Rice with Tiny Pandas in It: A Post Extensively Quoting Haruki Murakami

From Haruki Murakami's acceptance speech for The Jerusalem Prize:

I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on The System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist's job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories - stories of life and death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.

Some more Murakami, from one of my favorite stories of his, "On Meeting the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning":

After talking, we'd have lunch somewhere, maybe see a Woody Allen movie, stop by a hotel bar for cocktails. With any kind of luck, we might end up in bed.

Potentiality knocks on the door of my heart.

Now the distance between us has narrowed to fifteen yards.

How can I approach her? What should I say?

"Good morning, miss. Do you think you could spare half an hour for a little conversation?"

Ridiculous. I'd sound like an insurance salesman.

"Pardon me, but would you happen to know if there is an all-night cleaners in the neighborhood?"

No, this is just as ridiculous. I'm not carrying any laundry, for one thing. Who's going to buy a line like that?

Maybe the simple truth would do. "Good morning. You are the 100% perfect girl for me."

No, she wouldn't believe it. Or even if she did, she might not want to talk to me. Sorry, she could say, I might be the 100% perfect girl for you, but you're not the 100% boy for me. It could happen. And if I found myself in that situation, I'd probably go to pieces. I'd never recover from the shock. I'm thirty-two, and that's what growing older is all about. 

Excited for the American publication of 1Q84, which happens Tuesday. Excerpt from the beginning at Asymptote:

How many people could recognize Janáček's Sinfonietta after hearing just the first few bars? Probably somewhere between "very few" and "almost none." But for some reason, Aomame was one of the few who could.

Other excerpt from 1Q84, from a few months ago in The New Yorker (entitled "Town of Cats"), which I loved:

Tengo, by contrast, was curious about everything. He absorbed knowledge from a broad range of fields with the efficiency of a power shovel scooping earth. He had been regarded as a math prodigy from early childhood, and he could solve high-school math problems by the time he was in third grade. Math was, for young Tengo, an effective means of retreat from his life with his father. In the mathematical world, he would walk down a long corridor, opening one numbered door after another. Each time a new spectacle unfolded before him, the ugly traces of the real world would simply disappear. As long as he was actively exploring that realm of infinite consistency, he was free.

While math was like a magnificent imaginary building for Tengo, literature was a vast magical forest. Math stretched infinitely upward toward the heavens, but stories spread out before him, their sturdy roots stretching deep into the earth. In this forest there were no maps, no doorways. As Tengo got older, the forest of story began to exert an even stronger pull on his heart than the world of math. Of course, reading novels was just another form of escape—as soon as he closed the book, he had to come back to the real world. But at some point he noticed that returning to reality from the world of a novel was not as devastating a blow as returning from the world of math. Why was that? After much thought, he reached a conclusion. No matter how clear things might become in the forest of story, there was never a clear-cut solution, as there was in math. The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a problem into another form. Depending on the nature and the direction of the problem, a solution might be suggested in the narrative. Tengo would return to the real world with that suggestion in hand. It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell. It served no immediate practical purpose, but it contained a possibility.

Brief aside recalling somebody, I can't remember who or where, nicknaming Murakami translator Jay Rubin "Clichetown." (Ah, it was a question on Tao Lin's formspring account.)

Brief Q+A up at The Atlantic with Murakami translator Phillip ("Non-clichetown"?) Gabriel:

Did Murakami resist or revise any parts of your translation?

At one point Jay, Murakami, and I got into the question of the nickname of one of the cult's security detail. I originally called him "Skinhead," thinking of a menacing right-wing figure, but Jay preferred "Buzzcut." Murakami said he liked the latter—the military connotations it carried—so that's what we went with.

Here, in this past Friday's NY Times, Sam Anderson profiles Murakami:

I asked Murakami, whose work is so often dreamlike, if he himself has vivid dreams. He said he could never remember them — he wakes up and there’s just nothing. The only dream he remembers from the last couple of years, he said, is a recurring nightmare that sounds a lot like a Haruki Murakami story. In the dream, a shadowy, unknown figure is cooking him what he calls “weird food”: snake-meat tempura, caterpillar pie and (an instant classic of Japanese dream-cuisine) rice with tiny pandas in it. He doesn’t want to eat it, but in the dream world he feels compelled to. He wakes up just before he takes a bite.

"And the bear slept with him, got drunk with him, and was a good friend."

This seems like a joke: "In Montana, once, he lived with a bear, and the bear slept with him, got drunk with him, and was a close friend." - from a profile of Ernest Hemingway by Lillian Ross, published in The New Yorker, May 13, 1950.

"I've bin Landen on this page for hours..."

The comments here made me laugh out loud. The New Yorker makes a typo in a Facebook post, snarkiness ensues.

