Onward with Murakami

"It's strange, isn't it? No matter how quiet and conformist a person's life seems, there's always a time in the past when they reached an impasse. A time when they went a little crazy. I guess people need that sort of stage in their lives."
--Colorless Tsukuru Tasaki, Haruki Murakami

It has been interesting to read Murakami in English for the first time. Beforehand, I had always read his work in Indonesian translation - Dunia Kafka, Norwegian Wood, and 1Q84. Having run out of Indonesian translations for the time being, I purchased Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki in English from Periplus. I had wondered whether these two languages would convey the same general tone - though, of course, there is a third remove, in that the originals were written in Japanese. It does seem to me, though, that the tone and diction and mood come across in a pretty similar spirit between the Indonesian and English versions. In other words, they seem to bear the stylistic voice-print of Murakami, his gentle sense of humor, his clean, focused sentence structure, his use of repetition, especially of single words embedded throughout the work. Indonesian does tend to soften 'coarse language', as there are often no words that directly translate from English for these expressions. At the same time, Murakami, as far as I have read, rarely uses specifically coarse words, even in English, so the comparative translations do not suffer much at all in this way.

Four Eyes

Having stopped by my friendly neighborhood pharmacy in Sanur this morning, I was asked whether I would like a 30 minute massage for my back. So I got my massage, which was very relaxing indeed, but upon dressing to leave, I could not find my glasses. I was sure I had put them on the table near the massage bed, and yet they were nowhere to be found. I asked the masseuse for help, but after checking every corner of the room, she couldn't find them either.

"What do they look like?" she asked.

"Well, they're black, kind of rectangular, and ... well, much like yours."

"Oh!," she exclaimed. They do look like mine!"

The News

I was reading through a rather ruffled copy of Kompas this morning at Starbucks. It was a couple days old, but the news is always basically the same, you know. I skimmed through articles about foreign affairs, the affairs of government (basically the same everywhere), dry economic forecasts and such-like, when one small piece down in one corner of one page caught my attention. Two young women in Bandung had committed suicide by jumping from a balcony of their apartment building. First the older sister, aged 33, then the younger, 27. A man, eating a meal in his apartment on the ground floor, witnessed the event. First the one, then the other. When they hit the ground, he said, it sounded like a car crash. Both women's feet and hands were broken, their skulls shattered, and their stomachs exploded. Both, it was reported had been suffering from "sakit jiwa", or mental illness, for the past 10 years, since the death of their mother, and had been in and out of treatment and rehabilitation centers. Curiosly, another woman, some two years previously, had jumped to her death at this same apartment building. This small article, life, loss, suffering, death, compressed into about 3 inches of print space, eclipsed nation and society and conflict and the world at large. It meant something. These two women meant something more essntial than nations and legislative bodies and political decrees and visiting dignitaries and sporting events and terrorist threats and religious debates and the FPI and whether Pancasila was dead of alive. Here was something real, immediate, definite, done, never to be undone. Final. We see them standing on that balcony, one about to leap, the other just behind, a man enjoyng his meal below - a moment that might have meant anything until it suddenly became what it was. We see them standing there, gowns caught by the breeze, perhaps, hair blown sideways, a sheen of sweat,or of tears, on the cheek. Silent. Fixed. Irreversible. Haunting.

What Is Your Passion

My wife asked this evening, "What is your passion?"

A wife sort of question if there ever was one.

(Man's mental response: 'Passion?')

"Other than writing," she added.

Ouch. Ummm ...

"Fishing!"

"Fishing?"

"Yeah!"

(The man is now enthused, having finally discovered his passion).

"But, you can fish here, and you never fish."

"No, no, I mean fishing. You know, like--"

[like fly casting, in a mountain lake, with the sun just rising over the eastern hilltops. swimming down the slopes like cold silver and washing across the meadow and plucking up the flower tops and naming every one and trampling through the huckleberries and splashing through the shallow canals and kicking up frogs and salamanders and polywogs and then spilling out gold onto the rocky shore and turning the mirror of deep water to the sky and the sky to the water so that the puffy clouds skim along like boats both above and below, and all of it, everything, comes to lap against your pant-legs, tingle in your fingers, kiss your brow with mist from the tip of your pole and from the line and leader in their seeking arc ...

(you know, fishing, where you skirt the mucky brook by cutting through the woods and emerge again where the rocky shelf spills down from the shore to the shallows to the green of the deep water and you wade out waist deep, lake filling your pockets and your creel and floating your fly box and turning the speckled sides of the caught fish and the creel strap pulling on your shoulder and your forgotten pack of cigarettes wet and your cap bill pulled down against the face-front breeze blowing the mosquitoes back to the grassy verge where you have set a can of beer between two rocks to cool and you see the right spot, the spot you were seeking, where the sility shelf decends and the water turns and a riffle runs along the divide like a rapid snake and a large brook trout suddenly breaks the surface, a poem of three worlds, grace defined ...

(fishing.

(the aromatic smoke of my father's pipe. and mosquito repellent. and trout kept fresh between fronds of grass. and the scent of beer, and wind, and shallow water, and his unshaved whiskers. and the sharp scent of cedar sweating in the sun. and smoke from a campfire somewhere. and lilypads. and the motionless pond in the windless nook. and the minnows that dart just beyond our boot-toes. and the cheese and crackers my mother had sent. and my brother's red hair. his blue eyes. and the far shore from which we had come. and the sun just touching the very top of the tallest tree on the highest hill at the western-most edge of the earth.

(fishing. fly casting. and the long way home.

"Okay. Writing. Fishing. And what? What else? What is your passion?"

What else is there?

Evening Walk in Renon

Evening walk in Renon -- always the same, always somehow new.

Evening in Renon

Ah, such a pleasant evening. While the sun sets, a cool breeze soothes the tired brow of the day and lifts every care to careless caprice, all as insubstantial as paper kites. The children are out in the streets, and their parents, too, and the game of the day is badminton, of which the wind makes gentle farce. "Halo!" they shout, swinging their racquets, chasing the birdie, shaking the singing tree - men, women, girls, boys, bikes, bushes, storefronts, alleys, roses, dogs, cats, bells, gods, and the bakso man with the umbrella - Halo! Just being alive is an incomparable gift which neither wants nor knows a fee.

Lunchtime

My not so "furious" friend here is Samuel, whom I believe I have mentioned before. Samuel is a hardworking young man and, aside from working as a doorman at Starbucks, comes here to the house once a week to clean and mop and so on. Additonally, we have found work for him with two friends. Samuel appreciates this, as his wife, who currently in school training to be a teacher, is six months pregnant, and they will need all the money they can get to support the new member of their family. Often, we will have Samuel and his wife stay for lunch. On the menu today: Nasi Campur.