s work only strays deeper from the “Dark Wood”). In a manner similar to Murakami’s fiction of displacement, Kafka’s parable “On Parables” works to lead the reader astray. It brings forth the paradox of parable and reality. But so too does Murakami’s writing lead one astray. It does not do this out of willful obfuscation, nor out of any subtle malicious intent. Rather, Murakami’s writing begins with people who have departed from the social codes of behavior at the beginning of the text. What happens next is another problem. If research is most true as “fiction,” then the layers of Murakami’s text enfold and baffle the reader, leading to the truth of bafflement. Truth can only lie in the shadow of what is said or performed. In this manner the texts that have been spoken of as “most autobiographical” fail to accomplish what they set to do, because they achieve it in reality: our most autobiographical texts fail in the extent to which they wish to become parables. By comparison the “autobiographical” is hidden in Murakami’s work; and it may yet be that his life may succeed in becoming a parable. The characters of his novels all have lost their wives, and yet he has in fact to all external record retained his marriage over the years. Murakami then is writing the mirror of Kafka’s parable “On Parables,” and thus Murakami’s writing will be autobiographical only in parable….
Section 4: On Suicide and Metaphor

Toward the end of The Wild Sheep Chase (2002) Murakami does write about one instance of suicide. This suicide in the context of the novel seems to be the most logical thing one could do in the circumstance. This passage has the eerie quality of originating from a dead man’s mouth, and one is tempted to speculate if the character had been dead all along:
“I hanged myself from a beam in the kitchen,” said the Rat. “The Sheep man buried me next to the garage. Dying wasn’t all that painful, if you worry about that sort of thing. But really it hardly matters.
…
“What happened was this,” said the Rat. “I died with the sheep in me. I waited until the sheep was fast asleep, then I tied the rope over the beam in the kitchen and hanged myself. There wasn’t enough time for the sucker to escape
…
“What did the sheep want of you?”
“Everything. The whole lock stock and barrel. My body, my memory, my weakness, my contradictions… That’s the sort of stuff the sheep really goes for. The bastard’s got all sorts of feelers. It sticks them down your ears and nose like straws and sucks you dry. Gives me the creeps even now.”
“And for what in return?”
“Things too good for the likes of me. Not that the sheep got around to showing me anything in real form. All I ever saw was one tiny slice of the pie. And…”
The Rat trailed off again.
“And it was enough to draw me in. More than I’d care to confess. It’s not something I can explain in words. It’s like, well, its like a blast furnace that smelts down everything it touches. A thing of such beauty that it drives you out of your mind. But it’s hair raising evil. Give your body over to it and everything goes. Consciousness, values, emotion, pain, everything. Gone. What it comes closest to is a dynamo manifesting the vital force at the root of all life in one solitary point of the universe.” (pp. 331-335)

A sheep? -A sheep is a kind of dynamo, a genius in direct contact with the full weight of the light and dark aspects of the “self.” Jung (1970) comments that the encounter with the self has two possible negative outcomes: the self either assimilates or is assimilated by the ego. If the self assimilates the ego, consciousness is lost, and one is as good as dead. The ego that assimilates the self runs the risk of inflation, in short, becoming inauthentic, “full of oneself.” Murakami’s character, “the Rat,” in this sense is justified in running away from both of these alternatives, either impending psychosis or egotistical power aggrandizement, which amounts to much of the same thing. Suicide for “the Rat” plays on his “weakness,” his vulnerability to the inflating power of the “sheep,” reminiscent of the people of Japan and Germany during World War II falling under the power of their totalitarian governments. The self was present in Nazi Germany, or Imperial Japan (of the 1930’s and 1940’s), but the ego was a shade of authentic value, projecting and literalizing the death instinct into homicidal rage. Insofar as “the Rat” knew he was weak, perhaps suicide was the better alternative to psychosis or its externalization as a leader of a totalitarian state.
Why a sheep? A sheep is a mature lamb, the icon of the sacrificial creature in Judeo-Christian mythology. The youth and innocence of the lamb is offered to God. Many times people who live like “sheep” are considered timid and myopic, willing only to follow the herd or the flock. To turn the sheep from the one who stays, scared and scattered in the center of the flock, to the one who represents the sum total of cosmic energy and genius is nothing short of religious symbolism and paradox. The key here is that the religious symbol is not in Christian religion, it’s in Japan, which makes its sentimentalism tolerable, and welcome in its weirdness.
Murakami’s books are written in a straightforward narrative style. One could say that open prose narrative is a kind of Bestandsaufnahme (“taking stock” ) or “Confessional Scheme.” Prose has an earnestness and a willingness to pursue reality as some continuing thing page after page. These writings are fictions.
Taking things literally would be a form of suicide. Taking an author’s life literally would be a form of suicide. And taking the confessional scheme literally in my reveries would indeed be a form of suicide. There are moments in one’s life where one is forced to act literally; this would be a “small suicide” where the best one could hope for would be a release from a constricted sense of “self.”
Fiction has grace in that it suggests but does not convert. Perhaps it is out of some kind of “Japanese” sense of discretion that Murakami alludes to, but does not fully disclose, his private life in his writings. He writes about issues however that are so real and informed by life that they cannot but seem to be directly from a profound life experience of the “author” himself.
If I must hazard a guess, Murakami’s writing holds something about “cutting and releasement.” We are released from the bonds of the literal, and we are cutting away and toward the terror of the “literal” and “real” at the same time. The characters in Murakami’s novels enact this cutting and releasement in the dramas he presents. I would like to suggest that Murakami’s writing is a counterpoint to Saint Augustine and Rousseau, who took the terror of the real and of research into “their own lives” (and wanted their lives to become parables). Where Augustine and Rousseau nobly (perhaps) thought that the subject matter of their own lives was worthy of writing into fiction, Murakami, holds off, “not yet.” This is the first time we will allude to Kurosawa’s (1998) last film, Madadayo, “Not Yet,” which seems to imply that “the old man is not yet dead; and he is not yet ready to let the hungry youth take his place, not yet.” It is a condition which neither Murakami nor his characters are “yet” at either.
Section 3: Careful with that ax, Eugene
I aimed the knife at the moon as he’d done, and stared hard at it. In the light it looked like the stem of some ferocious plant just breaking through the surface of the soil. Something that connected nothingness and excess.
“Cut some more things,” he urged.
I slashed out at everything I could lay my hands on. At coconuts that had fallen on the ground, the massive leaves of a tropical plant, the menu posted at the entrance to the bar. I even hacked away at pieces of driftwood on the beach. When I ran out of things to cut, I started moving slowly, deliberately, as if I were doing Tai Chi, silently slicing the knife through the night air. Nothing stood in my way. The night was deep and time was pliable. The light of the full moon only added to that depth, that pliancy. (Murakami, “The Hunting Knife,” New Yorker, November 17, 2003, p.149)

In the story, “The Hunting Knife” Haruki Murakami shows a man suddenly possessed with cutting. The character does not have a name because the story is told from his perspective. His name is “I,” a single stroke of the pen. He does a dance with a knife beside a swimming pool at a resort and in front of a crippled man who is confined to a wheelchair. The knife belongs to the crippled man and the crippled man has shown the knife to him (“I”).
Once again, to do the violence of literalism and speak, as it were, from my own life, or its “suicide:” I have always been fascinated by knives. A reductive psychoanalytic interpretation would they are part of some deep repressed rage and anger that I have toward women (mother), possibly the rage of a man denied his power for too long. But that would hardly express their full meaning to me. Maybe I am just “messed up.” I admit that they are a dubious way of cutting myself free of constriction. They are keen edged and able to make the finest distinction, to discriminate between good and bad. The knife blade is the product of metal refinement that comes from fairly advanced civilization. As civilization develops, so does the dilemma of repression, disease and mental illness come into view. One may even suggest that the production of an unconscious is necessary step in differentiation so that civilization can necessarily complexify and grow.
The positive power of the knife blade is its capacity to discriminate good from evil, or good from bad. The mature individual must be able to balance on the knife-edge and keep situations from turning to violence for as long as possible. It may be that it is only when the individual feels the pain of the cutting of these opposites that “individuation” happens, the personal growth of the individual is in that moment and to some degree attained.
The man, “I,” is suddenly obsessed with cutting and that is the way the story ends, like a terrifying dream, the knife flashing into the night. This expresses a certain sudden discovery of violence that is in a sense liberating. The story is set in a vacation resort. It seems warm and balmy, it alludes to swimmers and summertime. The man in the wheelchair seems bound to the softness of his mother, as the main character (“I”) is bound to the softness of his wife. It is only outside in a chance meeting in the moonlight that these two men find some form of liberation and satisfaction through an apparently senseless cutting dance , enacted by one and cheered by the other. There is nothing to convey the edginess that resides prior to this, things are contained in the smooth, seamless topos of the “vacation.”
Could this be the way most of Murakami’s writing begins and ends, a bad dream, a knife flashing into the night, a cipher of human violence? The cipher is empty, and yet it holds a place. Things have been cut, cleared away, a “place” has been made, but this is not without the son’s interminable and infinite reproach.
Section 5: Cutting and Releasement
As we are writing and reading this, to our horror, acres of ancient rainforest are being “clear cut” in Brazil. The same turn of the phrase “cutting” might be applied to Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), who made poems from words written on pieces of paper, drawn randomly from a hat. The gangster, the corrupt police and politicians, the greedy voice, asks for his or her “cut,” or percentage, of the dividend. Cutting cuts both ways: it destroys insofar as it sets upon the world (turning rain-forest into paper?), but it creates a possible poesis, out of bits of paper (wood pulp?) a world. In the same manner Murakami’s cuts both ways. He describes people who cut the prison of social norms away from themselves and things that really matter (i.e., Toru Okada and Noboru Wataya in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle are both cut away from certain parts of themselves and have to meet in a bloody tangle to gain resolution). These cuttings will show the stark disconnections of people undergoing divorce, separation, some sort of dis-junction from themselves, others, society, their dreams and the cosmos. But Murakami will draw together strange patterns from the cut and pasted symbols, cutting in and out of the traffic of conscious and unconscious.
One example of this “bricolage” comes from Murakami’s (1991) Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. The novel continually visits in successive chapters two aspects of the underworld: both the inner psyche or dream of the main character, and the “outer” fictionalized underground of Tokyo itself, filled with vast spaces of troglodyte freaks. In this passage the main character finds a moment of rest in the one shore of consciousness and tranquility, his own apartment, despite the fact that it has just been ransacked by two underworld thug-types.
I pulled the ring on a can of Miller and handed it to her.
“But how do you see you?” She asked.
“Ever read the Brothers Karamozov?” I asked.
“Once, a long time ago.”
Well, toward the end Alyosha is speaking to a young student named Kolya Krasotkin. He says Kolya, you’re going to have a miserable future. But overall, you’ll have a happy life.”
Two beers down, I hesitated before opening my third.
“When I first read that, I didn’t know what Alyosha meant,” I said. “How is it possible for a life of misery to be happy overall. But then I understood that misery could be limited to the future.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“Neither do I,” I said. “Not yet.” (Murakami, 1993, p.389)