David Remnick on bin Landen's death: "it is hard to recall Obama's announcement without also recalling the bizarre political context of the days that immediately preceded it.

"I didn't know that they got bin Landen too," replies one commenter. "Now I definitely feel safer."

On a related note, good friend Adam Wilson interviews Ben Laden, a klezmer musician residing in Pennsylvania, over at The Faster Times.

Shit, Jara, It’s Me, Bolaño

"When I felt I’d had enough fresh air and it was time to get back to the bar, I climbed the steps up to the door (stone steps, single blocks of a stone that had a granitelike consistency and the sheen of a gem) and ran into a guy who was shorter than me and dressed like a fifties gangster, a guy who had something of the caricature about him, the classic affable killer, who got me mixed up with someone he knew and greeted me. I replied to his greeting, although from the start I was sure that I didn’t know him and that he was mistaken, but I behaved as if I knew him, as if I, too, had mixed him up with someone else, so the two of us greeted each other as we attempted ineffectively to climb those shining (yet deeply humble) stone steps. But the hit man’s confusion lasted no more than a few seconds, he soon realized that he was mistaken, and then he looked at me in a different way, as if he were asking himself if I was mistaken, too, or if, on the contrary, I had been having him on from the start, and since he was thick and suspicious (though sharp in his own paradoxical way), he asked me who I was, he asked me with a malicious smile on his lips, and I said, Shit, Jara, it’s me, Bolaño, and it would have been clear to anyone from his smile that he wasn’t Jara, but he played the game, as if suddenly, struck by a lightning bolt (and no, I’m not quoting one of Lihn’s poems, much less one of mine), he fancied the idea of living the life of that unknown Jara for a minute or two, the Jara he would never be, except right there, stalled at the top of those radiant steps, and he asked me about my life, he asked me (thick as a plank) who I was, admitting de facto that he was Jara, but a Jara who had forgotten the very existence of Bolaño, which is perfectly understandable, after all, so I explained to him who I was and, while I was at it, who he was, too, thereby creating a Jara to suit me and him, that is, to suit that moment—an improbable, intelligent, courageous, rich, generous, daring Jara, in love with a beautiful woman and loved by her in return—and then the gangster smiled, more and more deeply convinced that I was having him on but unable to bring the episode to a close, as if he had suddenly fallen for the image I was constructing for him, and encouraged me to go on telling him not just about Jara but also about Jara’s friends and finally the world, a world that seemed too wide even for Jara, a world in which the great Jara was an ant whose death on a shining stair would not have mattered at all to anyone, and then, at last, his friends appeared, two taller hit men wearing light-colored double-breasted suits, who looked at me and at the false Jara as if to ask him who I was, and he had no choice but to say, It’s Bolaño, and the two hit men greeted me. I shook their hands (rings, expensive watches, gold bracelets), and when they invited me to have a drink with them I said, I can’t, I’m with a friend, and pushed past Jara through the door and disappeared inside."

-Roberto Bolaño, "Meeting with Enrique Lihn," the final story in The Return. Originally published in The New Yorker.

meat scarf, softball, free mix cd download, my forthcoming interview with john wray

some of what's been going on in the past week or so:

-i interviewed john wray for the faster times, a new online newspaper, in which we discussed daniel johnston, strange jobs, writing on the subway, and sausage. the faster times website launches june 15 (though i'm not sure when the interview will be published)

-played softball for the new yorker

-saw leonard cohen in boston

-spent six hours or so making a mix cd for my friend dawn's going away party slash "long, lonesome drive back to san francisco." you can download it here.

the playlist:

Wouldn't It Be Nice (Vocals Only) - The Beach Boys
La Javanaise - Serge Gainsbourg
Sugar Man - Rodriguez
Circulation - Deerhunter
Make Believe Waltz - Som Imaginario
Number One Fool - Fabulous Emotions
Daytime Girl (Original) - Billy Nicholls
The New Pollution - Beck
Hot - Ratatat remix of Missy Elliott
Making Flippy Floppy - Talking Heads
Star Eyes (I Can't Catch It) - Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse, featuring David Lynch
Stringsong - Adron
Evening Gown - The Left Banke
Manta Ray - Pixies
Guys Eyes - Animal Collective
Gold Soundz - Pavement
Danny (Lonely Blue Boy) - Jon Brion
Unknown (Pre Cherry Peel Demo, Track 9) - Of Montreal
O Leaozinho - Caetano Veloso
We'll Meet Again - Johnny Cash

-went to see my friend, the lovely and talented sarah (line and a dot), play and hung out afterwards, wherein i discovered the difference between british and american cigarette warning labels, or as sarah so eloquently described it, "the meat scarf":

sarah also made a US tour video, in which tao lin, miles ross, ben blum, and i make appearances:

Line & a Dot - The Return to New York Tour from Line & a Dot on Vimeo.