Haruki Murakami's "Scheherazade": Sex and Storytelling

Well, the Nobel Prize for Literature has been announced, and favorite Haruki Murakami did not win.  French author Patrick Modiano, not well known in the U.S., did.  Congratulations to him.

Murakami has a new short story in the recent New Yorker (Oct. 13, 2014), the title of which, "Scheherazade," immediately attracted my attention, having recently read the new translation of 1001 Nights by Hanan Al-Shakyh and Marina Warner's wonderful study, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights.

Murakami's story is about a guy who cannot, for some undisclosed reason, leave his house. A nameless woman is assigned (but we do not know by whom) to come to his house regularly to bring him food and supplies. She also has sex with him and tells him stories; thus, he calls her Scheherazade. The main story she tells him in the story we are reading is about her breaking into the home of a boy with whom she was obsessed while in high school, (she is middle-aged now), fantasizing about him, stealing trivial items, and leaving other items in their place.

Because the story provides no background for why the man cannot leave the house or who is responsible for sending the woman to attend to his needs, the reader is apt to focus on these mysteries.  Indeed, New Yorker editor Treisman begins her interview in her weekly online feature by asking Murakami if he knows why the man cannot leave the house.

If this were the account of an actual event or even a realistic story, the question might be legitimate.  However, since Murakami does not reveal in the story why the man is confined to the house, he can quite rightfully reply to Treisman: "I don't know the exact circumstances that brought about the situation." Murakami says what caused the man's situation is not important. A fan of Kafka, he might have said it is no more relevant to the story than why Joseph K in Kafka's The Trial is arrested; it just is a given of the story that makes the story possible. In some ways, we are all locked in.

Treisman also asks Murakami why he ends his story without letting the reader hear the end of the story Scheherazade is telling the man.  Murakami says this is one of the most basic techniques of storytelling since the beginning of storytelling.  Many of the stories in 1001 Nights end only as an introit to another story within a story until the reader gets drawn so far into stories within stories that reality (whatever that is) is left so far behind one wonders if such a thing ever existed.  But readers want realism and closure, some contact with what they think is the "real world," as if their notion of "reality" is the only notion possible. This desire for closure even leads Treisman to ask Murakami if there will be a sequel--a device that Hollywood movie makers use to satisfy audiences' need for the illusion that that stuff on the screen keeps on happening even after they leave the theater.

I have only found one reader on the Internet who has read the story and commented on it—the indefatigable Betsy Pelz over on the Mookseandgripes.com website—a valuable site I have read with pleasure the past several years.  And sure enough, Ms. Pelz spends much of her discussion pondering what the guy is doing confined in the room and who is sending that woman over to tend to his needs.

Is the man a criminal, a political prisoner? She asks. Is the woman a prostitute, a sex surrogate? How does the woman manage the very practical matter of getting over to the guy's house so regularly without disrupting her own marriage? Ms. Pelz even suggests that the woman might be hired by the mob to keep the man prisoner. Frustrated by finding no answers, Ms. Polz develops her own fantasy solution that the man is actually the young boy the woman had an obsession about when she was a teenager—that he is actually now her husband and they are playing some sexual fantasy game by which she keeps him interested in her even though she is no longer young.

Perhaps concerned that  such a reading might trivialize the story as just an old Ladies Home Journal "Can this Marriage Be Saved?" piece, Ms. Pelz also suggests that the story has a social context, claiming, "The story addresses the kind of challenge a man faces in highly gendered societies such as Japan, where this story takes place and where the ideal for men is to be strong and silent."

I am not particularly attacking Betsy Pelz's reading of this story. She certainly has the freedom to read it any way she wishes. I suspect that most readers will have the same reaction to Murakami's "Scheherazade," especially if they are not as familiar with the history of storytelling beginning with 1001 Nights as Murakami is.  Indeed, Treisman's questions in the Murakami interview suggest that she is anticipating the typical reader response of trying to "normalize" this story, ground it in "realistic" motivation and "social" context.

But as Murakami's coy responses that he does not know what brought about the situation the man is in and his acknowledgement that he is using one of the most basic techniques of storytelling "handed down the millennia" suggest that "Scheherazade" is a story that can only be understood within the context of storytelling.

"Scheherazade" begins with an acknowledgement that this is a story about the ambiguous world that story creates: "Habara didn't know whether her stories were true, invented, or partly true and partly invented.  He had no way of telling.  Reality and supposition, observation and pure fancy seemed jumbled together in her narratives."   Stories that begin with some variation of "Once there was a man who…" often end with the reader asking the teller, "Did that really happen?"  My children often would ask me after I told  them a story, "Is that really true, Daddy, or just a story?"

