{"id":14658,"date":"2014-10-13T18:08:25","date_gmt":"2014-10-14T01:08:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/?p=14658"},"modified":"2014-10-13T18:39:29","modified_gmt":"2014-10-14T01:39:29","slug":"scheherazade-by-haruki-murakami-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/scheherazade-by-haruki-murakami-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Scheherazade by Haruki Murakami — Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scheherazade<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

By Haruki Murakami<\/p>\n

The New Yorker<\/em>, October 13, 2014, pp. 100-109.<\/span><\/p>\n

Translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen.<\/p>\n

\n

\n

In Haruki Murakami’s revisitation of this ancient classic, a woman the narrator calls ‘Scheherazade’ tells stories to her lover, Habara, “because she wants to.”\u00a0 She seems to need to talk.\u00a0 Nothing is at stake, certainly not her life.\u00a0 Habara was enthralled by the stories because he was “able to forget the reality that surrounded him, if only for a moment.”\u00a0 They “eased [him] of worries and unpleasant memories,” and he needed this more than anything else.<\/p>\n

The lovers don’t call each other by their names.\u00a0 He doesn’t know hers, and she doesn’t use his.\u00a0 “She barely spoke during their lovemaking, performing each act as if completing an assignment.”\u00a0 She would leave at 4:30 to prepare dinner for her family, and Habara would be left to dine alone.\u00a0 He watched DVDs and read long books.<\/p>\n

There wasn’t much else to do.\u00a0 He had no one to talk to.\u00a0 No one to phone.\u00a0 With no computer, he had no way of accessing the internet.\u00a0 No newspaper was delivered, and he never watched television.\u00a0 (There was a good reason for that.)\u00a0 It went without saying that he couldn’t go outside.\u00a0 Should Scheherazade’s visits come to a halt for some reason, he would be left all alone.<\/p>\n

It is a little hard to figure out what this relationship is all about — that is, why it even exists.<\/p>\n

Habara had met Scheherazade for the first time four months earlier.\u00a0 He had been transported to this house, in a provincial city north of Tokyo, and she had been assigned to him as his “support liaison.”\u00a0 Since he couldn’t go outside, her role was to buy food and other items he required and bring them to the house.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 Apparently, having sex with him was part of her assignment as well.<\/p>\n

no vow, no implicit understanding — held them together.\u00a0 Theirs was a chance relationship created by someone else, and might be terminated on that person’s whim.<\/p>\n

So there seems to be some large, mysterious institutional force governing their lives and defining their roles and their functioning within this rather choreographed relationship.\u00a0 It sounds like he might be under some sort of house arrest, or perhaps he has some disability or injury that he is recovering from.\u00a0 It is never clear why these two people meet frequently and what motivates them, or why Habara has such a sense of confinement.\u00a0 It is also unclear why they could not continue to meet even if this nameless, faceless force decided to terminate their “liaison.”<\/p>\n

I think this ambiguity, this absence of internal motivations, is important.\u00a0 Perhaps it is a comment on Japanese society.\u00a0 I haven’t lived in Japan, so I cannot speak authoritatively on this, but from casual observation, it seems that many Japanese people live very structured lives that are defined by external forces, social expectations, that are a pervasive, overarching presence in their lives.\u00a0 Thus, much of what they do and how they live is done in order to fulfill these imagined requirements and obligations, rather than from a deeply personal sense of purpose.\u00a0 People don’t know why they are doing what they are doing, but they know they are supposed to do it — so they do.\u00a0 What is the “reality that surrounds” Habara that he is so eager to forget, and thus so readily loses himself in Scheherazade’s narratives?\u00a0 Japanese society.<\/p>\n

I once met a young Japanese woman who had freshly arrived in the United States.\u00a0 I asked her, “Why did you come to America?”\u00a0 She replied simply, “Freedom.”\u00a0 I was a little taken aback by that blunt response and all that must have been behind it, but I think it is not an uncommon sentiment among young Japanese women.\u00a0 Japanese society can be burdensome and confining for young people and this relationship between Habara and Scheherazade, defined and controlled by a powerful unseen force, evokes that sense of invisible boundaries and sweeping tides.<\/p>\n

There is nothing resembling spontaneity in this whole story, with the possible exception of their conversations.\u00a0 The conversations after sex seem to be the only place in their lives where they can interact of their own volition\u00a0 and participate in life as themselves.<\/p>\n

Their sex was not exactly obligatory, but neither could it be said that their hearts were entirely in it. . . Yet, while the lovemaking was not what you’d call passionate, it wasn’t entirely businesslike either. . . to what extent did Scheherazade see their sexual relationship as one of her duties, and how much did it belong to the sphere of her personal life?\u00a0 He couldn’t tell.<\/p>\n

