#The little I’ve seen seems to have devolved into a high school girls bathroom.

[cozymochi]

mochi, I just wanna remind you that your work is appreciated and your creativity is something I admire greatly

The detail and effort you put in each drawing always comes through in the end. I could truly stare forever at a single piece and still find things I haven't noticed before

I use your drawings often as references for shading (something I struggle with) and it has helped me in a big way

We adore you, mochi. You are a lovely member of the twisted wonderland artist community, and I wish you all the best online and in life

ahh, thank u mysterious shadow person 🩷 at least something’s helping somewhere 😭 thO i promise i don’t really know what i’m doing either and i call my creativity into question on a constant basis

but that’s still nice to say— mostly cuz I pretty much prescribe to the usual expected “haha i see this and move on instantly” assumption thanks to the way current internet mass consumption is set up. That and lol I don’t really think I’m doing anything all that notable or distinct enough to warrant much fanfare. Or anything interesting lol. So on, and forth etc. etc. I literally can’t even take normal compliments without suspicion

I AM NORMAL (questionable)

I’ll probably see my stuff reposted excessively to Pinterest though. (Not a flex)

thank u tho 😭 sorry idk what to really say im kinda notoriously bad at this

[pinelife3]

Getting Short Stories

I read the short story “The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women” by Haruki Marukami last weekend. I really enjoyed it - until it finished. Because then it was obvious the story wasn’t going to give me any more help to understand it. Of course, I thought about if after I finished it, still trying to get whatever Murakami was on about. And I’m still thinking about it now. I don’t get it.

(Disclaimer: I cannot give you a clear definition of what it means to get it. It’s the same as when a poem works. It’s something clicking into place. Something you couldn’t learn on Wikipedia. Sweeping clear new pathways in how you think about something. I’d argue that you can get something from a piece of media without explicitly getting the media itself (for example, I love “Burnt Norton” but it is pretty inscrutable to me). Equally, you can get something without really caring about it (see: the more recent seasons of Black Mirror) - but that’s not all that interesting to talk about.)

“The Semplica-Girl Diaries” by George Saunders is an example of a short story I like and get: the character’s actions and motivations are sometimes surprising but still make sense, the world is vivid and interesting, the writing is highlightable, and I think I understand what Saunders is trying to say. Or - if I’ve misunderstood what he’s saying, I’ve been able to wring something satisfying out of it on my own. It means something to me, and I feel moved by the story and its ideas in some inarticulable way. I think I read it in a food court.

“The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women” was published in The New Yorker in 1990 and then made its way into Murakami’s 1993 book of short stories The Elephant Vanishes (published in English in ‘93 - it wasn’t published in Japanese until 2005). Probably like many people who have bought the book in the past year, I was inspired to read it after seeing the Korean film Burning (which is based on a story in the collection called “Barn Burning”). Also, I haven’t read any Murakami (that’s a lie: I tried to read Norwegian Wood when I was 21 but didn’t have much patience for it and gave up after ~100 pages) and thought this might be a low-effort way of remedying that.

In terms of the action of the story, The New Yorker summarises it well: 

The narrator, a resident of Tokyo, has quit his job in a law office, and is living as a house husband. One Tuesday morning he receives a phone call from an unknown woman, who says she will help him "come to an understanding," if he'll give her ten minutes. Busy cooking spaghetti for brunch, he hangs up. Later, his wife calls to tell him of a job prospect, as poet and poetry editor of a magazine for young girls. She also asks him to look for their missing cat; it's named Noboru Watanabe, after the wife's brother. She thinks it's in the yard of an abandoned house on their street. In his own yard, the narrator hears a bird screeching; he doesn't know what species of bird it is, but he and his wife think of it as the windup bird: it's there each morning, as if to wind up their world. That afternoon the mysterious woman calls back, and tries to have an erotic dialogue with the narrator. After he hangs up, the phone rings again; he doesn't answer. At the abandoned house, a young girl coaxes him to sunbathe with her. She tells him a fantasy about ripping up a corpse to get at "the lump of death itself." That night, his wife angrily accuses him of killing the cat. He writes a poem: Noboru Watanabe Where have you gone? Did the windup bird Stop winding your spring? The telephone begins ringing once again, but neither the narrator nor his wife will answer it.

