Thoughts on All of Us Are Dead

All of Us Are Dead. Credit: Netflix

All of Us Are Dead depicts a society ruled by human selfishness, where the youth are mere pawns used to prop up self-serving systems of oppression built by adults. An adult-made zombie virus is the symbol for such selfishness, with violence as its principal symptom.

Other than a few selfless, heroic adult characters—the English teacher, the police detective, and On-jo’s father—we see how the students are undermined, patronized, and oppressed by most other elders, particularly the ones in positions of power.

There is horror in how the children who are victims of adult selfishness eventually embody the same selfishness themselves. The vicious bully Gwi-nam, until then used as a lowly pawn by jaded, cynical individuals, became the ultimate embodiment of violence.

In an early episode, one student mulled whether they lived in a country that mourns the loss of wisdom through the death of its elders, or the loss of hope in the death of its children. The series draws parallels with the sinking of the Sewol last decade, critiquing the circumstances that led to a national tragedy in which adults utterly failed to protect children.

With its portrayal of the horrors of human selfishness, cynicism, and utilitarianism, All of Us Are Dead criticizes a culture that upholds hierarchy and “saving face” at the expense of the young. It confronts a society to consider how much value it ought to place on its youth.

The Best Reads of 2021

Here are six of the most memorable books I read in the past year:

The novel Stoner by John Williams was not only one of my favorites of the year, but it has also easily become one of my all-time favorite books. It is rich in its simplicity, with Williams’ accessibly vivid prose driving along a poignant narrative. The titular character, William Stoner, is a professor of English literature with an unwavering integrity to his profession, and a passion, though restrained, for all that he loves. The novel deftly traces his life, with its small triumphs and tragedies. The story resonates with me very well, particularly because it is about academia.

Another favorite read from this year was Manila Noir, a crime fiction anthology edited by Jessica Hagedorn. Crime noir is a genre that fascinates me, and reading dark, ominous stories set in familiar places around Manila, quite literally, hits home. A city with numerous districts where rich and poor are juxtaposed with one another is fertile ground for crime noir fiction, a genre that is a suitable medium for addressing the grim realities of the Filipino social condition at the capital. Some of the best in this collection were “Comforter of the Afflicted” by F.H. Batacan, “The Professor’s Wife” by Jose Dalisay, and “Darling, You Can Count on Me” by Eric Gamalinda. I’ll always remember going through this book on the rainy days and evenings of the summer monsoon season.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me is an important read for anyone. Coates writes the book as a letter to his son, describing the world that his child faces—a world that inflicts violence, in different forms, but especially in the institutional, upon the Black body. Recounting the realities of growing up African-American, Coates addresses the numerous faces that systemic racism takes on.

J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace is a novel about a white male professor, David Lurie, involved in a scandalous affair. After resigning from his post, he moves out of the city to live at his daughter Lucy’s farm. A disturbing incident occurs, illustrating tensions and subversions of power in post-apartheid South Africa.

The Quiet Ones by Glenn Diaz is a page-turner that follows a handful of characters—Filipino young professionals in the 2000’s—from different backgrounds. They are driven into committing an embezzlement scheme as call center agents. Diaz’s novel is an exploration of capitalism in modern Philippine society.

Kokoro by Natsume Soseki is about a young man who forges a friendship with a jaded older man he calls Sensei. The two characters of different generations draw parallels with a transitioning Japan at the end of the Meiji era.

Quarantine in the bottom of a well: Examining self-isolation in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is Haruki Murakami’s richest novel. The sprawling narrative features memorable, eccentric characters, and some of the most vivid and disturbing scenes he has written. It is an exploration of the human psyche, both personal and collective, and how much we can truly ever know not just one another, but also ourselves. Murakami also probes into Japan’s history of war and imperialism, and how it affects succeeding generations.

When I first read The Wind-up Bird Chronicle a few years ago, I read it too quickly at a time where I wasn’t in the right headspace. In the early lockdown days of 2020, I picked it up for a second time, gaining a deeper appreciation of this very rich work by reading it slowly, leisurely.

Self-isolation was one term we’ve come to terms with in 2020. In The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, the protagonist Toru self-isolates at the bottom of an empty well to do some deep thinking. All he really wanted to know was why his wife Kumiko had suddenly left him. In the well, Toru does a lot of mental digging, reflecting on his past with Kumiko. He realizes that he can never fully know everything about another person, not even his own wife. “Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?”