After this ambiguous set up of the relationship between Habara and Scheherazade, the story shifts focus and is taken over by a reminiscence Scheherazade relates from her adolescence that dominates the remainder.\u00a0 Habara and Scheherazade, the couple, retreat and Scheherazade herself steps forward to claim center stage, specifically, a relationship — or, rather, an obsession — she had in her teens, which impelled her to break into houses — not to steal things, but to satisfy a psychological compulsion.\u00a0 So it becomes a story within a story, or rather, a substory taking over what had been the main thread.<\/p>\n

Scheherazade was obsessed with a boy in her high school class.\u00a0 She broke into his house (rather easily through the front door with a key hidden under the doormat), and proceeded to go through his things, lie in his bed, smell his clothes, take a couple of innocuous souvenirs, and — very importantly, leave some small mementos of herself behind in inconspicuous places.\u00a0 She is a rather aggressive girl, but in a very indirect way.\u00a0 She never approaches the boy himself.\u00a0 She tries to get close to him through the things<\/em> he uses and lives with: by occupying the space he occupies, but when he<\/em> is not there.<\/p>\n

she began thinking about what to leave behind.\u00a0 Her panties seemed like the best choice.\u00a0 They were of an ordinary sort, simple, relatively new, and fresh that morning.\u00a0 She could hide them at the very back of his closet.\u00a0 Could there be anything more appropriate to leave in exchange?\u00a0 But when she took them off, the crotch was damp.\u00a0 I guess this comes from desire, too, she thought.\u00a0 It would hardly do to leave something tainted by lust in his room.\u00a0 She would only be degrading herself.\u00a0 She slipped them back on and began to think about what else to leave.<\/p>\n

Murakami does not write very well about sex.\u00a0 He does not seem to understand it.\u00a0 What I mean is he is detached from visceral passion.\u00a0 Lust.\u00a0 He doesn’t want to let himself or any of his characters feel it.\u00a0 Neither Habara nor Scheherazade feel lust or strong passion in their relationship, and the above passage repudiates lust as a motivating force in Scheherazade’s behavior as a young girl toward the boy in her dreams.\u00a0 It sanitizes her obsession with the boy.\u00a0 It desexualizes her smelling his shirt and taking it home, lying in his bed, looking at his hidden pornography.\u00a0 It makes the girl seem unreal and discredits her obsession with the boy.\u00a0 If she had stuffed her wet panties under the boy’s pillow and approached him with a dripping cunt that was eager to fuck, it would have given her character more credibility.\u00a0 She would have to do it in a Japanese way, of course.\u00a0 Murakami could figure that out.\u00a0 But Murakami cannot write the story that way.\u00a0 He wouldn’t know what to do with a girl like that.\u00a0 Believe me, there are plenty of Japanese girls who are not afraid of lust.<\/p>\n

Scheherazade actually has more interaction with the boy’s mother than she does with the boy.\u00a0 In fact, it seems likely that the boy never became aware of Scheherazade’s interest in him, although it is very clear that his mother did — and she put the kibosh on it.<\/p>\n

When my break-ins stopped, my passion for him began to cool.\u00a0 It was gradual, like the tide ebbing from a long, sloping beach.<\/p>\n

The subsiding of Scheherazade’s interest in the boy is as amorphous and inexplicable as her obsession.\u00a0 But it was the mother’s actions that locked the door and made the house inaccessible to her.\u00a0 The boy himself was still readily available.\u00a0 Scheherazade mentions watching him in classes at school and watching him on the soccer field.\u00a0 She could have approached him in any number of ways.\u00a0 It leads me to think that this obsession was more about the mother than it was about the boy.\u00a0 Nothing she did had any impact on the boy, or even reached his awareness.\u00a0 But the mother knew everything, or at least would soon discover everything, and Scheherazade knew this.\u00a0 Still she pressed forward in defiant provocation.\u00a0 It was an attempt at asserting independence — from the mother — through sex.\u00a0 But it was quashed.\u00a0 And it appears she never recovered.<\/p>\n

Habara and Scheherazade have one more lovemaking session, at Scheherazade’s suggestion, and then she dresses and leaves.\u00a0 It is not clear why Habara is left ruminating about the possibility — or rather, the certainty<\/em> — of losing Scheherazade, and the greater specter of losing connection to all women.\u00a0 Being “deprived of his freedom entirely” was the way he put it.\u00a0 The invisible puppetmaster that pulls the strings on all of their lives and limits them to a very narrow range of possibilities, seems destined to pull the plug on his tenuous connection to humanity and leave him completely desolate.\u00a0 This is his greatest worry.\u00a0 There is nothing in the story to substantiate this fear, any more than there is anything in the story that explains why this affair is even taking place.<\/p>\n