This is basically the extent of the story but there are some weird details that add flavour. For example, the protagonist seems to have an auditory fixation. A lot of the story is about him listening to female voices (side note: Murakami is known for having a thing for ears - or formerly having a thing for ears). When a woman calls him on the phone, he makes much of his ability to place voices but has difficulty placing hers. Eventually, their conversation devolves into what is essentially phone sex. He hangs up and avoids answering the phone for the rest of the day, although it keeps ringing. The narrator describes a secret garden path/passage with no entrance or exit. It runs behind all of the houses in his block, so when he walks down it, he has a view into everyone’s backyards: he can see their washing, smell their cooking, etc. He is surprised and suspicious that his wife is familiar with this corridor. (If this were high school English I would be hammering home that the blocked in tunnel is a metaphor for the protagonist’s directionless existence, etc.) The ‘young girl’/teenager mentioned in the summary above, is described as crippled/limping and she mentions that she’s taking the year off school while her leg heals after a bike accident. He falls asleep in a deckchair in her garden while she talks to him. When he wakes up she’s gone. This never goes anywhere. The phone sex never goes anywhere. The corridor never goes anywhere. 

The passages about the wind-up bird are brief and seem trivial while you’re reading them: just lazy, dreamy thoughts from our unemployed protagonist as he drifts off to sleep on a warm Tuesday afternoon:

A regular wind-up toy this world is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world. Alone in this fun house, only I grown old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me. Yet even as I sleep somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, wind-up birds everywhere are busy at work fulfilling their appointed rounds.

Okay... sure. Clearly, the bird has some significance, but the protagonist spends an equal amount of time thinking about spaghetti. What I also find difficult is that people’s emotions, reactions and motivations in the story don’t make sense. When his wife yells at him at the end of the story, accusing him of killing their cat, I wondered if maybe she was trying to pick a fight, if she’s sick of the marriage and wants out. I also thought she might be more distressed because the cat is named after her brother - how do you tell your brother that the cat you named after him is lost, probably dead. What would that symbolise? Still, to me she seems like an unreasonable person because the way her emotions escalate (apparently without any real trigger) is seriously out of step with normal human behaviour:

I emerge from an after-dinner bath to find my wife sitting all alone the darkened living room. I throw on a gray shirt and fumble through the dark to reach where she’s been dumped like a piece of luggage. She looks so utterly forsaken. If only they’d left her in another spot, she might have seemed happier.

...I take a seat on the sofa opposite her. “What’s the matter?” I ask. “The cat’s dead, I just know it,” my wife says. “Oh c’mon,” I protest. “He’s just off exploring. Soon enough he’ll get hungry and head on back. The same thing happened once before, remember? That time when we were still living in Koenji -” “This time it’s different. I can feel it. The cat’s dead and rotting away in the weeds. Did you search the grass in the vacant house?” “Hey no, stop it. It may be a vacant house, but it’s somebody’s house. I’m not about to go trespassing.” “You killed it!” my wife accuses.

I heave a sigh and give my head another once-over with the towel.

“You killed it with that look of yours!” she repeats from the darkness. “How does that follow?” I say. “The cat disappeared of its own doing. It’s not my fault. That much you’ve got to see.” “You! You never liked that cat, anyway!” “Okay, maybe so,” I admit. “At least I wasn’t as crazy about the cat as you were. Still, I never mistreated it. I fed it every day. Just because I wasn’t enthralled with the little bugger doesn’t mean I killed it. Start saying things like that and I end up having killed half the people on earth.” “Well, that’s you all over,” my wife delivers her verdict. “That’s just so you. Always, always that way. You kill everything without ever playing a hand.”

I am about to counter when she bursts into tears. I can the speech and toss the towel in the bathroom basket, go to the kitchen, take a beer out of the refrigerator, and chug. What an impossible day it’s been!

Am I dumb? Do I not understand adult relationships? Because this seems like a very weird exchange to me. Does the way he reacts to her accusations, with exasperation rather than anger or surprise, suggest that he’s seen her behave like this before? A pop culture analogue: remember the video of Solange beating up Jay-Z in an elevator after the 2014 Met Gala?

Jay-Z is in the white suit. Solange is the one hitting him. There’s a bodyguard trying to keep them apart. And Beyoncé is standing there calmly - not getting involved, just trying to protect her outfit. Here they are directly after the incident.