We can also ask the question of just how much we can achieve perfect understanding of our own selves. Digging deep into one’s thoughts can be a mentally uncomfortable, painful process. How far deep are we willing to dig into ourselves to truly know who we are?

When Toru’s neighborhood acquaintance May Kasahara covers the well with a lid, Toru is forced very deep into his own mind as total darkness envelops him:

In the darkness, he all but loses track of his physical existence and becomes pure memory and imagination, floating in and out of consciousness, unsure of where he ends and the darkness begins.

(Rubin 209)

The subterranean darkness transports him into a subconscious world, which appears as a hotel. Matthew Strecher suggests this other world is the collective subconscious, a “metaphysical shared space” (88). Each room in the hotel represents an individual subconscious.

Given that the other world was accessed in a state of absolute darkness, it suggests a darkness within both collective and personal subconscious. Toru’s personal space is Room 208, where he finds repressed lust—from a lack of intimacy in his failing marriage—and violence/anger—hatred towards his brother-in-law Noboru Wataya.

What goes on in the subconscious other world has repercussions in the conscious real world. In order to quell the chaos in the real world, Toru finds it necessary to pass through to the other world and confront his own demons in Room 208, his own subconscious.

Murakami manages to write this lengthy narrative chronicling a 19-month period from July 1984 to December 1985 as a suspenseful psychological thriller, yet he adds even more depth to the novel with a historical dimension. Fictional episodes from the Nomonhan Incident and the Soviet Invasion of Manchuria are weaved into the narrative. Murakami conveys the idea that a lingering violence deep in the Japanese collective subconscious stems from Japan’s recent history of war and imperialism:

The ‘war’ in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is not presented as a series of historical facts but as an important part of the psychological baggage of Murakami’s generation and beyond.

(Rubin 217)

The historical episodes within the narrative delivered graphic scenes of skin being flayed, hands being crushed under military tanks, and heads being bashed in with baseball bats.

Aside from the violence, the cast of characters around Toru also leaves a memorable impression not just by personality, but also by name: spunky teenager May Kasahara, Lt. Mamiya, sisters Malta and Creta Kano, mother-and-son Nutmeg and Cinnamon Akasaka, the evil technocrat Noboru Wataya, the cat named Noboru Wataya, and Boris the Manskinner, among others.

A suspenseful, multilayered novel that probes into the human mind and the history of Japan, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is Murakami’s magnum opus. It was my favorite read of 2020.

Murakami, Haruki. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Translated by Jay Rubin. Vintage, 1998.

Works consulted:

Rubin, Jay. Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words. Vintage, 2012.

Strecher, Matthew Carl. The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami. University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Rubin provides great insight into Murakami’s novels and short stories in his Music of Words—an enjoyable, illuminating read for the seasoned Murakami reader. Another one of my favorite reads of 2020, it provided enriching supplementary material while I worked through The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and the Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman short story collection.

I’ve read Strecher’s Forbidden Worlds a few years ago, and I plan on reading it for a second time. He provides academic commentary on numerous Murakami novels, with a focus on the metaphysical realms that Murakami creates in his fiction.

A Short Existential Reflection After Reading Haruki Murakami’s “Birthday Girl” on my Birthday

I wanted to backdate this post because my birthday was last January, but it’s already early May, and I’m only now finally posting this. I read the story and started writing this post on my actual birthday, but I left this alone for a long time. There was a gap of almost three months between the first time and the second time that I worked on this entry. All the free time during self-isolation beckoned me to revive this long-neglected literary blog. I’m glad I’m finally ending an almost-two-year writing hiatus. This is the first time on this blog that I’m doing a close reading of a short story rather than of a novel.

The titular character of Haruki Murakami’s “Birthday Girl” came in to work at the restaurant on her twentieth birthday. “I wasn’t going to do anything special anyway, even if it is my twentieth birthday.” I could have said the same thing about my twenty-fifth birthday.

This year, I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday on a Tuesday. The last time it was on a Tuesday was on my nineteenth. Six years ago, birthdays for me were exciting, at least in a social sense. I was still attending university and had lots of classmates and friends around me. After graduating, normal days have become more lonesome, and birthdays have become more private, reflective of my personality—quiet and reserved. I would’ve made a bigger deal of it had it been on a weekend, but this year, my birthday fell on an otherwise insignificant day in the middle of the calendar week. Nonetheless, on that Tuesday, on top of my work responsibilities, I went out to have lunch and dinner with my parents.

