I’m reading this book now. 1985 — a book from nearly 40 years ago.
So many lines in it cut right into me. When I say “cut,” I mean this young man is in pain — he grabs a knife and stabs himself, and he stabs the “society” called “Japan.” And I get cut too.
“I’m bitter. It galls me to have been born a person of a defeated nation. Because of a war that happened before I was even born, some part of me is already defined. I’ve become complicated. Hard to make sense of.”
“And it planted a ‘mixed-blood sensibility’ in me, too.”
“It was only natural that Yukio Mishima, who was truly brilliant, and Yasunari Kawabata, whose sensibility was tied to Japan, fell into despair. If you ask me, I simply can’t understand how the old writers go on blithely doing something like literary criticism without even taking their own lives.”
Maybe Ryu Murakami’s core theme, his center, never changes. Everybody’s core theme is different.
As far back as I can remember, I’ve been chasing music and war since I was 14. My views shift with each experience and each stage, but even 40 years on, that’s still my theme.
Ryu Murakami, just past 30. So delicate, so straight. I’m amazed he didn’t die. Akutagawa, Mishima — they killed themselves, didn’t they.
One of the reasons he didn’t die may be Cuba and music. That’s where he came back to life. It wasn’t just that he got hooked on Cuban salsa — it meant something really important.
How am I supposed to write that?
Maybe — somewhere around Cuba and “KYOKO” (1995–1996), the pain of the wound inside him got worked through, and his style and his themes changed completely.
For his longtime readers and consumers, that might make them go, “Huh?”
For example, in the 1980s, when Motoharu Sano went to New York and his sound changed completely, many fans left. I stopped listening too. Users and consumers say irresponsible things about the product (the person).
Now, for some reason, I’ve turned into a kind of “Ryu Murakami researcher.”
Maybe he’s the writer who wrote about Japanese society, the Japanese heart, after the defeat. The conflicts of that time, the warping the defeat left behind — the things so many Japanese look away from — he managed to pour into literature and leave them written down.
War, America, music, Cuba. Japan. Maybe there’s something to me doing this too. Anyway, I’m at it. Heating costs too much, so I’m bundled up under a blanket, reading.
What am I doing? Defeat, America, music, Cuba — I’m gathering all of that from my own words and from Ryu’s past words, and building a site out of it. In English, Spanish, and Japanese.