“With the Beatles”
by Haruki Murakami
translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel
from the February 17 & 24, 2020 issue of The New Yorker
The New Yorker celebrates its birthday with a story from Haruki Murakami. I’d love to hear thoughts on this one — we have two weeks to spend on it; I promise to participate too!
This one begins with the death of a dream:
What I find strange about growing old isn’t that I’ve got older. Not that the youthful me from the past has, without my realizing it, aged. What catches me off guard is, rather, how people from the same generation as me have become elderly, how all the pretty, vivacious girls I used to know are now old enough to have a couple of grandkids. It’s a little disconcerting—sad, even. Though I never feel sad at the fact that I have similarly aged.
I think what makes me feel sad about the girls I knew growing old is that it forces me to admit, all over again, that my youthful dreams are gone forever. The death of a dream can be, in a way, sadder than that of a living being.
I’ve read more of the story, and it has a vibe I quite like. Dealing with aging and memory (back to 1964 and 1965 as suggested by the title) in a loose structure, it has the feel of what I love in César Aira’s work. I hope we all enjoy it!
This piece is marked by its patience, a steady and meditative work but also surprising and epiphanic. At first it seems fairly middlebrow in its boomer reminiscences, and the nostalgic pseudo-memoir feel never fully 100% goes away. That said, the beauty of the writing and the timely deployment of lines like the following really mark Murakami’s skill:
“What pulled me in was the vision of that girl clutching the album as if it were something priceless. Take away the photograph on the album cover and the scene might not have bewitched me as it did. There was the music, for sure. But there was something else, something far bigger. And, in an instant, that tableau was etched in my heart—a kind of spiritual landscape that could be found only there, at a set age, in a set place, and at a set moment in time.”
As does the clever deployment of suspense with the gf’s brother, and the fear that creeps in on the reader that the brother may have committed a horrific crime—very effective. Then the release of tension followed by the flash forward in time and the story’s real revelations are even more effective, especially in their thematic resonance with what Murakami had been unpacking throughout the story at large.
Murakami is frank without being overly confessional, reflective without being a navel gazer. The specificity of Percy Faith and Andy Williams, the parenthetical observation that back then “middle class” wasn’t an insult, the paralleling of the narrator’s teenage couch-kissing with the good teacher’s impending suicide, the sad declines of Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee, the banality of the questions in literature omnibuses; these are telling details that separate this piece of fiction from some of the more sophomoric and half-baked efforts The New Yorker has unfortunately been publishing lately. A fantastic piece and an incredibly rewarding read.
The whole gimmicky short story about a Beatles song thing put me off. So what? Sly Stone was right, “Different strokes for different folks.” May be a boring song lyric but at least it’s true.
I started this and was instantly engaged by the sort of Proustian scene with the girl clutching the Beatles LP. Still….I was kind of thinking that it was another memoir like David Rabe’s story and like Mary South’s more of a non-fiction piece than fiction. And then Murakami’s snake uncoils and the story becomes richer and deeper. On one level a good joke–a memory story in which is embedded a story of a character who has memory lapses–but on another it peels away the surface layers of nostalgia (The Beatles, The Sound of Music) to reveal an enigma in the revelation of the ex-girlfriend’s suicide.
Tremendous story. Like others said, it “unravels” and “peels” and “unpacks” and you can come back to it and read it again and sigh over the “voice” maintained throughout. A little boy-male centric to be sure, and I wonder if the average female reader would have quite the same reaction? Male nostalgia for “all the pretty, vivacious girls I used to know” can come across as self-indulgent and a little creepy….
Come on, mkevane. I think nostalgia is pretty universal and I give women more credit than not being able to identify with a story’s mood just because it’s coming from a first-person protagonist of the opposite gender. Personally, I know plenty of women in their forties and fifties who gush about all the cute, mysterious boys they used to know.
It’s not remotely self-indulgent or creepy for either gender to look back with fondness on their youth and the people they knew in high school or college that they have lost touch with (or who have died). When you’re young, you’re firm-bodied, your mental alacrity is undiminshed, you can devour books and films and culture, the world is new to you, you can recover from your indulgences more quickly, you’re less cynical. It’s natural and not gendered.
Murakami is one of the best-selling authors in the world and far from “boy-male centric.” He’s sold 2.5 million books in the US alone. His novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage sold a million copies in its first week of release in Japan. I’m pretty sure that among all those readers there are plenty of women.
What a great story. More complicated and richer than most of Murakami’s. Filled with references to American music, both rock and jazz. (He has always been an Amerophile). Even a sly, hidden mention of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”. And classical music – Mozart and Stravinsky! And repeated characterizations of music as wallpaper, sound track, etc – i.e., emotional context. Which partly underpins and enhances his memory of the 16-year old girl.
Also, I love the mocking of us who read fiction and answer “meaningless questions”:
“Question: What elements in the lives of these two men were symbolically suggested by their two meetings and conversations?”
But more than this is the role of memory. So much remembering. The girlfriend’s older brother even has a memory disease. Which is cured by his telling the narrator about it. But the narrator has no way to purge his memory of the high school girl.
Three suicides. Yet they are not the most important substance of the piece. Memory is. Both the opening and closing grafs are about the haunting memory of a young girl whom he never even spoke to. After all the events, this is what he ends with: “I wonder – is she still hurrying down that dimly lit high school hallway, in 1964, . . .holding that wonderful album cover . . .clutching it tightly as though her life depended on it.”
As he writes in the opening graf: “The death 9f a dream can be, in a way, sadder than that of a living being.”