When I got home that night, I sought for the story “Birthday Girl” in Murakami’s Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman short story collection, looking to indulge on some occasion-appropriate literature. It’s a simple story with an understated depth to it. I ended up writing an existential interpretation of it—an interpretation greatly influenced by a quarter-life crisis I had been sorting out at the time.

The central event of “Birthday Girl” is a young woman being asked to make a wish on her twentieth birthday. I have found that the story features elements of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism: a young adult’s freedom in the face of a near-infinite amount of possibilities, and an individual’s identity being built on her decisions in life. Reading Murakami’s tale through this lens delivers one of early adulthood’s introductory lessons: taking responsibility.

The unnamed birthday girl works as a waitress in an Italian restaurant. In the middle of her shift, the manager suddenly falls ill. The girl is then assigned to take over the task of delivering dinner to the enigmatic restaurant owner’s room in the same building, a task that no one other than the manager had ever taken on before. Upon delivering the owner’s meal, the girl is invited to spend a few more minutes in his office for a celebratory toast. “Today just happens to be your twentieth birthday, and on top of that, you have brought me this wonderful warm meal,” says the owner. “This has to be some kind of special convergence, don’t you think?”

Because of the special occasion, the owner then offers to grant any wish the girl might have had. Just like a normal wish, she can make only one, and once she makes it, she could never take it back. It’s not every day that one’s employer suddenly claims to have the powers of a wish-granting genie, and this merely amused the girl. “I decided to play along with him. It was my twentieth birthday after all: I figured I ought to have something not-so-ordinary happen to me that day.”

Her wish was never explicitly revealed, but whatever it was, the owner found it to be unusual. He thought she might have wanted to be prettier or smarter or richer. The girl didn’t wish for any of these:

“Of course I’d like to be prettier or smarter or rich. But I really can’t imagine what would happen to me if any of those things came true. They might be more than I could handle. I still don’t really know what life is all about. I don’t know how it works.”

In any case, the owner grants the wish. Naturally.

Making a birthday wish is normally a custom that adults leave behind in childhood. In “Birthday Girl,” we see the symbolic value of a birthday wish to a young adult.

In Japan, twenty is officially the age of maturity. The Japanese celebrate Coming of Age Day every year on the second Monday of January for all twenty-year-olds as they enter adulthood. It’s around this age when young adults encounter their own existential crises of sorts. They have no idea what to do, or if not, no idea what exactly they want to do. Life presents the typical twenty-year-old an overwhelming amount of choices, which brings about an anxious freedom, at least according to the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: “Man is condemned to be free.”

In this context, wishes can be thought of as metaphors for decisions, in a way that the future is always in mind when making either of them. Decisions come in all different sizes, but some fairly large ones immediately confront us in our early adult years, and these large decisions are the choices we make in order to build our identities. In a manner not exactly as intimidating as Sartre’s choice of words regarding man’s freedom, the restaurant owner confronts the girl with her freedom when he asks her to make a wish.

Years later, the girl’s friend (the narrator of the story) asks her if the wish came true. She vaguely answers: “I haven’t seen how things are going to work out to the end.” Did she regret making that wish? She responds by merely describing her present life—that she was now married with children, drove a nice car, and saw her girlfriends regularly. It was never indicated how many years had passed since the girl’s twentieth birthday, but clearly, she progressed in life. When she was twenty, she was a restaurant waitress, but some years later, she became happily married.

Despite the inevitable change in lifestyle, the girl implies that she—her identity—hasn’t changed. Years after making a birthday wish, she realizes:

“No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves.”

Furthermore, at the end of the story, the girl asks her friend what she would have wished for. When her friend says that she couldn’t think of anything, the girl says, in what is probably her most cryptic line: “That’s because you’ve already made your wish.”

Once more referencing Sartrean existentialism, the way we live (existence) defines who we are (essence). A person’s identity is the sum of all the decisions she has made. Hence, you’ll never be anything other than what you have already wished for.

