Rhythm, rituals, and running: Murakami’s 3 Rs of writing

The first time I encountered the works of Haruki Murakami was when I chanced upon the February double issue of the New Yorker in 2006. In there was Murakami’s short story, “A Shinagawa Monkey.”

I got interested because of the photo montage accompanying the book. It was a story of a woman named Mizuki who has trouble remembering her name. She then goes into counseling, which surreally leads her to a monkey living in the sewers of Tokyo who is notorious for snatching names.

I remember the jolt I felt when the monkey itself talked in the story. “I’m a monkey who takes people’s names. It’s a sickness I suffer from. Once I spot a name I can’t help myself.” Then the monkey becomes the oracle, revealing to Mizuki more than what she wanted: that her mother didn’t love her and that she didn’t love her husband.

I was able to trace another Murakami short story from the New Yorker, “The Year of Spaghetti,” which started funnily enough: “This is the story from the Year of Spaghetti, 1971 A.D. In 1971, I cooked spaghetti to live and lived to cook spaghetti.”

This is similar to the rhythm of Richard Brautigan’s prose, I then thought, not knowing he was Murakami’s influence. This is not the Japanese literature that I was familiar with, having tasted Mishima, Kobo Abe, and Kawabata in college.

After this, I had become, what John Irving called his fans, a Murakami junkie. In 2007, there was already a small Murakami cult in the Philippines, lurking in the internet, speaking among themselves like Shinagawa monkeys.

I remembered Nick Pichay asking me and the late Luis Katigbak: “I don’t get Murakami. What is he to you?” and I couldn’t answer him then. Also because I don’t know what Murakami was to me and why I liked him. I’m a writer, so I don’t read Murakami mainly to enjoy his stories.

But there were times when I couldn’t help but laugh at his stories, at the stories within the stories, the clever ways we are lured into the dreams of the characters and out again. I’m a poet, essayist, and a journalist, so when I read, for example, Sputnik Sweetheart, I am more drawn not to the love story between the protagonist Sumire and K. and Sumire and Miu, but to Sumire and writing and Sumire and writing block.

There is a passage in Sputnik which is central to the book and about writing novels. K. is talking about the huge magnificent gates in China and how they were made. The Chinese would go to the old battlefields and gather the bleached bones and bring them inside. Then they would construct a huge gate at the entrance of the city. Then they gathered stray dogs, slit their throats, and mix the blood with the old bones.

“Only by mixing fresh blood with the dried-out bones would the ancient souls of the dead magically revive,” K. says. “Writing novels is much the same. You gather up bones and make your gate, but no matter how wonderful the gate might be, that alone doesn’t make it a living, breathing novel. A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.”

So to write like Murakami, you have to slay a few dogs and shed their blood. That is the easy part. I am more drawn to how Murakami writes, where he gets his rhythm, and what makes him run.

Murakami was born in Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital, but, early on, his family migrated to the port city of Kobe, which is like Olongapo or Baguio to us, teeming with foreigners, mostly American sailors.

His father was a teacher of Japanese literature. Murakami later said, it may be a father-son thing that’s why he rarely read traditional Japanese literature. What got him were Hollywood movies, jazz, and the sort of books that American sailors leave in ports, like porn, pulp novels like Raymond Chandler, and others.

Maybe it’s interesting to note that the first fiction of Murakami to come out in the United States, a short story called “The Second Bakery Attack,” was published in 1985 in Playboy Magazine.

Jazz came to Murakami when he was 15 years old after watching Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers live in Kobe in 1964. Later, his favorites are Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan and Charlie Parker. Miles Davis was the great trumpeter while the rest are saxophonists. He later managed a small jazz house in suburban Tokyo, naming it Peter Cat. During this time he was just mixing drinks and preparing cucumber sandwiches.

When I was 23, I was often at Rumour’s Bar, drinking beer, listening to jazz, and talking to the bartender and the regulars. Their stories were similar to what Murakami would later write. Lonely hearts, cats, and weird parables. When Murakami was still tending his bar, he had no time to write but listened to a lot of jazz. In fact, he still kept his vinyl collection of mostly jazz records, a whole wall of 10,000 LPs. He also talked to a lot of people, but being shy he was just at the back listening.

“When I make up the characters in my books, I like to observe the real people in my life,” he said in the 2004 Paris Review interview. “I don’t like to talk much; I like to listen to other people’s stories. I don’t decide what kind of people they are – I just try to think about what they feel, where they are going. In those 6 or 7 months that I’m writing, those people are inside me. It’s a kind of cosmos.”

It was much longer for him because he didn’t really start to write until he finished his university. Three years later in 1977, Peter Cat transferred to the central Sendagaya neighborhood and that’s where he began to write.

So how did all that jazz affect Murakami’s writing? In 2011 (the English translation was in 2016), Absolutely on Music, came out. It is a series of conversations between Murakami and the great conductor Seiji Ozawa. It is mostly Murakami interviewing Ozawa, but in one chapter, “The Relationship of Writing to Music,” it is mostly Murakami jazzing it up: “Conversely, you can’t write well if you don’t have an ear for music. The two sides complement each other: listening to music improves your style; by improving your style, you improve your ability to listen to music.”

“No one ever taught me how to write, and I’ve never made a study of writing techniques. So how did I learn to write? From listening to music. And what’s the most important thing in writing? It’s rhythm. No one’s going to read what you write unless it’s got rhythm. It has to have an inner rhythmic feel that propels the reader forward.”