Though I am not certain of the Japanese, I would hazard a guess that the last words, “not yet” are “madadayo,” which once again links to Kurosawa’s (1998) film by the same name. This “Madadayo,” alluded to in passing is a holding off of judgment that is in itself profound. Judgment and the “death sentence” are implied, but never fully literalized: “not yet.”
The setting of this quote is a psychological detective novel: it is set in the not too distant future, in Tokyo, between two Japanese people, drinking American redneck beer, having a conversation involving a Russian literary genius, about the ultimate joy and disappointment of living! The can of Miller beer acts as a kind of machine of de-differentiation, blurring thoughts and feelings, and at the same time Miller is a line of becoming an American redneck fool. Rednecks in one sense close down discourse and speech in their own racism and “fascism,” and yet appeal to the “salt of the earth” in their own, red-necky, plaid shirt manner. The “salt of the earth” has a tendency to simplify thingsThe thought of Japanese becoming rednecks may only be successful in their capacity to remain strangely Japanese in doing so. At the same time the Japanese discourse on drunkenness, becoming drunk is a large and long history in itself. These people are on their way to drunkenness, but have not quite achieved it yet
The pastiche is amazing, but couldn’t these elements be drawn into any text if one focused enough upon it? Well, yes, but rarely does one encounter even in one’s own experience such a mixture of Japanese “self-restraint” mixed with the vibrancy of texts and images. Dostoevsky may be the name Murakami uses to indicate what it means to be a literary genius. And Murakami uses Dostoevsky’s name only in the most absurd, and beautiful of places, thus attaining a level of poetry: over a redneck American beer in Tokyo, or still later, in “Superfrog Saves Tokyo,” from the mouth of a frog. The pieces of music and conversations of his stories will begin to form their own patch-work of cuttings. We will gather them up, and we will release them as well, in order to not “set upon” them too much, but let them be in their beauty or defilement.
If cutting is the beginning and ending of things, releasement also has a role to play after the cutting is done. I am not aware of one mention of Martin Heidegger in Murakami’s writings, and yet why I am drawn to discuss this German philosopher of “obscurity” in this relationship here? And why the most obscure of all his thinking, this word Gelassenheit, which cannot have hands laid upon, cannot be “set upon” and grasped, with the concepts of general academic discourse and thinking, because it is in its essence “released?”
Murakami might be one who comes closest to this essence of “releasement” that Heidegger talks about, “gelassen.” First of all many of his characters, in fact most in his novels, are out of work or skirting the regions of unemployment and “freelance” work. They are in short “released” from the necessity to survive in the work-a-day world and yet somehow they survive. Either the ego is cut loose entirely from the work-force mass and floats in a limbo state, gray clouds, mists and mysterious encounters with people, or else the ego is only loosely affiliated with work. When there is a job it may be as an owner or manager of a jazz bar (Murakami, 2000, South of the Border, West of the Sun), or a roving journalist, or even a “counter of heads of bald men” (Wind-up Bird…) but these work positions always keep to the left, have one foot dipped in the unconscious waters. It is also a state where nobody really wants to do anything, where we would all rather let it lie and let it be. Better to be nothing at all . But the essence of being a “doctor” and of “doctoring” seems to be an endless frenzied technological “setting upon,” or is it? What happens when suddenly we all just let it drift?
Murakami’s writing is “released” from strictly being a novel, after all, as we have said he neither has written “autobiographical confessions” nor has he written a story that does not play with the cusps of his own life (day-to-day and extraordinary). A work of art is released from being a work of art. The music and writing of the finest and truest poems are released from being the truth in any narrow, limited sense of the word. Musicians tend to downplay their own music, but this is not to say that it isn’t truly great. Rather it releases the reader from the horrendous oppression of any “truth” but the “truth” of the drift of their own day. Releasement is drift.
In the novel the Wind-up Bird Chronicle the main character Toru Okada is “released” from work, he is unemployed. He is caught between the endless drift on the one hand, and the knife on the other. In the drift of “just letting it all go and watching” he cooks spaghetti and irons shirts and most of all he wants to just be left the hell alone. On the other hand the knife, or the bat (more on this later) is a weapon of an intense inner violence that can only be realized at the bottom of some deep and empty well.
One might say that “you can’t just go on being unemployed forever!” In the story of “the Hunting Knife” the vacation is about to be over. People spend time doing nothing as Murakami describes them. Maybe they cook spaghetti or take a vacation to Hawaii. The story is told almost always from the perspective of an un-named male narrator. There (in the novel Dance, Dance, Dance) they do nothing but sit on the beach and listen to pop-music with distressingly beautiful and clairvoyant sixteen-year old girls, more on this later.
Section 6: Spaces and times doing nothing
Throughout The Wind-up Bird Chronicle in particular there are spaces and times where nothing is done. Much of the novel is about the stand-still, and the dried-up well. The well of creativity (or hope, or love…) is dried up. All that rests and remains is to be still and wait for the water to return…. Below is a passage about a visit made by the young couple Toru Okada and his wife Kumiko to a soothsayer, Mr. Honda, who happens to be deaf or very nearly so. He still speaks that curious mixture of cliché mixed with startling clarity about the reality that they are about to enter into. Both the insight of the old man and the experience of the young couple is “Uncanny” (recalling also Sigmund Freud’s, 1958, essay on “das Unheimlich” ) in the deepest sense of the term:
“Which is better?” I asked out of simple curiosity. “Above or below?”
“It’s not that either one is better,” he said. After a brief coughing fit he spat a gob of phlegm onto a tissue and studied it closely before crumpling the tissue and throwing it into a wastebasket. “It’s not a question of better or worse. The point is not to resist the flow. You go up when you’re supposed to go up and down when you’re supposed to go down. When you’re supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there is no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up the world is darkness. ‘I am he and / He is me: / Spring nightfall.’ Abandon the self and there you are.”
“Is this one of those times when there is no flow? Kumiko asked.
“How’s that?”
“IS THIS ONE OF THOSE TIMES WHEN THERE IS NO FLOW?” Kumiko shouted.
“No flow now,” Mr. Honda said, nodding to himself. “Now’s the time to stay still. Don’t do anything. Just be careful of water. Sometime in the future, this young fellow could experience real suffering in connection with water. Water that’s missing from where it’s supposed to be. Water that’s present where it’s not supposed to be. In any case be very, very careful of water.” (Murakami, 1998, p.51)

Apart from the amusement that I feel in re-presenting the capitalizing of Kumiko’s question, the question of what I imagine to be a demure Japanese woman there is something else deeper that is going on here. That question she is asking in this instance is also the existential question, it is a or “sending” or “gathering” in the Heideggerian sense of the term of a question. It is not merely a question of whether to eat beef with green bell peppers or not (though this question is raised elsewhere and turned down by Kumiko elsewhere in the novel). This question is hinting at something: “Is this one of those times when there is no flow?” It is almost worse because she is asking a question, and the nature of a question is itself to be an open wound, a suspension of held realities and beliefs, held open to the possibility of a greater, more terrifying continuum.
The advice of the “wise” is to do nothing in times of dryness, to explore the only option available when the options in daily life evaporate: go down into oneself, into the dry well, into the tomb, wait and die, and find out. Who is really wise? In this instance the wise man is at the end of his usefulness and his uselessness. He points and shows, it is both empty and full. It is empty in that he knows that in one sense it does not really matter, all of this does not really matter. It is full in that there remains some movement of the heart, if truly full the dry old man will truly give the lovers their place.
Section 7: Wells and back alleys, doorways to the Underworld…
The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one's own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. (Jung, 1969, CW 9,1, p.21)

What is a well? What is a back alley? Back alleys may be similar to “vacations.” Once again, in a city every square inch of space in modern life has been “set upon” and takes its place in the utilitarian function of everyday life. Most of the time even the “back alleyway” is used at least to place and haul off garbage, it serves the purpose of an alternate route for efficient disposal of refuse. But what happens when the ends are stopped up, allowing neither entrance nor exit? There is then a passage leading from nowhere to nowhere. If one dumps waste there, it simply rots, decomposes, or re-composes into some other thing (I believe that Murakami talks about weather-beaten toys and plastic children’s entertainments being left out there to the sun, sky and rain). Everything in modern society has been “set upon” and turned into the grid of the continual “employment.” The law of the day-world is that everything must be employed. But what is the law of the night, the “underworld?” This back alley is the place where the laws and rules of consciousness change from day to night
It was not an “alley” in the proper sense of the word, but then, there was probably no word for what it was. It wasn’t a “road” or a “path” or even a “way.” Properly speaking a “way” should be a pathway or channel with an entrance and an exit, which takes you somewhere if you follow it. But our “alley” had neither entrance nor exit, which takes you somewhere if you follow it. You couldn’t call it a cul-de-sac, either: a cul-de-sac has at least one open end. The alley had not one end but two. The people of the neighborhood called it “the alley” strictly as an expedient. It was some two-hundred yards in length and threaded its way between the back gardens of houses that lined either side. Barely over three feet in width, it had several spots in which you had to edge through sideways because of fences sticking out onto the path or things that people had left in the way.
…
[When the passageway was blocked off at both sides] none of the neighbors complained, because none of them used the alleyway as a passageway, and they were just happy to have this extra protection against crime. As a result the alley remained like some kind of abandoned canal, unused, serving as little more than a buffer zone between two rows of houses. Spiders spread their sticky webs in the undergrowth. (p.12)