Even though it appeared that she was nonchalant about making her birthday wish, the girl probably realized its real significance. The girl knew that she didn’t even need the restaurant owner to “grant” her wish—the decision was in her own hands, and the result was her responsibility. Her wish on her twentieth birthday was the beginning of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A Familiar Pain: Loss and Isolation in Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. I just haven’t had the time to analyze and write deep reviews of some of the novels that I’ve recently read but I do hope to get back in the groove soon. I’m doing something a little different for this post and I’ll even touch on something personal for the first time in this blog. A recent experience has led me to seek comfort in one of my favorite novels. From the title of this post, I will be examining themes of loss and isolation.

I’m normally a solitary person, confident and comfortable with being alone, yet I’m also sensitive to feelings of alienation and being unwelcome. I’m fairly certain that I exhibit some mild symptoms of social anxiety. Two weeks ago, I had a bit of an incident that made me feel excluded. It’s upsetting to be left alone to figure out what went wrong, not knowing whether you’ve made a mistake or not.

Currently, there hasn’t been actual closure of the incident and it looks like it may be left unresolved with no further discussion, at least in the near future. It’s really only a minor issue in the grand scheme of things. Misunderstandings are not uncommon but they are more prone to happen online, easily causing conflicts. It’s difficult to uncover meaning in online interactions, much more in reading the behavior of others through a screen. In this day and age where social media is highly prevalent, I just hope we don’t continually shy away from actual human-to-human interactions—I’m afraid that is being slowly phased out in lieu of more and more digital means.

I feel better now and I’m prepared to move on. I may have temporarily harbored negative thoughts that ranged from resentment, to embarrassment, to frustration, but at least I didn’t act upon them. Needless to say, the way this whole episode developed was rather confounding. I vented out my thoughts to a few of my friends and I’m very thankful for them for listening.

Aside from talking to friends that care, it was very therapeutic to revisit one of my favorite Murakami novels. Feeling upset, I decided to pick up Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage to read a second time. I fondly remember my first reading of this novel two years ago and how sympathetic I felt towards the protagonist, Tsukuru, who was suddenly ostracized without explanation from his group of friends.

It’s comforting to be able to closely relate to a character and his battles, which is exactly why this was the first book in my mind that I thought would help me cope with some heavy feelings. Though my circumstances aren’t exactly similar to Tsukuru’s, I don’t think I’ve ever had a stronger connection with a literary character, and that’s because the pain that Tsukuru feels is familiar to me.

Tsukuru doesn’t have lots of friends but he’s content with that. When he is inexplicably isolated from the only four friends that he knew, he experiences an overwhelming sense of hollowness. Feeling betrayed, he encounters despair while being left in the dark:

“That was the first time in my life that anyone had rejected me so completely…Searching for the reason, or correcting a misunderstanding, was beyond me. I was simply, and utterly, in shock. So much so that I thought I might never recover. It felt like something inside me had snapped.”

The pain of an unexplained rejection in his early twenties settles and hardens in his heart over the following sixteen years. One night, in the story’s present, Tsukuru confronts that pain once again when he sees his steady girlfriend Sara walking hand in hand with another man. Sara was so visibly happy and beaming at the man in a way she doesn’t with Tsukuru.

“All that remained now was a quiet sorrow…He hadn’t felt such pain in a long time, not since the summer of his sophomore year in college, when his four friends had abandoned him. He closed his eyes and, as if floating in water, drifted in that world of pain. Still, being able to feel pain is good, he thought. It’s when you can’t even feel any pain anymore that you’re in real trouble.”

Indeed, it’s the familiar pain brought about by rejection, abandonment, and isolation. It’s okay to let such acute pain wash over you—it’s natural and it will pass. Humans, after all, are social creatures.

As a student of Stoic philosophy, I try hard not to (in fact, I shouldn’t) be bothered by other people’s actions and opinions about me, as those are outside of my control. I should focus instead on bettering myself without seeking validation or approval. But sometimes, when one yearns for connection and acceptance, one can’t help but feel disappointed in being rejected and alienated. There is real pain there. When a connection you’ve made is suddenly severed, it hurts.

The feeling of isolation always unleashes a flurry of negative thoughts that rain down on me. When rejection is abrupt and unexplained, it’s a double whammy. You’re lost, bewildered, not knowing what went wrong, not knowing how to proceed. The sense of loneliness only becomes more oppressive. Relating to my personal experience, I cannot say that I felt the same intense sorrow that Tsukuru had, but I do understand and know very well his pain.

“One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.”

