What It’s About
Alternating between two distinct yet converging narratives, Murakami provides a multifacted piece on psychology, consciousness, and existentialism through a whirlwind of genres.
The protagonist, an unnamed divorced man in his thirties lives in isolation as a Calcutec - a specialized worker biologically altered to scramble datasets for privacy-seeking clients. He agrees to a gig without the knowledge of his organization, The System, for a reclusive biologist who is later revealed to be responsible for the discovery of the mind-altering procedure that allows Calcutecs to perform shuffling. After shuffling the biologist’s data, the narrator returns home with a mysterious skull that draws the attention of a safety inspector hired to steal it. This leaves the protagonist paranoid and even more intrigued by the skull which increasingly resembles that of a unicorn.
In order to uncover more about his secretive assignment, he enlists the help of a librarian and finds historical references that momentarily confirm his suspicions regarding the artifact. Soon after, two Semiotecs break into his house and plunder the place under the pretense of drawing the System’s attention while stealing the biologist’s research. At the same time, the biologist’s laboratory is attacked by creatures called Inklings working alongside Semiotecs, compelling him to seek refuge underground in a deserted Inkling sanctuary. With the help of the biologist’s granddaughter, the protagonist traverses Tokyo’s underbelly to extract the truth, learning that his consciousness had been bifurcated in the operation that rendered him a Calcutec. Now knowing that he has a few days until his consciousness entirely recedes into an immortal fantasy, the protagonist entertains the librarian and reflects on the state of his life thus far. With Bob Dylan playing on repeat inside a rented Toyota parked by the bay, he enters a perpetual sleep.
In the deep recesses of his mind, the protagonist recently enters a town, the prerequisite for which is the relinquishing of his shadow which coincides with the disintegration of his mind. In this seeming utopia, he is appointed as a Dreamreader - one who discerns patterns in shimmers of light concealed within stacks of unicorn skulls. Gradually he falls in love with the librarian who is tasked with supporting him but is never able to reciprocate his feelings as a consequence of not possessing a mind. His shadow, feeling that something about the town is amiss, instructs the narrator to map out the town, taking him into the depths of the forbidden woods down the river to a whirlpool at the edge of town. Once completed, the narrator delivers the map to his bedridden shadow who grows weaker with the onset of a dark winter. Gradually the narrator learns that the unicorns embody the lost consciousness of the town’s residents, the death of whom solidify the dimunition of their minds. Ultimately, he helps the shadow escape by tossing him into the whirlpool, proclaiming his understanding that the town is of his own creation and that he must stay to unravel the basis of its existence.
Thoughts
Ray Bradbury’s protagonist in Fahrenheit 451 is famously named Guy to portray him as a cog in the machine that is this suppressed society, that is until he breaks free through exposure to books. Murakami’s decision to keep his protagonist nameless serves a different purpose. In fact, the author felt it wrong to ascribe labels to his characters as a Goodreads user points out. Quite the opposite of Guy Montag, the protagonist here is multifaceted, showing a deep admiration for Bob Dylan, taking a keen interest in food prep, and conveying amusing observations about the female body. While he does operate under a massive organization like Guy, he is introduced at the beginning of an assignment carried out without the knowledge of the System.
Two people can sleep in the same bed and still be alone when they close their eyes
He leads a solitary life following his divorce, entertaining women every so often but never pausing to make a real connection. His relationship with the librarian does evoke some sense of depth but his committment to it was more so a desparate effort to contribute something meaningful in another life in his last few conscious days.
When microorganisms die, they make oil; when huge timbers fall, they make coal. But everything here was pure unadulterated rubbish that didn’t make anything.
The abrupt realization that he is receding into the depths of his mind reminds me of the Marcus Aurelius quote “You could leave life right now”. To go from carrying out routine tasks for a large employer from a Tokyo apartment to having to chose between death and a shallow immortality would be paralyzing for most. Yet the narrator faces it with relative nonchalance despite the realization that he hasn’t much of substance to put in order prior to his ‘death’. Ironically, he leaves behind the ‘pure unadulterated rubbish’ for the professor’s granddaughter so that his existence amounts to at least something in his absence. Ultimately, the wreckage in his apartment is a bridge to adulthood for a naive yet sophisticated teenager seeking out a less secluded existence.
Maybe you can’t die here, but you will not be living you will merely exist. There is no ‘why’ in a world that would be perfect in itself.
A quote quite reminiscent of Huxley’s Brave New World, it puts into question the cognitive basis of a utopia. It is because of our tendency to question the underlying structures and institutions of society and a just distribution of value that true egalitarianism evades communities over time. The walled utopia in this novel isn’t perfectly egalitarian in that each citizen serves a specialized role, but no one questions their placement other than the narrator whose mind is gradually diminishing. The loss of one’s ability to question and think analytically is a precursor to stability as also in Fahrenheit 451.
“You are not lost. It’s just that your thoughts are being kept from you, or hidden away. But the mind is strong. It survives, even without thought. Even with everything taken away, it holds a seed - your self…”
Even then, it appears that these societies cling onto some semblance of the old order as a juxtaposition to the fulfillment afforded to the residents. In the aforementioned novels, the ones retaining the full extents of their minds remain as outcasts and are labelled as savages. Similarly, those in the town who are unable to relinquish their minds are banished to the woods, being inaccessible enough that they’re myths serving to instill fear and conformity across the population. This particularly reminds me of Jordan Peterson’s powerful conversation with North Korean defector Yeonmi Park who recounts viewing the United States as a mortal enemy to the rightful way of life enabled by the lineage of Kims. Even under the censorship of an authoritarian Communist regime, the inhumane living conditions of Nazi encampments, or the genocidal tribes of Rwanda, the will to question institutions and seek a life beyond the enclosures of an authoritarian regime persists.
Your body dies, your consciousness passes away, but your thought is caught in the one tautological point an instant before, subdividin’ for eternity
It is the ability of the mind to distinguish the past from the future and the now that time is born. At least our perception of it. Thought is time as philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti puts it, and subsequently thought is what allows humans to comprehend and ascribe meaning to the world around them. If the mind’s distinction between two events is scaled down then immortality is theoretically possible which is precisely what the protagonist is experiencing. Not only does the mind’s perception of time approach a singular point relative to the ‘real’ world, it recedes into an imagined reality indistinguishable from the one that the body resides in. Since awareness of the body can be boiled down to biochemical interactions, the mind can create an artificial physical presence. To some degree everyone lives in a world of their own, biased by slight alterations in their genetic makeup or their neural circuitry. Through mathematics and physics do we have at least some degree of objectivity about the world.
You said the mind is like the wind, but perhaps it is we who are like the wind. Knowing nothing, simply blowing through. Never aging, never dying.
Aging is change. It is the expansion of thought, the release of outdated ideas for ones that better serve the present context, the constant questioning of order. In the absence of these parameters individuals become stagnant. A midlife crisis is a mild version of this. Unlike the librarian, those living stagnant lives rarely possess the self-awareness to step out of this stasis, accepting a certain contentment over an uncertain fulfillment. In underdeveloped regions, literacy is the escape, but for the developed societies it is focus and a constant scrutiny of existing structures that can prevent mindlessness en masse.
Sunlight traveled a long distance to reach this planet; an infinitesimal portion of that energy was enough to warm my eyelids. I was moved. That something as insignificant as an eyelid had its place in the workings of this universe
And it is the eyelid that adds the greatest dimension of interpretation to the seeming insignificant place we occupy in the universe.