The back-alley, the “unused canal” between houses, states of concsiousness and events begins to be released (Gelassen) from the grind of everyday affairs. Covered with weeds and brambles, bottles up and allows neither entrance nor exit in any proper sense of the word, “preventing even dogs from getting through” (Murakami, 1997, p. 12). This back-alley allows only for improper entrance or exit, over walls and between hedgerows. Properly speaking, not even garbage can be placed there. Even garbage does not move, it simply contributes to the decay; it goes nowhere. Through its ceasing to serve a purpose even as an informal thoroughfare that allows flow back from the unconscious itself. What flows back when flow has ceased?
At the end of the alleyway is an abandoned house with a dried up well. No energy flows either in or out, so a dried up well seems like the best place to epitomize blocked energy flow, or the place where weird, extraordinary flows commence. Toru Okada descends here to ascertain something radically vital about what is missing… in his life, in other people’s lives…. Something missing, though it is not certain for whom or what its for and something possibly inexplicable is down there. Murakami (1997) writes:
The first thing I did in the darkness was to feel around the surface of the well bottom with the tip of my shoe, still holding the ladder in case there was something down there I had to get away from. After making sure there was no water and nothing of a suspicious nature, I stepped down to the ground. Setting my pack down I felt for the zipper and took out my flashlight. The glow of the light gave me my first clear view of the place. The surface of the ground was neither very hard nor very soft. And fortunately the earth was dry. A few rocks lay scattered where people must have thrown them. One other thing that had fallen to the bottom was an old potato chip bag. Illuminated by the flashlight, the well bottom reminded me of the surface of the moon as I had seen it on television so long before.
Taking a breath, I sat on the floor of the well, with my back against the wall. I closed my eyes and let my body become accustomed to the place. All right, then, I thought: here I am at the bottom of a well.
I sat in the dark. Far above me, like a sign of something, floated the perfect half-moon of light given the shape by the well cap. And yet none of the light from up there managed to find its way to the bottom. (pp. 221-222)

The description is utterly banal and realistic. Nothing is down there. There is nothing to say. The light of the upper world does not penetrate to the bottom of the well. What we consider important up above and what is illuminated, as an “event,” does not reach us here. The only other objects at the bottom of the well are the empty potato chip bag and the rocks that people had scattered there in an attempt to perceive its depth. The potato chip bag could be taken as a sorry metaphor both of the human race and of this one man’s condition (a man suddenly discovers how hollow and useless he, as any thing, can possibly be). It is the same “human race” which makes more and more “empty-potato-chip-bags,” both as an artifact and as a personal condition, and then goes about trying to forget them as vehemently and as soon as possible. How could one suddenly be so useless in the middle of life’s way? Yet the potato-chip-bag-hollowness is a sudden subtle cry to be in such a position. It is nothing and yet it cannot be made too much of as a piece of nothing, its uselessness. It is a subtle note, a piece of detail in a realistic description of what it is like to stand at the bottom of a well, a piece of trivia…. The meaning of “trivia” belongs to the dark goddess Hecate (“Tri-via,” “the one who is at the meeting place of three roads”), who is not to be trifled with.
The stones and pebbles at the bottom of the well are some of the simplest forms of “equipment” one can find. They have a single brief purpose in human hands, to sound a specific depth. They then join the depth and become, once again, silent and invisible as the garden stones that they were in the sunlight and rain, upon the fertile soil above. Now however they join into the darkness and become suffused with it, small perturbations of absolute stillness and flatness, zero intensity at the bottom of the well. It is from this “zero intensity” that all worlds come in contact.
Within this well, which is a sort of “dead end” in the earth, there is yet another place to go to. The back alley-way and the well served as bardo , mid-points to go between, neither in the conscious world nor in the unconscious world altogether. Within that well, within the city suburb is a hotel room, which in turn is linked to a strange endless hotel, which in turn is linked to a strange endless city that is only suggested inside. Toru Okada makes many descents into the well; the well marks him, literally on the side of his face with a large dark spot in his skin. He begins to shape a fragment of life down in the well (it is a whole world inside there and he is but one small man in an immense place). Life seems to begin to right itself, but this state is only temporary. Toru Okada still does not have his wife back. His burning curiosity and desire to be reunited with her sends the alchemical opus of the text further. For reasons too complicated to explain he is alienated from the providential forces and persons that let him easily enter into the well. Only after a period of abstinence from the well itself does he return:
I realized I was hearing a low, monotonous hum in the dark, something like the droning of insect wings….
While concentrating my attention on the sound, I fell asleep. I had no awareness of feeling sleepy before that happened. All of a sudden, I was asleep, as if I had been walking down a corridor with nothing particular on my mind when, without warning, I was dragged into an unknown room. How long this thick, mudlike stupor enveloped me I had no idea. It couldn’t have been very long. It might have been a moment. But when some kind of presence brought me back to consciousness, I knew I was in another darkness. The air was different, the temperature was different, the quality and depth of the darkness was different. This darkness was tainted with some kind of faint opaque light. And another sharp smell of pollen struck my nostrils. I was in that strange hotel room.
I raised my face, scanned my surroundings, held my breath.
I had come through the wall. (pp. 550-551)

The well is a point in the movement into the abyss of the hotel itself. The abyss is a shadow realm where, with breath bated, we are able to gain a brief sense of the reality of the images inside. This “weird hotel” may not even be inside, it may be some other place! The abyss of the hotel it is not just a diversion, it is the seat of the deciding violence of the novel, a place where the hell of aggression manifests something real on both sides of the wall.
In the novel Dance, Dance, Dance (2002) the words, “Well done, well done, well done, well done….” Well, one has to get cooked “well done” within a well, one has to get done in by a well, and in the end one might get a pat on the back saying “it was a job well done.” Murakami writes in Japanese, so I do not know if all these puns apply, but in a sense it doesn’t matter. The point is that everyone has his or her own wells. Some wells have gone dry. Some wells you are thrown into, and some you descend of your own volition, only to find that there is no way back up to the top. (In The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Toru Okada descends into the well by means of a rope ladder, falls into a kind of swoon, and wakes to find that the ladder has been pulled up by someone and there is no way of escape.) One is left only with the contemplation of death and one’s living.
In my own neighborhood there is a kind of well. It is located in the backyard of some folks who thought it might be right to build a bomb shelter during the 1950’s in all probability. I was down there maybe twenty years ago. Maybe now it has a lock on it. There was always the eerie feeling that I might go in there and they would lock it from above. There really would be no way out. There is a latch for a lock made of heavy welded steel, and a steel ladder going down. To get to the bomb shelter-well one has to force their way through thickets of brambles, stinking pools of water this swampy back “alley,” the “ravine,” behind the wealthy Brentwood homes. I once saw a marijuana plant growing down there, which was removed the next time I went through. At my age the police would apprehend me for trespassing and loitering, but at fourteen or fifteen I was within my limit. I would wear heavy boots and camouflage trousers in order to blend in to the scenery. There was always a hint of adventure and roughness I yearned for in the midst of my domesticated upbringing. The worst we had to fear were the neighbors’ dogs, however.
Here in Brentwood, my former wife took to setting up some fruit trees in the back alley (which is really an empty ravine enclosed on all sides by houses). She did not see the value in empty land gone to waste and wishes to fence more of it in. We were at great odds about the plan. There is a virtue in unused space. Nevertheless the fruit-trees went up, and so did more protective fences. The space that was “nowhere” shrank a little more, just as the space that is “nothing” shrinks a little when I speak too much. But the space is still there. The point is to find the empty and unused spaces, even if they are derelict alleyways, where consciousness is different. It is a consciousness that is not about a city street, its not an office or a living room, and it is not about the comforts of the bedroom either. It is about a wild and unused place (if wilderness is anything more than a romantic notion), and therefore it is somewhat dangerous. It is a wild and unused place in consciousness as well, still alive but unsurveyed, and therefore dangerous.
The back alley and the well may have a relation to being in the non-ordinary space of Dante’s Comedia. For Dante, the instance was quite direct and literal: he knew that he was no longer washing the dishes or ironing shirts; he knew that he was having an experience of going straight through the archetypal reel of Heaven and Hell. In this instance however it is the ordinary places that are not the ordinary place. One could be cooking some spaghetti, listening to the Thieving Magpie by Rossini, or looking for the cat in the back alleyway and suddenly the whole thing takes on a strange appearance. Suddenly the world you thought was the world was not the world at all you wanted (the bedroom), and not the world you thought you were going to (the city street) but somewhere in-between. This “somewhere in between” is a what the Tibetan Buddhists call a bardo or a “place between two places.” In the bardo one prays for the grace to follow the true and unspeakable way that is beyond either light or darkness.
Section 8: May Kasahara, deformity and Initiation
Going down within the well is the heroic act of courage to face the unconscious for Toru Okada. Yet there is another entity who brings Toru to the very verge of death. Perhaps May Kasahara, the eternal virgin of The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, takes Toru over the verge of death, and she acts as the virgin goddess to bring him through, initiate him, to the reality of his own death and possibility for life. So while Toru Okada goes down into the well, it is May Kasahara who pulls up the ladder behind him.
[May Kasahara spoke again down into the well]: “Say, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, you know what? You might die down there depending on my mood. I’m the only one who knows you’re in there, and I’m the one who hid the rope ladder. Do you realize that? If I just walked away from here you’d end up dead. You could yell, but no one would hear you. No one would think you were at the bottom of a well. I bet no one would even notice that you were gone.

