{"id":13018,"date":"2014-06-02T14:36:49","date_gmt":"2014-06-02T18:36:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=13018"},"modified":"2014-06-09T13:55:18","modified_gmt":"2014-06-09T17:55:18","slug":"haruki-murakami-yesterday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2014\/06\/02\/haruki-murakami-yesterday\/","title":{"rendered":"Haruki Murakami: “Yesterday”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click here <\/a>to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker<\/em> webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Haruki Murakami’s “Yesterday”\u00a0(tr. from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel)\u00a0was originally published in the Jun 9 & 16, 2014 issue of The New Yorker<\/em>. This is the Summer Fiction edition, so you can click here<\/a> to see the other stories in this issue.<\/p>\n

\"Click
Click for a larger image.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Betsy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Haruki Murakami was born in Kobe in 1949. Both of these facts figure in the story \u201cYesterday.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kobe is a large seaport south of Tokyo and one of the three big cities in central Japan where the Kansai dialect is spoken. Kansai is more of a regional accent than dialect, but it does include some unique and recognizable vocabulary. It is distinctly not the national standard, which would be what is spoken in Tokyo. When someone from Tokyo hears a Kansai accent, they associate a personality with the accent: warm, outgoing, and relaxed, also a little brash and outspoken, something that is so counter to ordinary Japanese custom as to be shocking. Kansai presents English translators with a quandary; some choose to use a southern accent, others a Texan, and in the case of this story, a kind Brooklynese or New Jersey accent.<\/p>\n

Tokyo-ben (the Japanese standard), when spoken by men, has a distinctly reserved, assertive, gruff tone, something fitting for the business, governmental, and military center that Tokyo is. Men and women in Tokyo, at least in my experience in 1968, do not sound the same, however. When you hear men and women in Tokyo speak, it is almost as if women have a regional dialect of their own.\u00a0There is a feminine way of speaking, which is demure in the extreme, and there is a masculine way of speaking, which would not sound wrong if a character from Ernest Hemingway chose to use it.<\/p>\n

Kansai is neither of those. What it is, says Tanimura (Murakami\u2019s narrator), is \u201cemotionally rich.\u201d<\/p>\n

What dialect you speak is a pivot point in this story.\u00a0When Tanimura, one of the three main characters, moves from the Kobe area to go to university in Tokyo, he drops his Kansai dialect. He says, \u201cI wanted to become a totally different person.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the three main characters in \u201cYesterday,\u201d a well-to-do twenty-year-old young man from Tokyo named Kitaru, affects a Kansai dialect. He also wants to become a totally different person, but in a completely different manner from his friend from Kobe.<\/p>\n

What he wants is not to be a different person than himself; rather, what he wants is to become a different person from the culture — not success-driven, not family-oriented, and not under the thumb of the culture. Japanese culture, as presented by Murakami, has a monolithic quality that needs confrontation. When Kitaru insists on speaking in a Kansai dialect, he is confronting expectations. He thus becomes a person whom other people find puzzling and annoying.<\/p>\n

The Kansai dialect he has chosen to speak sums him up. He\u2019s a kind of Mr. Opposite. He insists on making up his own words for the famous Beatles\u2019 song, \u201cYesterday.\u201d While everyone else buys the idea that they should study hard and go to the best college possible, Kitaru refuses to study. He wants the test to be an event that just happens, an event where luck plays a role. While everyone else thinks his girlfriend is gorgeous, he can\u2019t imagine having a sexual relationship with her.<\/p>\n

The fact that he isn\u2019t going to go to college is going to hurt him in the marriage sweepstakes, but the whole social fabric is something Kitaru appears to reject. In fact, he seems to be in the process of rejecting Japan.<\/p>\n