Murakami's narrator says that regardless of whether Scheherazade's stories were true or not, she had a gift for telling stories that touched the heart, stories that left the listener enthralled," able to forget the reality that surrounded him, if only for a moment."  Indeed, this is one of the primary effects of reading 1001 Nights.

The man in the story is puzzled by the fact that "their lovemaking and her storytelling were so closely linked, making it hard to tell where one ended and the other began." He has never experienced anything like this.  He is tightly bound to her, but he does not know why, for the sex is so-so and he doesn’t love her.  Indeed, the woman performs each sexual act as if completing an assignment in a businesslike manner.  Although their sex is not obligatory, it could not be said that their hearts are in it. Although the sex is not entirely businesslike, it is not passionate either.

Much of "Scheherazade" deals with the story the woman tells the man about her breaking into the house of the boy she was infatuated with while in high school.  She goes to his house when no one is at home and goes up to his room, sitting in his desk chair, picking up objects he has touched: "the most mundane objects became somehow radiant because they were his." She describes herself as a "Love Thief," feeling that if she takes something, she must also leave something. It is a reminder of the inextricable connection between story and sex that she takes one of the boy's pencils and leaves one of her tampons. She scribbles things in her notebook with the pencil, smells it, kisses it, even puts it in her mouth and sucks on it.  

She creates such a fantasy world that it no longer bothers her that in "the real world" the boy doesn't even seem to be aware of her existence. Murakami is exploring one of the most powerful aspects of love and sexual obsession that runs throughout 1001 Nights—that it is not the "real world" that matters—not even the "real" physical body of the other—only the powerful obsession that creates an alternate world. The fact that pornography focuses on physical events is what makes it so boring.

She continues to make trips to the boy's house, leaving strands of her hair, but also leaving the tampon, which the boy has never found because it was her first "token."  Leaving "tokens" is very common in the 1001 Nights stories; simple objects become transformed into magical emblems of the obsession that drives the story. Marina Warner talks a great deal about the importance of magical objects or tokens in her study Stranger Magic. All storytellers are aware of the metamorphosis of simple objects into sacred metaphoric ones. I have mentioned before Raymond Carver's comment about how ordinary objects become transformed in short stories.

A shift takes place after the girl takes one of the boy's soiled t-shirts from the laundry hamper and the mother discovers that someone has been breaking in the house and changes the door locks.  The girl does not need the boy, only the token of the shirt. When she puts her nose into the armpits and inhales, it is a as though she is in his embrace.  This "as if" is, of course, a key element of all storytelling. After she tells the man about the t-shirt, she asks to have sex with him one more time, and this time, instead of it being businesslike, it is violent, passionate and drawn out, and her climax is unmistakable.  Indeed, when she is having sex with the man this time, she is in her imagination having sex with the boy, and it is this imaginative sex that is central to the story.

When the girl stops the break-ins, her passion for the boy begins to cool.  She says that although the fever was passing, what she had contracted was not something like sickness, but rather the "real thing."  If a therapist or practical realist told the girl what she has been feeling was not the real thing but only an imaginative thing, such a judgment would just reflect a misunderstanding of what passion or desire or love or sex really is--always an imaginative thing.

At the end of his story, Murakami plays the little storytelling game so common in 1001 Nights, when the woman tells the man, "To tell the truth, the story doesn't end there.  A few years later, when I was in my second year of nursing school, a strange stroke of fate brought us together again."

The man wants to hear the rest of the story (as does the reader), but fears he may never see Scheherazade again and may never have the shared intimacy of sex with her again. "What his time spent with women offered was the opportunity to be embraced by reality, on the one hand, while negating it on the other.  That was something that Scheherazade had provided in abundance—indeed her gift was inexhaustible." Indeed, this is the gift of the storyteller, the key to the treasure.  And as John Barth's genii reminds us, "The key to treasure is the treasure."

I hope Betsy Pelz will forgive me for using her discussion as a sort of straw man to emphasize what I think is a very important point about the short story as a genre—that to understand a particular story the reader must have some understanding of the nature of story and storytelling, especially the fact that good short stories are most often about some universal aspect of human desire and that "realism" is never an adequate means by which to understand them.

I am working on my essay on "Sex and Storytelling" in Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. My thanks for the timely appearance of Haruki Murakami's story "Scheherazade," which reaffirms my notions about this theme in Alice Munro's stories.