It may be that May Kasahara is the Artemis, the virgin of Murakami’s story. And yet this Artemis inhabits a young woman’s body, paradoxically capable of fear . As much as Noboru Wataya is the one who violates whatever is virginal, May Kasahara follows a thread of the story that is not violated by anyone.
She is dangerous. She limps because of a motorcycle accident where her boyfriend lost his life. She put her hands over his eyes while riding behind him. She is beautiful and dangerous, and kills where the myth calls her to do so. She pulls up the ladder from the well, leaving Toru Okada to die. By all indications she would have killed him to, were it not that Okada had another woman lover (not virgin in the absolute sense that May embodies) to look for him and to save him. She is cruel and brutal, and she is also small and vulnerable, as a girl can be. She wants to remain a virgin forever.
An importune sixteen-year-old is always out sunning herself in a string bikini. She too is unemployed.
May Kasahara asks Toru Okada at their first meeting: “Would you marry a girl with six fingers? How about a girl with four breasts, could you marry her?” Something freakish is being examined through this girl’s questions. There is something freakish about the human anatomy. Would a sixteen-year-old ever really ask these things? –Quite possibly so, but even then it doesn’t matter. What matters is the freakish nature of the imagination and the imagining.
This invites comparisons to all sorts of freakish things, “B” horror movies and circus side shows. Maybe she is the “Bride of Frankenstein,” but then Toru Okada is Frankenstein’s “monster” even if he doesn’t know this.
May Kasahara herself walks with a limp. Something about her has been deformed. It is the result of a motorcycle accident. She put her hands over the eyes of the young man who was driving the motor-bike. The ensuing accident killed him and injured her, perhaps permanently. Within May Kasahara is a good deal of something almost akin to “evil,” were it not for the unfortunate moralistic stance this takes. She is essential to the brutal reality of things, beautiful in the way a sixteen-year-old can be, and at the same time deadly. She seals up the crypt, the lid of the dry well, the pit, over Toru Okada’s head, and quite possibly would have left him there to die (an older woman lets him out). She is that close to death, and may be an incarnation of the goddess Artemis and her proximity to death. She is “evil” from the formal Christian point of view, because the Christian mythos (in the institutions we see today) simply has no place for this kind of a little goddess.
Where it is the whim of this little goddess to send our “hero” blithely to his death, it is the act of another woman, Creta Kano, who brings him back from the dead.
Section 9: Creta Kano, violation, the path to the shadow
Creta Kano pulls the “hero” from the crypt, or “well.” She is his wife’s double. The most important manner in which she doubles the wife rests in terms of her sexual and psychic interaction with the incarnation the shadow/nadir, Noboru Wataya. One can trace the descent of The Wind Up Bird Chronicle into the underworld according to the pattern of erotic desire facing three women: Kumiko Okada, May Kasahara, and Creta Kano.
Kumiko is the wasted wife, who rejects Toru outright, and, if one were to look with sufficient psychological sophistication one would suggest that he has in fact sent her away. His wife has run away ostensibly because of the part of her that identifies with her brother Noboru Wataya (the part that desires endless violation and defilement) asks her to do so. This however is the most difficult part for a gentle loving soul (a “nice guy”) like Toru Okada to integrate. In the twisted dialectic of Eros, if he truly loved her, would he become her violator (at least in parable)?
May Kasahara is the deadly virgin of the story, as beautiful as she is poisonous. But her effect is to push Toru Okada from his dream-world, where he can neither fully exist in conscious life, nor in the unconscious, through to a more active participation in both worlds. She is the risk, and something has to be risked.
Creta Kano is the final aspect that saves, even if temporarily, Toru, from stagnating in the grave and dying. In alchemical terms he must be pulled from the alembic (the container or vas hermeticum) at a particular moment lest his body die of starvation and thirst and his mind be washed away in the unconscious water he discovers there.
But Creta has also been violated. She has been violated in a manner that Toru’s wife seems to be seeking, but had not yet found. This violation takes her down to the bottom or ground of her being, to a literal, physical outpouring of her body through sexual union with Noboru Wataya.
“So then,” I said, “what you are saying is that the man gave you a new self, am I right?”
“Perhaps he did,” said Creta Kano, nodding. Her face was as expressionless as the bottom of a dried up pond. “Being caressed by that man, and held by him, and made to feel such impossibly intense sexual pleasure for the first time in my life, I experienced some kind of gigantic physical change…. …And once I passed through the deep confusion I mentioned earlier, I sought to accept this new self as something truer – if for no other reason than that I had been enabled to escape from my profound numbness, which had been such a suffocating prison to me. (p.304)

Noboru Wataya acts in a way and in accordance with the power of a “sheep.” Like “The Rat” in A Wild Sheep Chase (2002) Noboru has felt the power of something like a sheep, a power that has the creative potential of a blast furnace. A blast furnace can melt things down that were crystallized hard into death, like Creta Kano’s internal deadness: her hardness smelted in the blast furnace flame. This much is a good thing, unfortunately it is an accident for the man who has in a sense “swallowed the sheep” whole, and has in turn entirely been swallowed and engulfed by it: Noboru Wataya. “The Rat” commits suicide, at least in metaphor (we do not know if it’s all of him that dies or if part of him becomes the sheep man), thus ending the possibility of being filled with the archetypal power of the sheep. Noboru Wataya should have committed suicide to save his soul. There is absolutely no talk of “sheep” in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, yet the effect is the same.
[Creta Kano spoke again:] “Still, the bad aftertaste remained with me a long time, like a dark shadow. Each time I recalled those ten fingers of his, each time I recalled that thing he put inside me, each time I recalled that slimy, lumpish thing that came (or felt it came) out of me, I felt terribly uneasy. I felt a sense of anger – and despair – that I had no way to deal with. I tried to erase that day from my memory, but this I was unable to do, because the man had pried open something inside my body. The sensation of having been pried open stayed with me, inseparably bonded to the memory of that man, along with the unmistakable sense of defilement. It was a contradictory feeling. Do you see what I mean? The transformation that I had experienced was undoubtedly something right and true, but the transformation had been caused by something filthy, something wrong and false. This contradiction – this split – would haunt me for a very long time. (p.304)

For Jung (1970) the self extends on all sides of the ego, it is both brighter and darker than the ego formation. Murakami stresses the danger of contact with this self, that it twists the ego into “something filthy, something wrong and false.” I do not know ultimately if we can redeem and reclaim the “god-image” without suffering this kind of horrible inflation and violation of the fragile, eggshell of ego consciousness. The most authentic manner of reclaiming the “god image” is first through its “horror.” Only after we have endured, as we must endure the horror of this image if we are to survive, might we reclaim some relation to it as mortal beings on the earth.
Section 10: knife and bat: collision of the horrors from day and night
At the bottom of the well, the place where energy has dried up or coalesced into dryness, Toru Okada descends and stays . Toru Okada wants to be left the hell alone, but more than that he wants his “wife” back, and it is this energy that pushes him down to the bottom of the well, another Orpheus, in search of her. At the bottom of the well, in the standstill, he is still going. –He goes to a hotel. Submerged in the well, under an ordinary Japanese urban/suburban neighborhood is a hotel. What are hotels for? Hotels are for travelers who cannot stay the night at home. The hallways go on endlessly, sometimes the lights go out yet the images are still there. Though he doesn’t know it Toru Okada has to finally confront his shadow here, Noboru Wataya. In the Wind-up Bird Chronicle Toru (“I”) winds up “winding up.”
In Toru Okada’s hands is a baseball bat. Toru is a “good man,” a loving man, however dull and limited his understanding may be, he is persistent in a manner that sharply pierces the heart. A baseball bat is a dull, blunt, hard object made of wood, its violence blatant and overt. The bat has a chance to be used in a game with kids, but this time it must be used as a weapon. The “art of letters” both in Japan and the west, is likened to the “art of the sword.” The art of sword/letters takes the utmost refinement. Murakami may be suggesting here that the hero’s “light” (even his own heroic writing as an “author”) at this time is not with a blade, but with a coarse bludgeon, a bat. It’s essence is clumsy and crude, but full of soul. The whole energy of the novel coalesces round his swing. One is tempted to recall that the legendary Miyamoto Musashi refused to fight with a sword, but only with the wooden “bo-ken;” one time he even used a weapon carved from a row boat oar. The hero fights and wins with the fullness of his heart, but not with cultural refinement, which in this novel leads only toward corruption, cynicism and death in the person of Noboru Wataya.
Suddenly two men are brought together in a terrible, darkened hotel room. They are brought together to fight over and because of a woman. The one on the outside is Noboru Wataya, the demiougic horror of the successful political man, a vampire who violates the souls of others but himself has no soul. The one on the inside is Toru Okada, the battered “house-husband,” the emasculated man, who is just waking up to his rage toward his wife and his society for abandoning the nurturing principle of life. The woman has brought them together, she is a voice in the darkness. Noboru has only the Pharo’s rights over his sister, a weird claim of incest, another violation to add to his cannon of death. Toru has the claim of being a husband and a lover, his naïve sentimental attachment to a woman who never could be her shadow with him, and thus never be herself. It is a study of the complete psyche. In addition to the insanity of the two men entering a deadly fight, there is an admission of the insanity within this woman’s soul: her soul is as split between those men. Between her husband and the unresolved parts of her animus is a terrible fight.
Everything Noboru Wataya touches he defiles. The “blast furnace” of his consciousness controls him to use and to screw, and burn everything he comes in contact with. What is more this devouring “blast furnace” in him is incredibly successful. But he is against both life and thought. He just gains more and more power and rapes more and more people, not unlike our capitalist society in this day. He has control of the knife. He has total control, literary refinement, pen and sword. The knife, unfortunately can only be experienced on “both sides” with the risk of damage. The chapter is entitled “Just a real knife,” begging the question of metaphor and parable once again.
Again, without warning, the knife came. It slashed past my face like an attacking bee, the sharp point just catching my right cheek where the mark was. I could feel the skin tearing. No he could not see me either. If he could, he would have finished me off long before. I swung the bat in the darkness, aiming in the direction from which the knife had come, but it just swished through the air, striking nothing. The swing had been a good one, and the crisp sound helped me losen up somewhat. We were still an even match. The knife had cut me twice but not badly. Neither of us could see the other. And though he had a knife, I had my bat.
Again in our mutual blindness, breathing held in check, we felt each other out, waiting for some hint of movement. I could feel blood dripping down my face, but I was strangely free of fear. It’s just a knife, I said to myself. It’s just a cut. I waited. I waited for the knife to come my way again. I could wait forever. I drew my breath in and expelled it without a sound. Come on! I said to him in my mind. Move! I’m waiting for you to move. Stab me if you want to. I’m not afraid.
Again the knife came. It slashed at the collar of my sweater. I could feel the point moving past my throat, but it never touched my skin. I twisted and jumped to the side, and almost too impatient to straighten up, I swung the bat through space. It caught him round the collarbone. Not enough to bring him down or break any bones, but I knew I had hurt him. I could feel him recoil from the blow, and I heard a loud gasp. I took a short backswing and went for him again – in the same direction and at a slightly higher angle, where I heard the breath drawn in…. (p.585)