In a terrific interview in The Paris Review<\/em> (here<\/a>), Murakami says that when he was younger, he \u201cwanted to escape from this culture.\u201d He felt that it was \u201ctoo boring. Too Sticky.\u201d\u00a0Even though Murakami himself has lived abroad for periods of years, he\u00a0 says:<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to write about foreigners in foreign countries; I want to write about us. I want to write about Japan, about our life here.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He has sold millions of books in Japan, and in a way, Kitaru exemplifies the reason why. Kitaru bucks the system and survives.<\/p>\n

In The Paris Review<\/em> interview, Murakami says:<\/p>\n

The main task of my protagonist is to observe the things happening around him. [. . . H]e is neutral, and in order to maintain his neutrality, he must be free from any kinship, any vertical family system. This might be considered my reply to the fact the \u201cfamily\u201d has played an overly significant role in Japanese literature. [. . . M]y main character [. . .] chooses freedom and solitude over intimacy and personal bonds.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He further remarks that his protagonist is often a like the author\u2019s twin brother who was \u00a0kidnapped at two. The protagonist is \u201ca kind of alternative form of [Murakami himself].\u201d In this story, Kitaru and Tanimura, the two students, play those two roles as well, the one pursuing a career, the other being a kind of flower child.<\/p>\n

Time is important in this story. Murakami calls it \u201cYesterday\u201d after the Beatles song. The story is told as a remembrance of student days, when\u00a0two vivid characters Tanimura met while at Waseda (where Murakami also went). Murakami was born in 1949, and he was a student in Tokyo at the height of the student uprisings in 1968.\u00a0 It was a time of enormous tumult.\u00a0Everything was being turned upside down.<\/p>\n

Although the precise year the story takes place is not spelled out, the rebellion that Kitaru is embracing feels appropriate to 1968, when Murakami himself would have been in college.<\/p>\n

His twin protagonists, Kitaru and Tanimura, were \u201cfriends for just a few months.\u201d They hung out and talked about everything — girls, baseball, sex, studies. It was so vivid that Tanimura remarks, “It feels as though these things happened just yesterday.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of us might have exactly the same thought about our college friendships — that they are still so vivid they might have happened only yesterday. But what Murakami means by this story is specific to the \u201csticky\u201d culture of Japan — the way life is to be lived in a certain way, according to certain rules. Thus, Tanimura and Kitaru were playing out an argument about what it is to be a Japanese man.<\/p>\n

In their relationships with the ethereally beautiful Erika, they are also playing out the difficulty that finding a soul mate presents in Japan. Murakami himself, in The Paris Review<\/em> interview, says, \u201cMy protagonist is always missing something.\u201d Most surprisingly, Murakami says, \u201cIn my stories,\u00a0women are mediums [. . .] the protagonist is always led somewhere by the medium and the visions that he sees are shown to him by her.\u201d<\/p>\n

He goes on to describe the important role that sex plays in the relationship. I would comment here that any sexual relationship that either of the men might have had with the beautiful Erika would have been complicated by the fact that the pill was only legalized in Japan in 1999.<\/p>\n

But in this story, Kitaru and Tanimura are not there yet. Neither of them is able to commit to Erika, even though she seems interested in both of them. The young men are in that floating world of leaving home, when nothing makes much sense. As Tanimura says of that time, \u201cFor the most part, I remained hidden away, deep within myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

The primary symbol in the story, a moon made of ice, encapsulates not only the effect Japanese culture can have on a young man, but also the heart of the young man himself.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a curious thing that Murakami says he did not begin to write until he was 29. It can take a long time to find yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week’s New Yorker<\/em> fiction is Haruki Murakami’s “Yesterday” (tr. from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel), one of the four selected for the summer fiction issue. Betsy offers her thoughts. Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13019,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[243,94],"tags":[614,560],"coauthors":[505,504],"class_list":["post-13018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-haruki-murakami","category-new-yorker-fiction","tag-japanese","tag-short-story"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Haruki-Murakami-Yesterday.png?fit=290%2C290&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-3nY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13018"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13184,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13018\/revisions\/13184"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13018"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=13018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}