Why does Tsukuru often experience loss and abandonment? He’s just a normal guy and not repulsive in any way. Perhaps there is something about him that other people only see as temporary. He entertains the thought that he might just be, in essence, a hollow person.

“Maybe I am just an empty, futile person, he thought. But it was precisely because there was nothing inside of me that these people could find, if even for a short time, a place where they belonged. Like a nocturnal bird seeks a safe place to rest during the day in a vacant attic. The birds like that empty, dim, silent place. If that were true, then maybe he should be happy he was hollow.”

Tsukuru’s search for answers leads him to visit one of the four original friends that he lost, Eri, also known as Kuro, in Finland. She encourages Tsukuru to fully embrace his innate characteristics, even if it’s his own perceived hollowness.

“Let’s say you are an empty vessel. So what? What’s wrong with that? You’re still a wonderful, attractive vessel. And really, does anybody know who they are? So why not be a completely beautiful vessel? The kind people feel good about, the kind people want to entrust with precious belongings.”

In real life, people come and go. Life is fleeting; friendships, more so. That’s the reality. Couples break up. Family members become estranged. Long-time friends may eventually drift apart. Most of the time, there are reasons behind these things. Sometimes, these things simply happen without explanation.

Eri’s words to Tsukuru, however, reassure us that no human connections we make in life are ultimately wasted:

“[It] wasn’t a waste for us to have been us—the way we were together, as a group. I really believe that. Even if it was only for a few short years.”

The emotional connection I made with this novel has always stayed with me since the first time I read it two years ago. I’m glad I picked it up again when I was feeling down recently. Writing this post was cathartic. I feel lighter now and satisfied with this creative output. Tsukuru, my friend, thanks again for keeping me company.

Individuals, Juxtaposed: Shuichi Yoshida’s Parade

Shuichi Yoshida (author), Philip Gabriel (translator), Parade, Vintage, 2015. 230 pgs.

Juxtaposition is arguably part of the big city charm. Tokyo in itself is already a city of juxtaposed buildings and streets and as Shuichi Yoshida zooms in on a handful of urbanite youths living together, we see that within the confines of an ordinary apartment, they too, are juxtaposed. Parade is a dark thriller that packs a discreetly hard-hitting plot and a thought-provoking picture of urban life, where social structures, just as much as physical ones, are essentially superficial and temporary.

The novel is an engaging immersion into the lives of five different Tokyo urbanites. Despite the confined living space shared by five individuals and their together-ness as roommates, themes of loneliness and detachment are prominent through each character’s narrations. While the characters deliver edgy monologues on interpersonal relations, city life, and apartment living, we almost forget that the novel is a psychological thriller. Yoshida’s prose, translated by Philip Gabriel, is gripping all throughout, making this a fast read with some sneaky misdirection on the novel’s plot to set up a sucker-punch ending that comes flying out of nowhere.

The story is told through five chapters, each with a different narrator. Kicking things off is the narration of Ryosuke, 21, a college student. He works a part-time job at a Mexican restaurant during evenings and is romantically pursuing Kiwako, the girlfriend of a university upperclassman. When he is not outside, he mostly hangs around the apartment with Koto, a 23-year-old woman from Sapporo. Koto, narrator of the second chapter, normally spends her entire day by the phone, waiting for her television drama actor boyfriend to call. Whenever they have a date, she and he would arrange for quick trysts in hotel rooms.

Early on, Ryosuke and Koto each sense something strange going on in the next door apartment. Ryosuke had seen on separate occasions at least two young girls emerge out of it in tears and Koto had spied a politician enter it as well. The two of them would devise a plan to investigate this while some more mystery builds up in the background. Reports surface on television of an attacker at-large within the neighborhood. Several women have already fallen victim to the attacks, with gruesomely bashed-in faces. Police have even started going door-to-door to issue warnings to neighborhood residents. This sub-plot silently brews as the characters barely take notice of this and continue on with their own businesses.

One morning, Koto encounters 18-year-old Satoru emerging from the bathroom, assuming he is one of Ryosuke’s university friends. Satoru plays along but when the roommates discover that he doesn’t seem to be who he says he is, they start suspecting that they had let a thief unimpeded into the apartment. It turns out that it was Mirai, a 24-year-old illustrator and manager of an imported goods boutique, who had ferried in this young wayfarer on one of her countless drunken nights out. Mirai is brutally honest and provides a refreshingly cynical perspective. She regularly hangs out at gay bars and this is how she encounters Satoru, who had been homeless until he ended up in the apartment.