At the end of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Toru Okada still wants his wife back more than anything, and still he doesn’t get her. He doesn’t get her, she insists that she is not the woman that he wants. It does not a matter whether her shadow/whore rules her passion or not, he just blindly wants his wife back. But why pathetically cling to the notion that she was this “wife”? Toru comes to terms with his own violence in the darkened hotel room (“kills” his brother-in-law in image in the “hotel” at the bottom of the well), in “reality” (in the novel) he does not get his wife back. It is as though the law of the universe, prohibited parable and reality from completely occupying one place without violence, knife and bat. The world of the dream-hotel is prevented from being fully transferred “this life/wife” of Toru Okada’s. His brother-in-law does get mysteriously ill and dies, but this gets Toru no closer to his estranged wife.
The essential loss, stand-off, holding pattern, which exonerates and unites Toru Okada from his own shadow, but does not redeem his own marriage, is the central wound of the novel: the wound where parable and reality cannot unite and be one. Nevertheless both realities provide profound and fantastic experiences for the soul. To blend the elements of parable and reality would only produce a false optimism, or a positive outcome that would ruin the tension of the novel. The false blend of optimism, without a healthy dose of acknowledgement of death is tantamount to suicide, and is particularly dangerous in literature and in research itself. The best that happens is that one comes to terms with one’s own violence. The return to a state of marital bliss can only be fleetingly ventured in the dream of literary art.
Section 11: The Lovers Will Rise up
Frog fell silent, but soon as if dredging up his last ounce of strength, he began to speak again. “Fyodor Dostoevsky, with unparalelled tenderness, depicted those who had been forsaken by God. He discovered the precious quality of human existence in a ghastly paradox whereby men who had invented God were forsaken by that very God. Fighting Worm in the darkness I found myself thinking of Dostoevsky’s ‘White Nights.’ I…” Frog’s words seemed to founder. “Mr. Katagiri, do you mind if I take a brief nap? I am utterly exhausted.”
“Please,” Katagiri said. “Take a good sleep.” (p.111)

Once more we have a meeting of the absurd. A cartoon character incites a profound philosophic speculation on the basis of a Russian literary master to a schizotypal banker on the verge of a nervous breakdown in Japan after the Kobe Quake in 1995. Bankers in Japan do not regularly imagine immense green frogs that insist on their own “reality,” or the reality of the enemy that they mutually oppose, “worm.” The discourse of such a frog rarely resorts to educated Japanese (translated for our benefit into English) comments with the soul to allude to works of literary genius. Japan is full enough of animated frogs and animals speaking an uneducated discourse for five and six year old children, but rarely do they make enigmatic points that throw mysticism and romance into the same sentence. Kafka is capable of writing something like this, discourses from and about strange animals abound in his work, from “The Metamorphosis,” to “A report to the Academy” strange semi-human lines are being written. Humanity in fact is coming in and going out of being in such literature, completely relativized. Perhaps Mr. Katagiri himself has taken this strange line up, where he himself begins as a banker but ends up becoming a frog. Perhaps not, however, for he himself only participates in his “becoming-frog” from a distance, as a “hallucination” that preserves his bankers ego relatively intact. Even if Mr. Katagiri has some dubious success in “becoming-frog,” the frog winds up dissolving in the end into a psychotic nightmare of a thousand crawling insects and worms, the hideous, multiple face of the “unconscious” itself.
As a matter of fact, “White Nights” is a story about a love affair between a madman and a beautiful, repressed girl in St. Petersburg in Russia. It is possible to extrapolate a theological statement from the aching painfulness of the love affair, that the beautiful girl keeps on being more and more sublime and transcendent to the insane romantic machinery the fellow puts in place. To love in this sense has an aspect of infantile helplessness in religion, the religious sense that one might feel before God. Madness runs through and through the text, and the text within the texts of this book and that madness is his helplessness.
There is one other point here based on Thomas Moore’s discussion about the paradoxes of defilement and innocence. Moore suggests that the inner aspect of the libertine is what is missing from our girlish moralism and our feigned attacment to innocence, that if we could find it in ourselves to embrace what we are when we are culpable and to blame, then we would attain a far deeper level of innocence. Toru Okada is just such an “innocent” who clings to his girlish moralism and in doing so drives his own wife away. Mr. Katagiri is an innocent, whose myopic neglect for the world of the unconscious produces the trememdous imbalance that creates the terror of “Worm.” Frog states that in “White Nights,” “Fyodor Dostoevsky, with unparalelled tenderness, depicted those who had been forsaken by God. He discovered the precious quality of human existence in a ghastly paradox whereby men who had invented God were forsaken by that very God.” (p. 111). In just such a manner do those people who are abandoned by God neglect and abandon that “God” in return.
Marie-Louise Von Franz (Whitney, 1983) commented in the film A Matter of Heart:
We have now, you see, (in the image of Acquarius) it’s a man who pours water into the fish. Now the fish is the unconscious. So we have to support the unconscious. It’s not enough to, to just have it. We have to actively turn towards it and support it so that it helps us.
“Jung once said: ‘The toads and frogs are God’s first attempt to make man on a cold blooded level, and then he didn’t quite succeed. But he kept the idea, he kept the idea in mind and made us later.” (p.26 of transcript)

Murakami’s “Frog,” and indeed all frogs, exist half in the world of the unconscious, water and pond, and half in the daylight world of consciousness. Superfrog may be a kind of call from cold blooded cousins, but his remarks and candor, his great heart makes him more “warm-blooded-human” than the very banker who he has befriended. The circle may be complete at this point, man becomes frog and frog becomes man, or else it spirals into a new line of heterogeneity, or psychotic decompensation….
The frog is an amphibian. He belongs both to the realm of the unconscious, water, and to the conscious realm of the land. He may disappear and wander into the murky depths of a pond, only to resurface at a different hour, with a different mood of the day and sun through the leaves. The frog still belongs to the “natural world” (if such a world can be said to exist without its conjunction with the flows of a romantic literary machine). In any sense it is the capacity of the frog to dwell both on land and in the water that makes him more unique and adaptable. Similarly human beings have an adaptability between conscious and unconscious flows of reality that make them the descendants of frog in this way.
This section was entitled “The lovers will rise up.” It is a line from a Leonard Cohen (1975) song/poem: “Last Year’s Man:”
The rain falls down on last year's man,
an hour has gone by
and he has not moved his hand.
But everything will happen if he only gives the word;
the lovers will rise up
and the mountains touch the ground.

The statement contains the ultimate indolence of the figure of a man who cannot “move his hand” into becoming the essence of transformation. Were the transformation to take place, “the lovers will rise up,” and the hopes and desires of this proto-human, this frog would be met. This immobility is hell, a hell that is fixed and cannot change. And yet even this hell has a capacity fir transformation: the only thing the soul has to offer up is its own particular cry of grief . If it can offer up this cry in an outpouring of grief it is possible to turn this immobility into “transformation,” to turn a “black hole” into a “line of flight.”
There is not really that much grief in the story “Superfrog Saves Tokyo,” aside from the grief of the obvious absurdity, heroism, wondrous childish tenacity of the image of the frog himself. “Only a frog can save us!” the motto might say.
The encounter with the “self” or the “greater personality” is dangerous, containing all the energy of a “blast furnace”, as Murakami would say, and an equal capacity for bad as it does for good. Perhaps the appeal to the frog-hero at the end of this essay is too much entrenched in the child archetype, as at the end of the film Finding Neverland (Forster, 2004) Peter Pan pleads with the audience, “Clap your hands if you believe in fairies!” This too runs its dangers of inflation, a tedious appeal to childhood sentimentality, which needs a certain reluctance to make it satisfying. The child/lover archetype is indeed capable of bearing the weight of the self for the ego, which otherwise becomes over burdened, “corrupted,” in the case of “the Rat” in A Wild Sheep Chase, or Noboru Wataya in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. The question is: at what cost to the efficacy of the ego’s functioning, will it face the encounter with the “self?”
Indeed there is something about Leonard Cohen’s line “the lovers will rise up, and the mountains touch the ground” that speaks of a kind of “final judgement,” a tone that is no less than apocalyptic: an encounter with the “self.” This “rising” of the lovers has the capacity to be dangerously inflating to the ego. At the same time this “rising” is the first suggestion of any ascent throughout the descent process of dissertation research. If the “rising” of the lovers is looked upon too brazenly as an image, then the image itself gets damaged. It is a furtive attempt for the libido to move into consciousness after the prolonged ordeal of descent.
In this somewhat faltering (not entirely unsuccessful) attempt at consciousness, rebirth through an image , we come to the end of one form research as we know it. In one sense the work of research is done when in Frog’s words, “men who had invented God were forsaken by that very God.” However, beyond blind optimism there is still an element of this discourse that is not yet written.
Section 12: Conclusions for research
The central thesis of this dissertation is that “research” per se has been in denial of its own profoundly destructive aspect. What is not made conscious is projected outward and lived as “fate.” I have attempted to turn to literature that shows the possibility of containing the destructive components of the human soul through their very expression. Dante’s Inferno was a perfect example of research making conscious its own destructive aspect. The darkest and most hellish moments of Dostoevsky’s writing accomplish this same act of riding into hell in order to make the destructive act conscious. Finally in Murakami’s writing we see the trail of descent necessary for “research” to come to fuller terms with a sense of abasement and defilement, which otherwise it forces blindly and unconsciously out onto the world. The libido rises all round this descent, between the literalizations of the text, between the extroverted homicide and the introverted suicide is a possible, startling, flourishing of the story being told.

