Window Washing Day

My cubicle is located next to the window and today, on the other side of this window, are two dudes in a box that appears to be hanging from the sky, wiping at the other side of the glass. It is ridiculous that I am in such close proximity to two people in such a different place! Whereas I have to take an elevator down over 30 flights to go out, they are out there, with this wild possibility of falling that they are constantly reminded of as they swing slightly in the air. I wish I could join them today. It's nice outside.

Also, this window washing pleasantly reminds me of this Haruki Murakami story that was published in the New Yorker a month or two ago; great story. It is what started me reading him somewhat obsessively. He's pretty popular right now, as you can tell by his being in the New Yorker, after all, and on the front tables in the Strand bookstore, but he apparently hasn't historically been too popular in his native Japan. The interview excerpt below touches on this.

This is another good story by him... It starts off with this:

"Nineteen-seventy-one was the Year of Spaghetti.

In 1971, I cooked spaghetti to live, and lived to cook spaghetti. Steam rising from the pot was my pride and joy, tomato sauce bubbling up in the saucepan my one great hope in life."

Excerpts from a Salon Interview from 1997 (by Laura Miller) with Murakami:
The heroes in Haruki Murakami's dazzling, addictive and rather strange novels ("A Wild Sheep Chase," "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World") don't fit the stereotype of conformist, work-obsessed Japanese men at all. They're dreamy, brainy introverts, drunk on culture (high and pop), with a tendency to get mixed up with mysterious women and outlandish conspiracies.

Do they have a problem with what you write?

I love pop culture -- the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that. That's why I said I don't like elitism. I like horror films, Stephen King, Raymond Chandler, detective stories. I don't want to write those things. What I want to do is use those structures, not the content. I like to put my content in that structure. That's my way, my style. So both of those kinds of writers don't like me. Entertainment writers don't like me, and serious literature people don't like me. I'm kind of in-between, doing a new kind of thing. That's why I couldn't find my position in Japan for many years. But I'm feeling that things are changing drastically. I'm gaining more territory. I have had my very loyal readers in these 15 years or so. They're buying my books, and they're on my side. The writers and critics are not on my side.

I'm feeling responsibility as a Japanese writer more and more as I gain territory. That's what's happening to me right now and that's why I came back to Japan two years ago. Last year I wrote a book about the sarin gas attack on the subway train in Tokyo in March 1995. I interviewed 63 victims who were on the train that day. I did it because I wanted to interview ordinary Japanese people. It was a weekday, a Monday morning -- 8:30 or something like that. They were commuting to the center of Tokyo. It was packed, as you know, rush hour, and you can't move, you're like this [hunches shoulders together]. But they are very hard-working people, ordinary people, ordinary Japanese, and they were attacked with poison gas for no reason at all. It was ridiculous. I just wanted to know what happened to them. Who are those people? So I interviewed them one by one. It took one year, but I was impressed to find who those people are.

So, I myself hate those company people -- salarymen, businesspeople. But after those interviews, I had some compassion for them. Honestly, I don't know why they are working so hard. Some of them got up at 5:30 in the morning to commute to the center of Tokyo. It takes more than two hours by train, all of it packed like this [hunches]. You can't even read a book. But they are doing that for 30 or 40 years. That's incredible to me. They come home at 10 p.m. and their kids are sleeping. The only day they see their children is Sunday. It's horrible. But they don't complain. So I asked them why not and they said it's no use. It's what all the people are doing, so there's no reason to complain.

You say that imagination is very important in your works. Sometimes your novels are very realistic, and then sometimes they get very ... metaphysical.

I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much. Myself, I'm a very realistic person. I don't trust anything New Age -- or reincarnation, dreams, Tarot, horoscopes. I don't trust anything like that at all. I wake up at 6 in the morning and go to bed at 10, jogging every day and swimming, eating healthy food. I'm very realistic. But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird. When I want to write about the reality of society and the world, it gets weird. Many people ask me why, and I can't answer that. But I recognized when I was interviewing those 63 ordinary people -- they were very straightforward, very simple, very ordinary, but their stories were sometimes very weird. That was interesting. -H. Murakami.