In the world Murakami creates these invisible forces that shape and define and limit our lives are both capricious and<\/em> malevolent.\u00a0 We can’t see them or influence them, yet we are always under their shadow.\u00a0 Scheherazade gave a hint to the nature of that unseen, but all powerful governing force: the all knowing and all intrusive Mother, who locks doors and hides keys and crushes all free spirited love and passion.<\/p>\n

One can look at this story in two ways as a commentary on the outward forces in Japanese society that define and structure and limit the lives of people, but it also represents a depiction of internal, unconscious forces within the self that restrict and crush the individual spirit.<\/p>\n

The original story of Scheherazade was, perhaps, the earliest literary representation of a serial killer.\u00a0 It remains paradigmatic.\u00a0 An all powerful king who had felt betrayed and abandoned by one lover takes his revenge on all women thereafter.\u00a0 Every day he marries a virgin and has sex with her.\u00a0 The next day he beheads her and marries another.\u00a0 This continues indefinitely, and endless stream of murdered, slaughtered virgins.\u00a0 It is a tale of unbounded cruelty and hostility toward women from an original injury by one.\u00a0 The king is so insecure and so lacking in his own sense of loveability that he feels he must kill each new woman or she will surely betray and abandon him.\u00a0 This original insecurity and sense of being unloveable did not start with the lover who betrayed him, but rather, started with his mother who was never able to make him feel loved and secure in her love.\u00a0 His rage was so extreme that he had to kill every woman he came in contact with.\u00a0 It was the only way he could relate to women.\u00a0 The betrayal of the first woman who touched off the spree was only the spark that lit a tinderbox that had been waiting for many years.\u00a0 The injury that she inflamed had been inflicted many years prior, and indeed, goes back to the cradle.\u00a0 Killing women was palliative, but not curative.\u00a0 It assuaged his rage temporarily, like a valve letting off steam, but it did not begin to heal the original injury of neglect and abandonment that continued to fester and give rise to new waves of rage that demanded appeasement.\u00a0 This is why serial killers need to keep on killing.\u00a0 The mere venting of rage is not a cure.\u00a0 Sex alone is also not a cure.\u00a0 Scheherazade had the right idea.<\/p>\n

Habara feels that abandonment by Scheherazade is inevitable.\u00a0 It is only a matter of time.\u00a0 This expectation was present before he ever met her.\u00a0 It had nothing to do with anything she did or said.\u00a0 His fear of being deprived of his freedom entirely is not a fear of external forces — there are no external forces — but rather of internal anxieties and insecurities that might cripple and disable his ability to connect on any level with women.\u00a0 Scheherazade’s stories eased him of “worries and unpleasant memories” — most likely in relation to women.\u00a0 He very likely had many of them starting way back with a mother who could not love or make him feel loved, and perhaps abandoned him.\u00a0 Lust and passion are way too dangerous for a man this fragile.\u00a0 Deep attachment is the utmost danger, because from an early age he learned that strong attachment leads to devastating disappointment — over and over again.\u00a0 This is what the story is about.<\/p>\n

The original story of Scheherazade ends optimistically, even triumphantly.\u00a0 Murakami’s contemporary reworking is less optimistic, but has some promising trends.\u00a0 The original story is a story of healing, through, perhaps, sated rage, coupled with satisfying sex, coupled with a continuing narrative whereby the wounded ruler becomes invested in the future.\u00a0 Being able to see a way forward that is not an abyss of abandonment and devastation is a very important aspect of the healing process.\u00a0 That is what Scheherazade’s narratives were able to do for the murderous king.\u00a0 He was eventually able to fall in love with Scheherazade and make her his Queen.\u00a0 A decisively optimistic outcome.<\/p>\n

In Murakami’s story there is less healing and less optimism.\u00a0\u00a0 Murakami’s story ends with gloom and foreboding.\u00a0 What is positive in Murakami’s tale is that Scheherazade and Habara were able to connect with one another in genuine communication from the heart through the stories she told after sex.\u00a0 Sex was not the primary avenue of communication for this couple.\u00a0 Their sex was obligatory and somewhat perfunctory.\u00a0 The real action between them occurred afterward, when she told him stories of her past.\u00a0 He took a genuine interest in her life and she found a receptive audience for things she needed to reveal.\u00a0 This very positive connection aroused Habara’s anxieties of abandonment.\u00a0 There has not been enough time to effect a healing of his underlying vulnerabilities and injuries, but if they continue, perhaps for A Thousand and One Afternoons, they might achieve a similar outcome to the original tale.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scheherazade By Haruki Murakami The New Yorker, October 13, 2014, pp. 100-109. Translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen. In Haruki Murakami’s revisitation of this ancient classic, a woman the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"yasr_overall_rating":0,"yasr_post_is_review":"","yasr_auto_insert_disabled":"","yasr_review_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[837],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-14658","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-joe-cillo"},"yasr_visitor_votes":{"stars_attributes":{"read_only":true,"span_bottom":"