[1] The critiques of “modern life” as a phenomenon are at least as old as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s work Emile. It is definitely developed in Marx and Freud’s writing, and continues though Horkheimer, Adorno to Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari and Bordieu. This is to say that there is a specific discourse of “cultural critique” that is neither philosophic, economic, psychological, nor anthropological, but somehow crosses between these domains. It might be said that Murakami’s writings are a fictionalization (therefore more playful, poetic, and possibly even “true”) of the cultural critique.

[2] “Bautlessness” is a neologism. It indicates a kind of anxiety, restlessness, nausea of having nothing to do and not necessarily knowing or wanting to perform or do in the cage-like institutions of modern society. There is a kind of revolt in bautlessness, but then “after the revolution” one comes to the sense, “what does it matter?” “Bautlessness” is by no means “nihilistic;” it doesn’t trust nihilism either. “Bautlessness” is a superior term to Emile Durkheim’s (1988) anomie, Discussed by Anthony Giddens in his introduction to Durkheim’s work:

Human freedom consists in the liberation of man from the domination of phenomena which are not subject to rational control. These phenomena are of too sorts: the irrational impetus of his own inner passions which, if not subject to rational mediation, make man the plaything of arbitrary and transient desire and expose him to the aimlessness of anomie; and the external forces of nature. (p.27)

This Marxist emphasis on “rational control” lacks a real existential or literary component and becomes overly literalistic anthropological or sociological. Murakami points to the irrational components of freedom that are better framed in terms of “bautlessness.” Dream has greater depth than “reason.”

[3] I am taking this freedom to be the underlying sense of what Mailer (2003) wrote in Why are we at War? Mailer wrote particularly in response to the flagrant unfreedom of the “Patriot Act” and the fear, greed and overt power manipulation it represents in the U.S. post 9-11. However the “Patriot Act” is really just a symptom of the overall trend of society to conformity and manipulation (through fear) of all its members by a plutocratic oligarchy. Whether the cynicism lies in the suggestion that we owe our lives and loyalty to mercenary multinational corporations, or to the puppet governments representing their interests is of little consequence. If there is freedom, it must go on in endangerment, in the same sense that Jung (1970, CW, vol. 14) speaks of the danger of “Individuation” (p.65) or Mailer speaks of “democracy,” below:

Because democracy is noble, it is always endangered. Nobility, indeed, is always in danger. Democracy is perishable. I think the natural government for most people, given the uglier depths of human nature, is fascism. Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it. (online web source unavailable)

Mailer’s comments fall short of the bloody mess of this situation in the light of another secondary thinker like him, Jean Baudrillard (In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, 1983), who considers the “Mass” (la masse) of large democratic countries to be something like an “electrical ground” (faire masse) that stupifies the charge of insight necessary for real democracy to take place.

[4] The term is borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1991) essay “Micropolotics and Segmentarity.” This passage discusses the potential for fascism to exist on the micro-political level as well as on the macro-political level. It may however be easier to transform a micro-fascist black hole once again into a line of flight…

The concept of the totalitarian state applies only at the macropolitical level, to a rigid segmentarity and to a particular mode of totalization and centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple, family, school and office: every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonating in a great, generalized central black hole. (p.214)

[5] Murakami (1997) in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle writes about a faceless face of onsetting totalitarianism:

I was walking alone. The face of Noboru Wataya was being projected on the screen of a large television in the center of a broad lobby. His speech had just begun. He wore a tweed suit, striped shirt, and navy blue necktie. His hands were folded atop of the table before him, and he was talking into the camera. A large map of the world hung on the wall behind him. There must have been over a hundred people in the lobby, and each and every one of them stopped what they were doing to listen to him, with serious expressions on their faces. Noboru Wataya was about to announce something that would determine people’s fate. (p.240)

The faceless face always speaks the bleached out ideals of European enlightenment thinking: freedom, justice, equality. These words no longer mean anything. It doesn’t matter that what Wataya has to say is absolutely empty. He represents the same kind of faceless face that could order the mobilization of an army or the liquidation of a group of people in ethnic clensing. It is the faceless face that speaks always in a an apocalyptic tone, that stirs the most primitive emotions (as Hitler or Falwell) of a final reckoning. Finally, the faceless face has a kind of erotic appeal (Hitler, Mussolini) a fetishism for the weak and the deadened spirits of post-democratic “democracy,” as we may read in the section on Creta Kano and violation below.

[6] Heidegger (“The Origin of the Work of Art,” Krell, 1977) speaks about the “clearing” as an “opening” or “lighting,” in the midst of a discussion of the conflict between “world” (which has a particular relation to mortals) and “earth.” Clearing comes from the conflict cut between

This open region happens in the midst of beings. It exhibits an essential feature which we have already mentioned. To the open region there belong a world and the earth. But the world is not simply the open region that corresponds to lighting, and the earth is not simply the closed region that corresponds to concealment. Rather, the world is the lighting of the paths of the essential guiding directions with which all decision complies. Every decision, however, bases itself on something not mastered, something concealed, confusing; else it would never be a decision. The earth is not simply the closed region but rather that which rises up as self closing. World and earth are always intrinsically and essentially in conflict, belligerent by nature. Only as such do they enter into the strife of lighting and concealing. (p.177)

[7] "The forest clearing [Lichtung] is experienced in contrast to dense forest, called Dickung in our older language." Heidegger's (Krell, 1993) page 441

[8] Jung (CW vol. 14, 1970):

In order to enter into God’s Kingdom the king must transform himself into the prima materia in the body of his mother, and return to the dark initial state which the alchemists called the “chaos.” In this massa confusa the elements are in conflict and repel one another; all connections are dissolved. Dissolution is the prerequisite for redemption. The celebrant of the mysteries had to suffer a figurative death in order to attain transformation. (p.283)

[9] Kafka, (1971), On Parables:

Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid yourself of all your daily cares. Another said: I bet that is also a parable. The first said: You have won. The second said: But unfortunately only in parable. The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost. (p.457)

[10] Jung (CW vol. 9,ii, 1970) writes:

It must be reckoned a psychic catastrophe when the ego is assimilated by the self. The image of wholeness then remains in the unconscious, so that on the one hand it shares the archaic nature of the unconscious and on the other finds itself in the psychically relative space-time continuum that is characteristic of the unconscious as such.

…

However, accentuation of the ego personality and the world of consciousness may easily assume such proportions that the figures of the unconscious are psychologized and the self consequently becomes assimilated to the ego. Although this is the exact opposite of the process we have just described it is followed by the same result: inflation. (pp. 24-25)

[11] Freud, in “Civilization and its Discontents,” (Gay, 1989) writes in a speculation about the destructive instinct both linked and un-linked to sexuality:

I know that in sadism and masochism we have always seen before us manifestations of the destructive instinct (directed outwards and inwards), strongly aloyed with erotism; but I can no longer understand how we have overlooked the ubiquity of non-erotic aggressivity and destructiveness and can have failed to give it its due place in our interpretation of life. (p.754)

[12] Jung (1970), in Symbols of Transformation writes:

The sacrifice of the animal means, therefore, the sacrifice of the animal nature, the instinctual libido. This is expressed most clearly in the cult legend of Attis. Attis was the son-lover of Agdistis-Cybele, the mother of the gods. Driven mad by his mother’s insane love for him, he castrated himself under a pine tree. The pine tree played an important part in his cult; every year a pine tree was decked with garlands, an effigy of Attis was hung upon it and then it was cut down. Cybele then took the pine tree into her cave and lamented over it. (p.423)

The essence here is in the sacrifice of animal libido for the sake of civilization… perhaps to avoid the absurd tragedy of incest (along with its intensely compelling force) it was commemorated in image of animal sacrifice.

[13] Nietzsche (Kaufman, 1982, The Portable Nietzsche) Writes in Thus Spake Zarathustra (part 1, chapter 17):

“He who seeks, easily gets lost. All loneliness is guilt” –Thus speaks the herd. And you have long belonged to the herd. The voice of the herd will still be audible in you. And when you say “I no longer have common conscience with you,” it will be a lament and an agony. Behold this agony itself was born of the common conscience, and the last glimmer of that conscience still glows on your affliction. (p. 174)

[14] Still further below in this essay we will explore the Heideggerian term Bestand (“the standing reserve,” discussed in Heidegger’s essay Die Frage Nach dem Technik), which stands in stark distinction to Gelassenheit. Now, the Bestandsaufnahme bears a relationship to the Bestand, but at the same time it is not the Bestand. The Bestand sets upon matter forcing it to conform to the idea of production and consumption, and is in some sense the most blind and baleful aspect of technology we have to this day. The Bestandsaufnahme on the other hand seems to be very much concerned with the affairs of the day-to-day life that somehow might just be conscious of itself (especially in its smallness and futility) than the unconscious consumption/devouring of the technological Bestand. Hence the Bestandsaufnahme retains a chance of being Gelassen. The Bestandsaufnahme is discussed at length and is a central essence to my “Reveries” in a later chapter below.

[15] This remark must be read in the light of Foucault’s (1980) proclamation that all his works are “fiction,” (Power/Knowledge, p.193) discussed at length in my introduction to this dissertation. Foucault however is not trying to write a novel per se however, or does he? Could, for example Les Mots et Les Choses really be considered a novel in the same manner that Murakami writes The Wind-up Bird Chronicle? In this sense one could not only read Foucault as more of a “novelist,” but also Murakami as more of an “archeologist,” or “anthropologist,” or “sociologist,” coming closer to a radical scientific view of the world than we think. And I mean “radical” in the sense of debunking the heinous “literalism” that plagues and retards the social sciences in general, and turns them into agents of the “fascist” collapse of thinking.

[16] Hillman (1997), Suicide and the soul, discusses the issue of the interwoven nature of suicide as the literalization of the will to die, and subsequently wonders if literalization in general is a form of suicide:

…Suicidal moves give us a clue about our “inner killer,” who this shadow is, and what it wants. Since suicide moves show this shadow using the body as an instrument for concrete aims (revenge, hatred, etc.), profound questions are raised about relations between suicide attempts and attempts at literalizing reality by means of the body.