Haruki Murakami's After the Quake

One of my readers, who just happens to be my daughter-in-law, Ean, asked me if I had read Haruki Murakami and, if so, what I thought of him. She also asked me about a Colorado science fiction writer, whose work I have not read. I am always happy to respond when readers ask me, "what do you think about....?" So here is a post of a review I wrote several years ago of Murakami's collection of stories After the Quake.

AFTER THE QUAKE: STORIES
First Published: Kami no kodomo-tachi wa mina odoru, 2000
Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin

In the early morning hours of January 16, 1995, a 7.2 earthquake hit the port city of Kobe, Japan, killing over five thousand people, causing billions of dollars worth of damage, and putting 300,000 out of their homes, including the parents of Haruki Murakami. Two months later, the radical Aum Shinrikyo cult carried out a gas attack on the subway system in Tokyo, killing eleven and crippling many others for life. Because of these twin terrors, Murakami, who had lived in the United States for several years, returned to Japan to research and write a nonfiction book entitled Underground: The Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (2001) on the terrorist attack, filled with accounts of the lives of both survivors and cult members. In Murakami’s book, after the quake, (the small case letters of the titles of the book and the stories) are intentional) six stories explore the seemingly tangential, yet very real, effect of the earthquake on several Japanese characters in February, 1995, the month between the two disasters.

The first story, “ufo in kushiro,” begins with a woman who has spent five days after the quake in front of the television. On the sixth day, when her husband Komura, a salesman at a hi-fi-equipment store in Tokyo, comes home, she has disappeared, leaving him a note saying that although he is good, kind and handsome, living with him is like living with a “chunk of air.” As usual with Murakami’s characters, Komura does not make any emotional reactions to his wife’s departure. When he takes a week off from work, one of his colleagues says that if he will deliver a small package for him to his younger sister in the city of Kushiro he will pay for his airfare and hotel.

When the sister, Keiko, along with a friend Shimao, meet Komura at the airport, he has the strange impression that he is witnessing some moment from the past. He also feels he has not come far even though it was a long journey. These impressions create a transition from everyday life into a mysterious realm of reality typical of many of these stories. When Kieko says he does not think his wife’s departure had anything to do with the earthquake, Shimao says she wonders if things like that aren’t connected somehow. When Komura and Shimao try to have sex, he fails several times because he has been seeing images of the earthquake. He tells her about his wife’s note, and she asks if it is true that there is “nothing” inside him. When he asks what “something” inside of him could be, she tells him that the box he brought contains the “something” inside of him and that he will never get it back. At the end of the story, the most pessimistic in the collection, Kieko understands the emptiness inside himself.

The second story, “landscape with flatiron,” focuses on Junko, a young woman and an older man named Miyake building bonfires on the beach. As Junko watches, she thinks of Jack London’s story “To Build a Fire,” about a man traveling alone in the Alaskan wilderness who cannot get a fire started and freezes to death. She is convinced that the man actually wanted death, even though he had to fight to stay alive. Junko has always felt a “certain something deep down” as she watches the bonfires. Miyake, who is obsessed with the fires, tells her that if you get such a feeling while looking at a fire, it shows the deep, quiet kind of feeling inside you.

Like Komura in the first story, Junko says she is empty, to which Miyake replies that he is an expert on emptiness. After talking about committing suicide together when the fire goes out, Junko goes to sleep and Miyake tells her that when the fire goes out she will feel the cold and wake up whether she wants to or not. In spite of the sense of emptiness, characteristic of other stories in this book, there is also a sense of communion, between the two characters at the end. This mutual understanding thus suggests that it is possible that when the fire goes out, the two will still have each other.

“all god’s children can dance” begins with a man named Yoshiya following a mysterious man with a missing earlobe. Interspersed with accounts of Yoshiya following the man are flashbacks to his childhood, when his mother told him that his father was the Lord, and that one day he will show himself to him if he keeps his faith. Yoshiya is convinced the man with a missing earlobe must be his biological father. When the man gets off the train in an industrial area, he walks like a mechanical doll being drawn by a magnet. The fact that there is no sign of human life and the place looks like an imaginary stage set in a dream is another indication typical of these stories that the main character has entered some alternate dream reality. When Yoshiya follows the man into an empty baseball field, he disappears, and Yoshiya’s acts seem to have no meaning to him; in fact, meaning itself seems to have broken down, never to be the same again. Kneeling on the pitcher’s mound, Yoshiya gives himself up to the flow of time, saying aloud, “Oh God.” Once again, Murakami’s story ends with a sense of emptiness and loneliness; however, because Yoshiya calls out the name of his absent father at the end, there is some ambiguity about whether his discovery is positive or negative.