Satoru makes a living as a male prostitute by night but by day, he occasionally shoots speed and breaks into other people’s residences. That much we know through his narration but as for what he tells the other characters, Satoru plays a bit of camouflage. Mirai however, sees right through his fraud: “He simply has no respect for the past…these false histories he was spouting were becoming way too convenient.” But having been homeless previously, Satoru knows that selectively molding one’s image to others is fundamental to survival in the city. “I mean it’s all made up anyway,” he tells Mirai when she suggests he talk about his childhood memories.

The eldest roommate and the novel’s final narrator is 28-year-old Naoki, a professional at a film company. He has been an original occupant of the apartment with his now on-off girlfriend Misaki, until Mirai, and then Ryosuke moved in. Misaki eventually moved out to live with a middle-aged boyfriend instead and that’s around the time Koto moved in. Naturally, the younger members treat him as an older brother figure. Other than that, Naoki is a protein-shake-drinking health nut and spends his free time jogging around the neighborhood.

The five roommates keep loose and casual relations with one another but surely, this was to be expected for any group of individuals living together. Each of them came to the city from different backgrounds, carrying different burdens and secrets, and fighting different personal battles. Koto compares their living arrangement to that of an internet chat room and as Mirai observes, everyone is merely putting on situation-appropriate faces. For Satoru, the apartment is all a stage for “people-playing-at-being-friends.” It’s true that each roommate, in a certain sense, role-plays for the sake of living in harmony but in doing so, they also foster indifference in their lack of emotional investment in one another.

The roommates merely share an apartment and the occasional meal; otherwise, everyone is left on their own. At this point, that simple two-bedroom apartment becomes a sort of microcosm of a city, at least on the level of the individual. Paradoxically, despite the city—an artificially vast landmass of a dense web of streets and lofty skyscrapers— being a space that lots of people populate and share together, indifference and loneliness hang heavy in the air. This becomes the norm in a place where everyone bustles along with his or her own agenda. In such environment, detaching oneself and alienating others become equally easy. In the story’s late stages, one of the characters feels heavy isolation, ignored by everyone else (“unjudged, unforgiven, null and void”). It’s in this scene where even the perceived sense of alienation is chillingly oppressive.

Quick Review – Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale

Han Yujoo (author), Janet Hong (translator), The Impossible Fairy Tale, Graywolf Press, 2017. 214 pgs.

Underneath the brightly colored cover of this book is a satisfyingly dark novel. It was a little too meta for my brain, so I had to read other published reviews to wrap my head around this. I also listened to this interview with the author herself, found at this link.

The first part of the novel is a morbid story of young elementary school children, mainly focusing on a girl named Mia and another girl simply referred to as “the Child”. We then go to metafiction territory in the second part.

I like Han Yujoo’s creative style in this novel. It’s different and refreshing, though it might test the patience of some readers. Some paragraphs are deliberately repetitive and there’s also lots of wordplay going on. Ineluctably, some nuances will definitely be lost in translation, so credits to translator Janet Hong for keeping the English version as faithful as possible to the original in Korean.

One example of wordplay is the recurring references to dogs in the novel. In the interview I referenced above, Han briefly explains this: “Dog” in Korean is 개 (gae / geh) while “the Child” is 그 아이 (geu ah-ee). Say “그 아이” fast, over and over, and the resulting contraction becomes “개”. Interesting.

For now, this is all I can make of The Impossible Fairy Tale. To appreciate this more, I’ll be reading this again when my “pending-to-read” list becomes more manageable. Hopefully, I can write a more thorough analysis in the future.

LitHub has an excerpt here.

Review – Han Kang’s The Vegetarian

Han Kang (author), Deborah Smith (translator), The Vegetarian, Hogarth, 2016. 188 pgs.

Cha: An Asian Literary Journal has published my review of last year’s Man Booker International Prize winner, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. Full review is found here.

As a fan of Asian literature, I’m really glad that more and more Korean novels are being translated into English and being shared across the globe. By writing this review and having it published in a platform with a wider audience than this blog, I hope to have contributed even just a little to the overall worldwide discussion of Asian literature in translation.

It was quite challenging to analyze this novel and admittedly, this won’t be my favorite work by a Korean author. I will however say that The Vegetarian will go down as one of Korean literature’s most important works.