So more could be said about the literalism of suicide – for the danger lies not in the death fantasy but in its literalism. So suicidal literalism might be reversed to mean: literalism is suicidal. [emphasis mine](p.12).

I have a point of contention with Hillman about his use of the term “body,” which seems entirely uninformed by Deleuze and Guattari’s (1991) use of the term. The point is that the “body” term he uses here has a slight medico-scientific tinge to it, which unconsciously contextualizes the body (“It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = zero…” according to Deleuze and Guattari, p. 153) and runs the risk of another literalization in doing so….

[17] This is also a pass at Herman Hesse’s (1991) Steppenwolf, where Henry Haller enters the Magic Theatre at the price of “one small suicide.”

…Not afraid? That’s good, excellent. You will now, without fear and with unfeigned pleasure, enter our visionary world. You will introduce yourself to it by means of a trifling suicide, since that is the custom. (p.177)

[18] See my essay on Augustine and Rousseau’s Confessions, particularly the passages concerning Augustine’s mother’s desire to convert her son to Roman Catholicism, which can be read here as a desire on the mother’s part for the son to commit a form of suicide.

[19] It is not certain whether Murakami is Japanese or not, or rather it is only a “stab in the dark” because my conception of what is “Japanese” may be totally wrong or skewed; it probably is. Even Murakami himself suggests that he is not certain whether he is exactly a “Japanese writer” (in an article in Salon magazine where he comments on the particular Japanese-ness of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle):

When I was writing my other books, in Japan, I just wanted to escape. Once I got out of my country, I was wondering: What am I? What am I as a writer? I'm writing books in Japanese, so that means I'm a Japanese writer, so what is my identity? I was thinking about that all the time when I was here. (Source: http://www.salon.com/books/int/1997/12/cov_si_16int2.html )

But the term “stab in the dark,” which is a good way of describing research, is gone into further when we discuss the character Toru Okada’s confrontation with his very dangerous shadow, who “literally” in the novel stabs at him in the dark with a knife. This would place all researchers in the position of being power hungry political fiends, which is not far from the truth.

[20] I Could not resist playing with a title of a Pink Floyd song, “Careful with that ax, Eugene.” It runs with a theme of “rock-n-roll” popular culture that Murakami likes to play with. Here the word ax also doubles as a “guitar” or musical instrument. This brings to mind the guitar player from whom the character of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Toru Okada got his bat discussed at length below in the section on “knife and bat.” The actual moment when Okada picks up the bat from the guitar player (or “ax” player) and then beats the guitar player within an inch of his life with it is truly terrifying in its sense of completeness: Toru, an essentially weak, listless, “bautless” (a neologism indicating a kind of drifting apathy, tinged with an unknowing and nausea) fellow who has been left by his wife comes to full and horrifying union with his violence. This realationship, described here in a footnote no less, is exactly the way Murakami works: through an underground myriad of mixed associations and word plays that almost fit together both within the play of his work and this reflective comparative essay.

[21] Two other “cutting dances” are available to my imagination through myth: the cutting dance of Kali, the dark goddess, wife of Lord Shiva, the Destroyer; and the cutting traces, hundreds of scars left on Sir Richard Burton’s body (the Richard Burton who wrote the translation of 1001 Nights), apparently the result of a Sufi dance which involves the use of razor-like swords.

[22] The motif of “vacation” appears countless times in Murakami’s works. Most notably in the book Dance, Dance, Dance, where the un-named main character, once again “I” is a chaperone to this sublime adolescent girl in Hawaii…. Nothing happens on these “vacations,” which is utterly profound! “Vacation” is a time when the rigors of work (especially the context of Japanese regimented industry) have been suspended, but it is an expanse of seemless time in modern society, devoted to a kind of release that hopefully does not participate in the senseless, endless, manic consumption of capitalist life.

[23] Kafka (1971) again: the short story “The Judgment,” and Walter Benjamin’s (1968) critical essays on Kafka are relevant here: the son in a sense condemns the father for his existence. The “son” is condemned for the very sake that he condemns his father for having brought him into this life!

[24] The term “bricolage” signifies a kind of patchwork arrangement of parts into an assembly, described in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1989) Anti Oedipus, derived from Claude Levi-Strauss’s research. Bricolage differs from technological “setting upon” of the “Bestand” by virtue of its poetic movement and disjunctions of strata. An ideal bricolage I am thinking of here exists only in non-formal uses of technology, if it is situated on a “line of becoming” that renders further and deeper intensities possible. Literary works can become bricolage if they arc gracefully enough through various contexts, personal, social, technological, theological… but is itself always guided by an abstract machine that keeps re-reading context:

It might be said that the schizophrenic passes from one code to the other, that he deliberately scrambles all the codes, by quickly shifting from one to another, according to the questions asking him, never giving the same explanation from one day to the next, never invoking the same geneology, never recording the same event in the same way. When he is more or less forced into it and is not in a touchy mood, he may even accept the banal Oedipal code, so long as he can stuff it full of disjunctions that this code was designed to eliminate. (p.15)

[25] Once again it is suitable to note C.G. Jung’s (1990) discussion of the essence of the feminine in relation to the words “Scheide” and “Abschied” as “separation and farewell” (p.317) in Symbols of Transformation. This is to say that the archetype of birth, life and relationship embodied in the feminine is also the archetype of cutting and releasement.

[26] “Gelassen,” “released-ness,” (c.f. Heidegger’s “Memorial Address”) is a German adjective, which means the quality that “allows” or “lets be” as opposed to “setting upon” and “stock-piling.” Gelassen is profoundly psychological in that it goes up against, for instance, the Freudian technological statement, “where Id is, there Ego shall be.” Freud’s statement constantly engages and civilizes or colonizes the wilderness parts of the soul. Heidegger’s sense of gelassen or Gelassenheit maintains a sense that the “ego” must somehow come to an accord with the wilderness of the “interior,” rather than just subduing it. Beyond this the “interior” must also be questioned as a bourgeios, sentimental refuge of power (particularly through Foucault’s discussion of the architecture which creates inwardness: the cloister, and ultimately the bourgeois bedroom). What can be said is that the wilderness exists, whether within or without, and that the most tricky task is to find a suitable balance with this strata of “nature” or wildness. We are reminded once again of the writings of Pseudo Dionysus: “Nature rests in nature. Nature conquers nature. Nature rests in nature again.” As such the civilizing/colonizing “setting upon” which forces “Nature” into a “stockpile” (German: Bestand, from Heidegger’s “Question concerning technology”)(Freud: Ego conquers Id) is itself the fearsome “sending of Being.” But art for Heidegger (1977) is precisely the questioning of the essence of technology which itself is “Nothing technological!” (p.317) As such this “questioning” is precisely at issue when we discuss the writings of Musil, Dostoevsky, or Murakami.

[27] Heidegger (1977) writes:

The fact that now, whenever we try to point to modern technology as the revealing that challenges, the words ‘setting upon,’ ‘ordering,’ ‘standing reserve,’ obtrude and accumulate in a dry, monotonous, and therefore oppressive way, has its basis in what is now coming to utterance.

Who accomplishes the challenging setting-upon through which what we call the real is revealed as the standing reserve? Obviously, man. To what extent is man capable of such a revealing? Man can, indeed, conceive, fashion, and carry through this or that in one way or another. But man does not have control over unconcealment itself, in which at any time the real shows itself or withdraws.” (p. 299)

[28] Beckett (1967), Stories and Texts for nothing: “Suddenly, no, at last, long last. I couldn’t any more. I couldn’t go on. Someone said, you can’t stay here. I couldn’t stay there and I couldn’t go on.” (p.75)

[29] Freud (1958) another play on the paradox of “fiction” (or “parable”) and “real life”:

The uncanny is depicted in literature, in stories and imaginative productions, merits in truth a separate discussion. To begin with it is a much more fertile province than the uncanny in real life, for it contains the whole of the latter and something more besides, something that cannot be found in real life. The distinction between what has been repressed [uncanny as repressed familiar feeling] and what has been surmounted cannot be transposed onto the uncanny in fiction without profound modification; for the realm of fantasy depends for its very existence on the fact that its content is not submitted to the reality-testing facility. The somewhat paradoxical result is that in the first place a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in real life; and in the second place that there are so many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life. [sic.] (pp.157-158)

[30] The discourse of refuse and waste is vital to the continual enchantment of modern society. Efficient and rapid disposal are key to modern life “above ground,” or “outside the alley.” Rousseau’s Confessions (C.f. Slattery’s writings in his comparison of the construction Rousseau’s Confessions to the Paris sewer system) mark the beginning of an ideological sewage system; society searches for a way of having an underground/underworld so that the day-world above ground can thrive and prosper. The problem is that the laws of the land of the dead or the “underworld” operate differently from the laws of the day-world.

[31] Murakami spoke about the image of the well and its relation to the unconscious:

But the subconscious is very important to me as a writer. I don't read much Jung, but what he writes has some similarity with my writing. To me the subconscious is terra incognita. I don't want to analyze it, but Jung and those people, psychiatrists, are always analyzing dreams and the significance of everything. I don't want to do that. I just take it as a whole. Maybe that's kind of weird, but I'm feeling like I can do the right thing with that weirdness. Sometimes it's very dangerous to handle that. You remember that scene in the mysterious hotel? I like the story of Orpheus, his descending, and this is based on that. The world of death and you enter there at your own risk. I think that I am a writer, and I can do that. I am taking my own risk. I have confidence that I can do it. (source: http://www.salon.com/books/int/1997/12/cov_si_16int3.html )

For Murakami there is yet another place discovered at the bottom of the well, and that is the hotel complex. If we follow Murakami’s parallel to Orpheus, the hotel is the very manifestation of a visit to hell. All sorts of things could be going on besides simple illicit affairs, this is the place where dreams and nightmares come true.