In “thailand,” a woman named Satsuki goes to a professional conference in Bangkok, Thailand and decides to vacation there for a week with the help of a limo driver and guide named Nimit. The alternate reality theme is introduced when the limo arrives, looking like an object from another world, as if it had dropped from someone’s fantasy. When Nimit asks Satsuki if her hometown of Kyoto, which is not far from Kobe, was much damaged by the quake, she thinks that an unnamed “he” lives in Kobe.” Nimit takes Satsuki to a poor village to meet an eighty-year-old woman fortune-teller who tells Satsuki that there is a stone inside her body and that she must dream of a snake that will remove it or she will die. The old woman also tells Satsuki that the unnamed man in Kobe, obviously a man who has jilted Satsuki in the past, is not dead. Satsuki now recognizes that it is she who is headed toward death. She even thinks that the earthquake may be her fault because she wished for it to kill the man who. As she flies away, she sits in the plane wishing for sleep so her dream will come. Once again, a character is reminded of the emptiness inside the self, but once again also there is some ambiguity about the implications of this realization. If Satsuki has her dream, will she be saved from the hardness of her heart?

The most surreal story in the collection is “super-frog saves tokyo,” which begins Kafka-like with a man named Katagiri finding a giant frog in his apartment who tells him he has come to save Tokyo from destruction from an earthquake. Frog says that he and Katagiri must go underground to do mortal combat with a creature named Worm that gets larger as he absorbs hatred. Frog, quoting Nietzsche, says Katagiri must cheer him on, for fighting is not something he likes to do. When Katagiri tells Frog that he is even less than ordinary and does not see how he can help save Tokyo, Frog says he is trying to save Tokyo for good, ordinary people just like him. However, on the day they are to go underground Katagiri is shot by a man in the street and wakes up in a hospital only to find out there has been no earthquake and that he was not shot at all. Like other characters in these stories, Katagiri has no idea of what is true anymore. When Frog comes to the hospital and tells Katagiri that he did a great job in his dreams, the strange creature begins to break out in boils, out of which come maggots, centipedes, worms and bugs, which fill the room and crawl all over Katagiri. When he wakes up, he knows that Frog saved Tokyo at the cost of his life, for he went back to the mud and will never come again. Then Katagiri falls into a restful, dreamless sleep. Although this is certainly the most Kafkaesque story in the book, it is also one of the most optimistic, for it ends with Katagiri no longer troubled by strange dreams, peaceful in his very ordinariness.

“honey pie,” perhaps the most hopeful story in the book, begins with a man named Junpei telling a story to a child named Sala about a bear named Masakichi, who has no friends and is especially hated by a tough bear named Tonkichi. The child’s mother Sayoko has called Junpei, a writer and a friend, to come and help her because Sala has had another hysterical fits because she believes someone called the Earthquake Man is trying to put her in a little box.

When Junpei, Sayoko, and her husband Takatsuki were close friends at university, Junpei felt that Sayoko was the girl he had been looking for, but because he could never bring himself to express his feelings to her, Takatsuki was the first one to declare his love. After graduation, Junpei becomes a successful short story writer, while Takatsuki gets a job with a newspaper and marries Sayoko. Just before Sala’s second birthday, Takatsuki and Sayoko get a divorce, and Junpei thinks about asking Sayoko to marry him but cannot make up his mind. When Junpei and Sayoko take Sala to a zoo to see the bears, he tells her a story about Tonkichi who trades salmon with Masakichi for his honey, eventually making them best friends. When the salmon disappear, Tonkichi ends up being sent to the zoo.

That evening after dinner Junpei and Sayoko embrace as if nothing has changed since they were nineteen. During the night Sala comes into the bedroom and says the Earthquake Man came and told her that he has a box for everyone. Junpei sleeps on the sofa and looks at the TV, thinking they were inside the TV waiting for the box to open. He thinks that as soon as Sayoko wakes up he will ask her to marry him. He also thinks of a conclusion for the story for Sala; he has Tonkichi bake honey pies, which Masakichi takes to town and sells so they can live as best friends forever. Thinking he now will keep watch over this woman and little girl and never let anyone put them in that crazy box, not even if the earth should crack open, Junpei decides he wants to write stories different from what he has written so far; he wants to write about people who dream and wait. And indeed, this final story in Murakami’s collection is precisely that kind of story--a story that ends with fullness and unity instead of emptiness and separation. Thus, although these stories seem distinct entities, they are interconnected not only by the effect of the Kobe earthquake, but also because they move from meaninglessness to final hope.