The Night Also Dreams: Haruki Murakami’s After Dark

Haruki Murakami (author), Jay Rubin (translator), After Dark, Vintage, 2007. 244 pgs.

A few years back in high school, After Dark served as my official introduction to Haruki Murakami’s fiction. As a less mature reader at that time, it initially ran counter to my expectations of it being some edgy urban thriller. Reading it a second time a while back, I found a whole new appreciation to it, as it has easily become one of my favorite Murakami novels due to its simplicity and subtlety. Recently, I gave it a third read and thought I should write a review to gather my thoughts and make an analysis.

After Dark zooms, pans, and watches over late night Tokyo over a roughly seven-hour time frame, beginning just before midnight and ending at sunrise. Murakami observes and explores the urban setting during these nocturnal hours while digging for the surreal in deserted offices, bathroom mirrors, and television screens. His typical artful mix of realism and surrealism creates an overall dreamlike affair within a well-paced and efficient narrative. Elements of Murakami’s characteristic style—magic realism, pensive characters, jazz music—are ever present, if not subdued. In After Dark, it’s the night that takes center stage.

From the opening, the night is kept alive as the city pulses: “Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city’s moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.” Across the narrative, we get to tour around a certain city district, visiting places that contribute to that “basso continuo” of the nighttime: A Denny’s diner, a love hotel named Alphaville, an all-night convenience store, among others, not to mention the souls that stay awake during this time, for various reasons.

It’s also a rare Murakami novel that is narrated in the third person, with particular significance. The narrator is an abstract point-of-view, taking on a role equivalent to that of a camera director of a television broadcast. Like it or not, we are part of this abstract being comprised of the narrator and the reader. “We” and “our” are used often by the narrator/observer for emphasis: “Redundant though it may sound, we are sheer point of view. We cannot influence things in any way.” This sense of voyeurism (and our apparent participation in it) is a recurring theme in the novel.

The focal point of the narrative is the Asai sisters—nineteen-year-old Mari and twenty-one-year-old Eri—who couldn’t be any more different. We first encounter Mari reading a thick novel while sipping coffee at a Denny’s until an old acquaintance, Takahashi, joins her at her table. This young man Takahashi and Mari had been paired up in a double-date before, which also involved Eri and her then-boyfriend. The two of them briefly chat about Eri and other topics while Takahashi downs a quick meal. When he leaves, Mari  then gets sucked into a brief adventure of having to translate for a bloodied and beaten-up Chinese prostitute at a love hotel. This gets the ball rolling as Mari jumps around the late night establishments, with a revolving door of characters engaging her in dialogue, including the owner and an employee of the Alphaville love hotel.

In her several conversations across the night, Mari often mentions how she and Eri “live in different worlds.” To put it simply, Mari is the brainy type—studious, fluent in Chinese—while Eri is the pretty face with a modeling career. Though these differences in characteristics and personality are merely superficial, the rift between the two sisters runs a lot deeper, reaching into an emotional level. Both sisters yearn to close this emotional gap between them but both seem not to know how.

There’s reason for why Mari is out in the streets at nights. She couldn’t sleep and doesn’t want to go home because she couldn’t bear her sister’s condition—Eri has been sleeping at home for two months. As point-of-view, we get to observe Eri’s room every now and then. This is mainly where Murakami plays around with his signature surrealism. “Clearly, something here is incompatible with nature,” the narrating observer teases. There’s a mysterious television set in the room, where a masked man is displayed on screen, seemingly watching over Eri’s sleep. At one point, Eri gets transported into some other world inside the television. This whole sequence is cryptic, although its apparent metaphorical value is hinted at:

“Around us, cause and effect join hands, and synthesis and division maintain their equilibrium. Everything, finally, unfolded in a place resembling a deep, inaccessible fissure. Such places open secret entries into darkness in the interval between midnight and the time the sky grows light.”

Perhaps it really is unnecessary to explain these strange events, just like how dreams also go beyond explanation. When we dream, an infinite number of realms open up and arbitrariness is imposed upon us. In After Dark, Murakami tastefully imagines this notion into the nighttime setting. There’s something about the night’s own spirit that welcomes the uncanny and the surreal during the most untimely hours, lurking around both those asleep and awake. As one character mentions, “Time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night. You can’t fight it.” In Murakami’s nocturnal Tokyo, the night also dreams.