There are in fact different hotels. In A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) Murakami describes “The Dolphin Hotel” as “a small place totally undistinguished. Its undistinguishedness was metaphysical. It wasn’t particularly old; still it was strikingly run down. Most likely it was run down when it was built.” (p. 192). In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997) the hotel takes on a chic modern appearance, not at all run down, yet eerie in its flawless, crepuscular darkness.

[32] Toru Okada in the book is in his early thirties, in the beginning of the middle of his life. This is an undeniable allusion to Dante, who begins “In the middle of the road of our life” in a dark wood of obscurity. Dante is lost to the light of normal, everyday life, just as Okada (of Murakami) is lost to that very same life down in the well. It may be argued that Dante and Murakami are searching out of this darkness and obscurity for a sense of Heidegger’s (1977) “dwelling” (p. 323 ff.). However “dwelling” cannot come into being without the suffering of “cutting and releasement.”

[33] This unpacking and play of the image of a detail, this “potato-chip-bag” might be compared to Heidegger’s (1975) discussion of Van Gogh’s painting of peasant’s shoes, which take on the possibility of human “dwelling” in his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art”:

From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heavyness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through far reaching and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoe vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexpected self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. The equipment is pervaded by the uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want.” (pp. 33-34)

The potato chip bag is simply exhausted. The poetry is still lacking in most men’s voice to speak for a discarded plastic-mylar bag, tossed in the wind or by the whimsy of chance into the well.

[34] Trungpa (2004) writes in Transcending Madness (available on the web at: http://childoffortune.com/transcend.mad.htm#Bardo

Bardo is a Tibetan word: bar means "in between" or, you could say, "no-man's land," and do is like a tower or an island in that no-man's land. It's like a flowing river which belongs neither to the other shore nor to this shore, but there is a little island in the middle, in between. In other words, it is present experience, the immediate experience of nowness--where you are, where you're at. That is the basic idea of bardo.

[35] Something about the discourse of interior/exterior is extremely limiting, and may be the product of some form of carceral game or machine.

[36] Murakami (1998) brilliantly illustrates the genius and selfishness of the virgin, who never wants to become a mother, rather wishing to remain virginal forever. In a sense the very wish to remain a virgin is at the same time the archetype that defiles virgin beauty:

Can I be honest with you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? I mean really, really, really honest? Sometimes I get sooo scared! I’ll wake up in the middle of the night all alone, hundreds of miles away from anybody, it’s pitch dark, and I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen to me in the future, and I get so scared I want to scream. Does this happen to you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? When it happens, I try to remind myself that I am connected to others – other things and other people. I work as hard as I can to list their names in my head. On the list, of course, is you, Mr Wind-Up Bird, and the alley, and the well, and the persimmon tree, and that kind of thing. And the wigs that I’ve made here with my own hands. And the little bits and pieces I remember about the boy. All these little things (though you’re not just another one of those little things, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, but anyhow…) help me come back “here” little by little. Then I start to feel sorry I never really let my boyfriend see me naked or touch me. Back then, I was absolutely determined not to let him put his hands on me. Sometimes, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, I think I’d like to stay a virgin the rest of my life. What do you think about that?

Bye-bye, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. I hope Kumiko comes back soon. (p.449)

[37] One of my favorite childhood nursery rhymes was from Doctor Seuss about something “freakish,” Green Eggs and Ham: “Could you, would you, in a box? Would you, could you, with a fox…?” What makes Green Eggs and Ham a staple of literature is its freakishness. Nobody wants to eat green eggs and ham. We are all peevish as Toru Okada, who wants to be left the hell alone. To consume the green eggs and ham is to consume the weird and wacky food of the unconscious itself, to who knows what sort of alarming, disastrous or salutary effect! “Try them, try them you will see!”

[38] Creta physically looks the same size as Toru’s wife and even wants to wear the wife’s clothing, Murakami (1998): “The sight of Creta Kano in Kumiko’s clothing made me feel once again that reality was changing its direction somewhat, the way a huge passenger ship lumbers into a new course.” (p. 309). Such a desire to wear the wife’s clothing for this new woman, the way she fits into the wife’s clothes is nothing less than eerie.

[39] This is an entry point for Thomas Moore’s (1996) Dark Eros:

To “own” the libertine, and not just girlishness, implies that we can transcend the boundaries of morality and propriety that give the ego a certain effective, yet narrow, supporting structure. Being innocent we feel fine about ourselves. The Sadean point, however, is to find self-acceptance even in the presence of genuine guilt. Imagine a government that acknowledged its capacity for violence, that offered no pretense of false innocence. It could be strong without the loss of true innocence. If the United States were to examine its soul in light of Hiroshima, it would loose innocence altogether, but it might be initiated into a new honesty of intention and genuine power might coexist. (p.43)

[40] Jung (1970) writes:

The self, in its efforts at self realization, reaches out beyond the ego personality on all sides; because of its all encompassing nature it is brighter and darker than the ego, and accordingly confronts it with problems which it would like to avoid. Either one’s moral courage fails, or one’s insight, or both, until in the end fate decides. (pp. 545-546)

[41] Heigegger (1977) in “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” has the best sense of what one must do or live as a “mortal,” in the light of the Geviert, or “four-fould” (p.329): the gods who dwell in the heavens and men who dwell upon the earth.

[42] Jung (1970) wrote of Michael Maier’s “Journey through the Planetary Houses,” “life never goes forward except at the place where it has come to a standstill.” (p.225)

[43] I am tempted to speculate that while Murakami has written a parable where the main character does not get his wife back, whereas in his own life Haruki Murakami has maintained a long partnership with his own spouse, Yoko. In effect Murakami has in the Wind-up Bird Chronicle effected the message of Kafka’s parable on “parables:” “you have won only in reality, in parable you have lost!”

[44] This is the wound of the Kafka (1971) parable of “The Country Doctor” where the doctor is forcibly stripped naked and then placed beside the boy’s horrendous, maggot infested wound. The wound produces nakedness, abjection and abject poverty, not empowerment. The doctor (iatros) attempts to “correct the situation” on the basis of ideals, Hippocratic oath, social convention. But the situation is just much too bizarre to be contained on the social level. In the Kafka story the doctor is forced outside into the blizzard of snow, he witnesses his horses, his animal drive, born steaming from out of a stall or a pigsty, and he gets on and rides! He rides off into the infinite or the darkness of the night, it really doesn’t matter. In a similar manner Okada is unable to redeem his own marriage, it remains thrust open, forcing his nakedness, and simultaneously the moment where he “winds up” and takes a blind swing for a moment’s connection.

[45] The Kobe quake in 1995 shook up Japanese society in a profound manner. The city of Kobe itself was too deeply crippled to be of much help to itself in the first days after the quake, yet it was too proud and stubborn to ask the government for the ample assistance available. It was a debacle of pride and sadness that ripped at the hearts of many in Japan, tore and ruptured once again against the “old guard” mentality of complete self sufficiency, insularity and coldness. The up-swelling of support for Kobe, shortly after the extent of the disaster was revealed, spoke of a moment of altruistic “reaching out” of the Japanese people toward each other. Murakami wrote this series of short stories based on the rupture and connection that was created round the ache or wound of the Kobe quake.

[46] The experience of “falling in love” is an experience of falling into a moment of “child’s psyche.” It is no accident that Cupid/Eros is represented as a child. In this way the infantile experience of falling in love can be equated to the infantile experience of religion itself. Freud (Gay, 1989) writes:

…Between the father complex and man’s helplessness and need for protection…

These connections are not hard to find. They consist in the relation of the child’s helplessness to the helplessness of the adult which continues it. So that, as was to be expected, the motives for the formulation of religion which psychoanalysis revealed now turn out to be the same as the infantile contribution to the manifest motives. Let us transport ourselves into the mental life of a child. You remember the choice of object according to the anaclitic (attachment) type, which psychoanalysis talks of? The libido there follows the same paths of narcissistic needs and attaches itself to the objects which ensure the satisfaction of those needs. In this way the mother, who satisfies the child’s hunger, becomes its first love-object and certainly also its first protection against all the undefined dangers which threaten it in the external world – its first protection against anxiety, we may say. (p. 699)

[47] Rilke (Bly, 2004) writes, discussed in David Whyte’s Poetry of Self-Compassion:

It's possible I am pushing through solid rock

in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;

I am such a long way in I see no way through,

and no space: everything is close to my face,

and everything close to my face is stone.

I don't have much knowledge yet in grief --

so this massive darkness makes me small.

You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:

then your great transforming will happen to me,

and my great grief cry will happen to you.

(Source: http://home.earthlink.net/~mdmeighan/solidrock.txt )

[48] Jung (CW vol. 5, 1970) writes on transformation, with regard in a sense to the psychotic outpouring of Frog into the imagination of Katagiri in “Superfrog Saves Tokyo”:

When such an invasion happens, we are often faced with a situation in which the unconscious overtakes or “takes over” the conscious mind. The latter has somehow got stuck, with the result that the unconscious takes over the forward-striving function, the process of transformation in time, and breaks the deadlock. The contents then pouring into consciousness are archetypal representations of what the conscious mind should have experienced if the deadlock was to be avoided. (p.397)

The interpretation here is that socially and collectively “mass man” does not get the vital experiences of the unconscious that he has been neglecting, his need to become a kind of super-hero in the face of the odds of reality, or that he is unable to equate his drudgery with the heroic sacrifice necessary for life to continue, thereby the sacrifice returns with redoubled strength and vehemence in the sensitive, amphibian body of the frog.

[49] The terms “black hole” and “line of flight” have particular significance for Deleuze and Guattari (1991). The black hole is a kind of terminus of creative possibility, the imperceptible libidinal economy of the exchange of living images is expressed in the “line of flight”

[50] Whitney (1983) in the film A Matter of Heart interviews Sir Laurens Van Der Post, speaking:

…Calvin fought very desperately to have the Book of Revelations removed from the Bible because he called it a dark and dangerously obscure book. But it is very meaningful because it’s the one book which suggests that the revelation of God doesn’t end with the coming of Christ, there is more to come. That religion is a continuing process of revelation, and experiencing of revelation, and being obedient to your greater awareness of becoming in life. (transcript, p.22)