What a fucking pro. Thousand yard smile. 

At the time, speculation was rife about what Jay-Z did to trigger such a beating (in italics because it’s still surprising that everyone was so okay with the domestic violence). What really thrilled people was the crack in the facade of perfection. A glimpse into their lives that hadn’t been perfectly curated, something we were never meant to see. The common read was that Jay-Z must have done something because otherwise Beyoncé would have stepped in to protect him. The consensus now is that Solange had found out that he’d cheated on her sister. Maybe even that he’d done something at the Gala. This is all now part of the Carter canon because they’ve referenced it in their music to great commercial and critical success.

Another interesting interpretation was that perhaps Beyoncé had seen Solange raging and uncontrollable many times before and knew how to weather the storm. Maybe Solange has a temper when she drinks? Maybe she’ll have an outburst, and all you can do is stay out of the way and ignore it until the mood passes and she sobers up. Perhaps her family is used to this behaviour. There’s no point engaging or trying to reason with her, you just have to let her get it out and then smile for the press at the elevator doors. 

As with Beyoncé, maybe our protagonist is accustomed to bad behaviour: recriminations, tears, tantrums. You kill everything. Most people would want to dig in if their partner said something like that. But perhaps it doesn’t trigger such a strong reaction in him anymore. Another odd behavioural detail, perhaps again showing the protagonist’s muted response to the world, is that he is pretty indifferent to the mysterious phone call. He resolves not to answer the phone, but is otherwise not at all curious about who’s calling him. If I received a call like that from a shadowy stranger, I would sacrifice a great deal to find out who was behind it. I know I’m not alone here - because, as every scammer knows, the most efficient way to get someone to open an email which it is in their best interest to not open (full of malware, spyware, etc.), is to include a declaration of love or romantic interest in the subject line.

Searching for some connection between the events of the story, I wondered if maybe the wife hired the woman on the phone to seduce her husband so that she’d have a concrete reason to divorce him. But this doesn’t really track because just earlier in the day she was encouraging him to stay a house husband - why would she do that if she wanted to leave him? 

There are lots of weird details in the story, none of which signify much to me. Our protagonist is unemployed, he doesn’t have much to do and isn’t looking for much to do, his voice as narrator is anxious, circular, repetitive. The key themes seem to be curiosity, restlessness, loneliness, directionlessness, nessness, etc. But unless the point is that everything that happened in the story was pointless, and that’s supposed to echo the protagonist’s torpor, I don’t get it. Basically every major plot element is still a question mark - are we supposed to dismiss those as magical realism or wishful thinking on the part of the protagonist and move on with our lives, never being curious about who the lady on the telephone is, or why the girl has a messed up leg and won’t go to school? I can’t do it. I want to know! I want to get it.   

Fortunately for us, Murakami wrote a novel called The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle which spins off the short story into the first chapter of the novel and runs from there. Do you think it answers any of my questions above?

Remember the cat named after the wife’s brother? In the novel, the brother is an incestuous rapist. Maybe that is why the narrator doesn’t care for the cat much. Maybe that’s why the wife is accusing her husband of killing it? Some kind of wishful thinking? Still, we don’t get any background on the relationship with her brother until The Wind-up Bird Chronicle so you’re kind of grasping at air in the short story. 

In a chapter of the novel apparently not published in English versions (according to Wikipedia, Vintage, the English publisher, was concerned the book was too long so they had the translator cut about 61 pages from the original 1,379 pages), it is revealed that the phone sex lady was actually his wife. Twist! In the short story he said of the woman’s voice:

I have absolutely no recollection of ever heading this woman’s voice before. And I pride myself on a near-perfect ear for voices, so I’m sure there’s no mistake. This is the voice of a woman I don’t know. A soft, low nondescript voice.

I presume his skill for placing voices isn’t in the novel. Because that seems like a pretty lame trick to pull on your reader. It’s one thing to have an unreliable narrator. But an incompetent, overconfident one is just setting you up for a shitty experience. That’s a book I don’t want to read. I also don’t want to read it because it’s 1,318 pages, so that’s that.

