Chapter 5 Elephant and Fengwen/Li Ge

Haruki Murakami can be regarded as a very westernized Japanese novelist. He likes Fitzgerald the most, has collected thousands of jazz records, opened a bar, and translated Paul Auster. Living in the United States, Murakami would be mad if he knew that I was going to explain his Japanese temperament. The atmosphere of Japanese love, the Japanese temperament... At best, it is called distance, and at worst, it is called alienation.I don’t know how to describe that kind of thing. The last time Dr. Li came back from Japan, we drank coffee together. The doctor said: “Japanese people are very simple, that is, everyone does not cause trouble to others. On the subway, people and People don’t look at each other. Because I’m usually too depressed, once it erupts, it will be abnormal and bloody.” I asked him if he had a family photo with him, and he said that his wife would not show it to outsiders. I said your wife is from Japan. Man, he was very surprised and said how do you know, I said it was obvious.

The Japanese have always been expressive and polite, and they are afraid of establishing serious relationships with others. The result of saving attention is that they are very sensitive to seasons, weather, and details. When you read their novels, there are often very Beautiful, prose paragraphs, moreover, they are not about people, but about objects and scenes.I thought of a word that can describe the Japanese love or interpersonal style, that is "light love". But I always feel that although it is also light, the Japanese style in Murakami's novels is different from Watanabe Junichi, Yoshimoto Banana, and Kawakami Hiromi.

I was thinking that Murakami in Japan has some similarities with the post-80s in China—he was an only child, which was rare in Japan at that time.When he was a child, he always felt inferior because of this, and felt that he was incomplete and could not belong.Most of the characters in his works have thin backgrounds, sparse relationship networks, no parents, no brothers and sisters, decent family backgrounds, no tragic friction and conflict with reality, and their personalities are a bit close to the current nerds and nerds.Live alone in a dormitory, accompanied by the minimum density of furniture and the maximum density of books and periodicals, get up, take a walk, smoke on the sunny terrace, read a book, listen to records, make a cup of hot coffee with a coffee machine, and have tomatoes for lunch Spaghetti with sauce and a pet cat.Only friends, but also lovers, lovers, sex partners.The sweetest love written by Murakami is probably the autobiographical "My Happiness in the Cheesecake Shape". "I" and my wife were so poor that we could only rent a triangle between two railways. It was very noisy on weekdays. When the railway workers went on strike, we hugged our cat and basked on the railway tracks. That was the happiest time for us... Among Xiang Yang's works by Murakami, this is my favorite.

What makes me particularly unforgettable is "The Disappearance of the Elephant". I have always regarded this elephant as the totem of Haruki Murakami. Maybe Murakami wanted to be such a big, solitary, quiet, and self-willed elephant. Proud animals, with their own thoughts and values, pursuing the independence and freedom of the soul, one day they feel uncomfortable with the cages and fences, and disappear without saying hello. Elephants are of course afraid of cages——In "Listening to the Wind", the little girl asked her boyfriend, do you love me, will you get married, and other questions that little girls would ask, and the men all affirmed them one by one, the girl Say you lied to me. The man showed her a piece of mud, and said, "This is a piece of hay for a cow to chew the cud. I never understand why the cow chews such an ugly thing." The girl Very smart, after thinking about it, he would say: "Okay, don't tell me the truth in the future." I read a few books by Murakami, and found that his favorite image is wind. In "Listening to the Wind's Song", the mouse wrote a novel. He said that he had been to an ancient tomb, and he heard the sound of the wind passing through the woods, covering everything, cicadas, spiders, frogs—— "I just want to write a novel, about the wind that wraps everything up and flows into space."

Suddenly I changed my mind and remembered that Murakami really wrote a novel about wind decades after "Listening to the Song of the Wind". Lihui's woman, this woman is self-sticky, never willing to put herself deep into the depths of daily life, she loves a man named Junping, and then she needs a huge space for spiritual activities.She came with a blank, no future inaction, came unintentionally, and landed in his life, her identity was blank, her social coordinates were blank, her history was blank, and he didn't know where she lived, what she was doing, where she was going , I only know the cold touch of the skin when making love, the warmth of the breath when whispering, and the cleverness of the conversation. You can fully open up your pleasure in front of a person.I just remember these...Of course, this woman still disappeared in the end. She wanted to go to her career, that is, in a high place, between two tall buildings, put up the steel wire, untie the safety cable, in this world, "only me and the wind are left" .Junpei couldn't get through to her anymore.

Whenever I am overwhelmed by children and housework, I will look out the window and be Gui Lihui who disappeared for five minutes, imagining that I am walking on a tightrope, with my eyes closed and against the wind.Then open your eyes, what to do. What makes Murakami different from other Japanese writers is his importance.Murakami's works usually have two areas of light and dark. For example, Naoko, who has doubts about life and is gradually swallowed by shadows, is Watanabe's spiritual twin. Pair it with an extremely light-oriented, cynical, and light-flowing green child like the wind.In "Listening to the Wind", there is also a French girl who died in her prime, plus a hippie girl who speaks unreliably.Murakami usually feels nostalgic for the shadow, and then continues to have nothing to do with the sunshine... This is also very similar to the living conditions of many young people today: an old soul lives in the heartless and dazzling youth.

The girls are fascinated by the dehydrated mushroom-like lifestyle of Miss Satoshi, quiet and drifting with the tide, losing contact with the outside world in spring, summer, autumn and winter. The way of life of "dry girl" originally came from Japan, lonely but not weak, quiet but not lonely, so in this issue of "Carp", in addition to the new short story by Nanae Aoyama, there is also a special article from Dongying, talking about the dehydrated dry girl.