He says that the rhythm comes from the combination of words, the combination of the sentences and paragraphs, the pairings of hard and soft, light and heavy, balance and imbalance, the punctuation, the combination of different tones. “I’m a jazz lover, so that’s how I set down a rhythm first. Then I add chords to it and start improvising, making it up freely as I go along. I write as if I’m making music.”

Unfortunately for us, we are only reading Murakami through translations, so we are not sure if the rhythm, the polyrhythm he is gushing about, is there.

Matthew Carl Strecher in his book, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami, says that the American tone of his work had him compared to Vonnegut and Irving. “This rhythm and tone were the beginning of what would become known as the author’s ‘nationality-less’ (mukokuseki) style.”

Critic Chang Mingmin states that Murakami caused the first revival of interest in Japanese literature in Taiwan since Japan’s recognition of the People’s Republic of China in 1972, and Kim Yang-su notes that Murakami has (partially, at least) overcome half a century of Korean animosity toward Japan following half a century of colonial rule, and now stands at the forefront of a new body of East Asian writers – many of them influenced by Murakami himself – who are poised to develop “a cultural autonomous zone in which the weight of nationalism is eliminated…where [these writers] will be able to interact freely.”

But then Murakami always insists that he is writing for his countrymen. “I don’t want to write about foreigners in foreign countries. I want to write about us. That’s important to me,” Murakami said in the Paris Review interview.

Murakami’s ritual is not as easy as peeling out one LP from his collection and listening to it. He wakes up at 4 am and works for 5 to 6 hours straight. In the afternoons he runs or swims (or both), runs errands, reads, listens to music. Bedtime is 9 pm. “I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes an important thing; it is a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”

Toni Morrison, whom Murakami met early on but was afraid to talk to, said to a friend that she didn’t have a ritual. “I, at first, thought I didn’t have a ritual, but then I remembered that I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark – it must be dark – and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come. And she said, Well, that’s a ritual. And I realized that for me this ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space that I can only call nonsecular.”

“Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.”

I’m not sure if that’s also the reason why Haruki starts his ritual at 4 am. I myself, when I am writing a creative piece, start at 3 am. That is why my blog is called Unholy Hours. Maybe this is what Morrison meant by nonsecular. Natutulog pa ang Diyos (God is still asleep).

In his book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami mentions Raymond Chandler, that even if he wasn’t writing anything, he would just sit on his desk every day and concentrate on writing. “I understand the purpose behind him doing this. This is the way Chandler gave himself the physical stamina a professional writer needs, quietly strengthening his willpower.”

Writing rituals is a way of baiting the Muse. They help us mentally prepare ourselves for writing. In his book, The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg says: “First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is the reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering in the future. Over time, this loop becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become intertwined with a powerful sense of anticipation and craving emerges.”

That is why Murakami had this “superstition” about writing. Even his start on writing was well documented when he thought he could write a novel. April 1, 1978, at the Jingu Stadium. His Yakult Swallows were fighting the Hiroshima Carps. The Swallows’ leadoff batter was David Hilton and he hit a double. And it was that exact moment that thought struck him: You know what? I could try writing a novel. Blue sky. New grass. The crack of the bat. He went to Kinokuniya, bought manuscript paper and a fountain pen. The rest is history.

How many of us can say the same thing? Wait for Phil Younghusband to make a hat trick? Kobe Paras to dunk over Lebron? I was thinking because Ichiro has gone back to my favorite team Seattle Mariners, I would get my impetus to write short stories. Just predict your magic moment and then duly write.

Murakami also has his talismans, some souvenirs he bought or were given to him. If you go to his website, you will know what particular talisman inspired what novel. Some sort of magic? Refer to our gate parable in Sputnik Sweetheart.

Of course, magic is not enough. In his routine, Murakami can finish his first draft in 6 months. Editing and revision mean another 7 to 8 months. 1Q84 has 425,000 words, for example. That took a lot of jazz records. “The whole process – sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the flow of the story on track – require far more energy over a long period, than most people ever imagine. You might not move your body around, but there’s grueling, dynamic labor going inside you,” says Murakami in his running book.

And then after 6 hours of mental marathon, he does the actual marathon. I love how Murakami said that he started to run when he was 33, when Jesus Christ died and when his idol Scott Fitzgerald started going downhill. Owning a jazz bar means smoking a lot, inhaling smoke, and drinking a lot. At 33, Murakami stopped drinking and smoking. He cut down on meat and rice.

I am way past 33. I also don’t belong to that group of special kind of writers whose springs of talent never dry up. Like Murakami, I have to dig out a deep hole. Isn’t it funny that Murakami always talks about digging a hole when he talks about locating the source of creativity? And why some of his novels have wells right out of nowhere?

“I have to pound the rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of creativity,” he says in his running book. New novel, new digging.

So writing fiction is a long haul, people. Lately, I’ve cut down on my night drinking. I bought a lot of running shoes and shirts. I started waking up early. Maybe kill some dogs along the way and talk to stray cats. Just one double from Ichiro starting this April and I’m off with you and hope to catch up with Murakami somewhere. – Rappler.com 

This was a talk delivered by the writer during the Haruki Murakami Festival at the BGC Arts Center in Taguig in March 2018. Photo of Frank Cimatu courtesy of Fully Booked.