Perhaps it’s wrong to judge Murakami based on one short story. But he put this one at the start of the book! And actually (even though I’ve read hardly any of his stuff) I would argue this story is probably representative of his work. Check out this Murakami bingo card:

Appearing in “The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women”:

Mysterious woman

Ear fetish? Perhaps not - but, like I said, an auditory fixation for sure

Unexpected phone call

Cats

Urban ennui

Secret passageway

Precocious teenager

Cooking

Vanishing cats

This story is in his usual stylistic neighborhood. He’s got to be comfy here. 

What do people like about Murakami? Does his writing make me feel like the universe is singing a song? Certainly, this story has stuck with me. By which I mean, it plagues my every waking thought. It torments me. It twists my toes backwards, blocks the drain of my shower with hair, corrupts my Excel files. It is a blight I shall bear for the rest of my life: who was on the phone? Not only do I not get Murakami, but I don’t get what others might like about him. Like I said at the top, I did enjoy reading this story because there were tantalising threads. I could tolerate the dull inner monologue about the narrator’s erstwhile legal career and how he felt as he drifted off for an afternoon nap if there were a resolution to at least one of the story’s mysteries. But this story does not pay off. Not even a little bit. The idea that you need to read 1,300 more pages for a resolution is frustrating. In 2014, The Guardian covered an event where Murakami spoke about The Wind-up Bird Chronicle:

The author of 13 novels and many short stories admitted to having completely forgotten what he has written – or indeed why – when asked about specific plot points, without seeming bothered at all. “Really?” and “I don’t remember that” were two of his most frequent answers, and he had the audience laughing at his frankness every time. “It was published 20 years ago and I haven’t read it since then!” he said of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, around which the event centred...

“I don’t have any idea at all, when I start writing, of what is to come. For instance, for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the first thing I had was the call of the bird, because I heard a bird in my back yard (it was the first time I heard that kind of sound and I never have since then. I felt like it was predicting something. So I wanted to write about it). The next thing was cooking spaghetti – these are things that happen to me! I was cooking spaghetti, and somebody call. So I had just these two things at the start. Two years I kept on writing. It’s fun! I don’t know what’s going to happen next, every day. I get up, go to the desk, switch on the computer, etc. and say to myself: “so what’s going to happen today?” It’s fun!” 

Fun for you, maybe.

I don’t think a feature of good fiction is wacky shit inexplicably occurring with no explanation or follow up - otherwise, it’s not a narrative.

I don’t need every plot line neatly resolved, and I don’t need to be told explicitly what everything means (I’m happy to do some legwork on my own) but none of the plot points are resolved at all in "The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women”. In fiction, as in life, I want things to be connected, to have a cause and effect relationship. I want things to make sense: to have a trigger, make an impact, be remembered. Even if the trigger is hidden, I want people to react to the things happening around them in a plausible way. Ideally, I want to think the things in the story mattered. 

“Up in Michigan” by Hemingway is a short story I like. It’s an interesting depiction of sexual politics, innocent female affection, etc. As I’ve gotten older, the reasons I like it have changed. When I read it when I was 20, I felt some kind of feminine kinship across time with the protagonist because she falls for the wrong guy, and her romanticism is crushed by the weight of the drunk guy she likes falling asleep on her after some bad sex, and she loses a little bit of herself that night - yes, her virginity but also some trust and whatever. And now I find it kind of amusing because you know Hemingway killed with the ladies and probably played the heart breaker (or the drunk dude falling asleep on some poor girl) a hundred times over so it’s funny to imagine Hemingway in his early 20s, having just got done stomping some girl’s romantic aspirations, then sitting down to write this story, all soulful and sensitive, as if he gave a fuck about girls crying over boys who will never like them. Still, Hemingway’s short stories fucking kill. Killing fuck. They’re good. In “Up in Michingan” as in many of Hemingway’s stories, things are implied rather than uttered (as per the law in Hemingwayland), so sometimes you don’t know the background to a conversation and have to deduce what two characters are talking about, but the dynamic between them is revealed through dialog and their actions. You may not understand why something happened, and often there’s no narrator to help you out, but you infer how people feel about it and what it means to them. Not everything needs to happen for a reason: sometimes babies are born with cancer, sometimes the guy you like doesn’t like you back, sometimes guys get into fights outside bars, sometimes you meet a weird teenager in a secret garden path. But the things that happen should matter to you, to your reader, and to your protagonist, at least a little bit. Otherwise what’s the point?