Murakami Ryu: The only book I had in my bag that day

 

The only book I had in my bag that day was a supplementary reader for our school textbook, Japanese Language and Literature. I reluctantly pulled it out and started flipping through the pages. I wasn’t what you’d call a reader, who goes through books systematically and attentively, but more the type who finds it hard to pass the time without something to read. I could never just sit, still and silent. I always had to be turning the pages of a book or listening to music, one or the other. When there was no book lying around, I’d grab anything printed. I’d read a phone book, an instruction manual for a steam iron. Compared with those kinds of reading material, a supplementary reader for a Japanese-language textbook was far better. I randomly flipped through the fiction and essays in the book. A few pieces were by foreign authors, but most were by well-known modern Japanese writers—Ryuˉnosuke Akutagawa, Junichiroˉ Tanizaki, Kobo Abe, and the like. And appended to each work—all excerpts, except for a handful of very short stories—were some questions. Most of these questions were totally meaningless. With meaningless questions, it’s hard (or impossible) to determine logically if an answer is correct or not. I doubted whether even the authors of the selections themselves would have been able to decide. Things like “What can you glean from this passage about the writer’s stance toward war?” or “When the author describes the waxing and waning of the moon, what sort of symbolic effect is created?” You could give almost any answer. If you said that the description of the waxing and waning of the moon was simply a description of the waxing and waning of the moon, and created no symbolic effect, no one could say with certainty that your answer was wrong. Of course there was a relatively reasonable answer, but I didn’t really think that arriving at a relatively reasonable answer was one of the goals of studying literature.

Be that as it may, I killed time by trying to conjure up answers to each of these questions. And, in most cases, what sprang to mind—in my brain, which was still growing and developing, struggling every day to attain a kind of psychological independence—were the sorts of answers that were relatively unreasonable but not necessarily wrong. Maybe that tendency was one of the reasons that my grades at school were no great shakes.

Carnaval was an early work, so the evil spirits of his weren’t showing their faces clearly yet. Since the piece is about the carnival festival, it’s full of figures wearing cheerful-looking masks, but this was not merely some happy carnival. Ultimately the evil spirits lurking within him do make an appearance in the piece, one after the other, as if introduced for a moment, wearing happy carnival masks. All around them, an ominous early-spring wind is blowing. Meat, dripping with blood, is served to everyone. Carnival is literally the festival of thankfulness for meat, and a farewell to it, as Lent begins. That’s exactly the kind of music it is.”

“So the performer has to express, musically, both the mask and the face that lies beneath it for all the characters who appear. Is that what you’re saying?” I asked.

She nodded. “That’s right. That’s exactly right. If you can’t express that sentiment, then what’s the point in performing it? The piece is the ideal of playful music, but within that playfulness, you can catch a glimpse of the specters lurking inside the psyche. The playful sounds lure them out from the darkness.” “All of us, more or less, wear masks. Because without masks we can’t survive in this violent world. Beneath an evil-spirit mask lies the natural face of an angel, beneath an angel’s mask lies the face of an evil spirit. It’s impossible to have just one or the other. That’s who we are. And that’s Carnaval. Schumann was able to see the many faces of humanity—the masks and the real faces—because he himself was a deeply divided soul, a person who lived in the stifling gap in between the two.”