Barn Burning by Haruki Murakami, 1983
The magic trick:
A narrator who refuses to explain the story to the reader and a story that refuses to explain itself to the narrator
This week we’re going to the movies. Five stories that were the basis for five movies.
“Barn Burning” today – the basis for one of my favorites movies of the 2010’s – Burning.
This story employs a tact that Murakami uses to varying extents in a lot of his work: promising the reader inconsistent explanation and resolution.
Our narrator tells the story to us with many would-be major questions unanswered. And not simply unanswered. They aren’t even presented as if they are questions.
Consider the opening paragraph:
“I met her three years ago at a friend’s wedding reception, here in Tokyo, and we got to know each other. There was nearly a dozen years’ age difference between us, she being twenty and I thirtyone. Not that it mattered much. I had a lot else on my mind then, and didn’t have time to worry about things like age. Plus, I was married, but that didn’t seem to bother her either.”
That’s a lot of loose threads, right? And it’s not a spoiler to tell you that very little of the potential questions you likely will ask having read that opening paragraph ever get addressed, let alone resolved, in the story.
So, brace yourself for that kind of reading experience, OK?
But then just as you start to adapt to story’s rhythms and have given up asking the lingering questions on your mind, the narrator himself starts seeking answers. He wants specifics. He wants something tangible, something that explains to him what is going on.
It’s a brilliant dichotomy – a narrator who refuses to explain the story to the reader; and a story that then refuses to explain itself to the narrator.
And that’s quite a trick on Murakami’s part.
The selection:
I met her three years ago at a friend’s wedding reception, here in Tokyo, and we got to know each other. There was nearly a dozen years’ age difference between us, she being twenty and I thirtyone. Not that it mattered much. I had a lot else on my mind then, and didn’t have time to worry about things like age. Plus, I was married, but that didn’t seem to bother her either.
She was studying with a famous mime, and working as an advertising model to make ends meet.
But she usually found it too much trouble to go out on the modeling assignments she was given, so her income didn’t amount to much. What it didn’t cover, her boyfriends made up. Of course, I don’t know for sure. But things she said, seemed to hint at that kind of arrangement.
As I mentioned, when I first met her she told me she was studying mime. One night, we were out at a bar, and she showed me the Tangerine Peeling. As the name says, it involves peeling a tangerine. On her left was a bowl piled high with tangerines; on her right, a bowl for the peels. At least that was the idea.
Actually, there wasn’t anything there at all. She’d take an imaginary tangerine in her hand, slowly peel it, put one section in her mouth, and spit out the seeds. When she’d finished one tangerine, she’d wrap up all the seeds in the peel and deposit it in the bowl to her right. She repeated these movements over and over again. When you try to put it in words it doesn’t sound like anything special. But if you see it with your own eyes for ten or twenty minutes (almost without thinking, she kept on performing it) gradually the sense of reality is sucked right out of everything around you. It’s a very strange feeling.
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What a great summary of Murakami’s intentions in this story — and his frequent style elsewhere. BTW he also produced, in a completely different direction, one of the best non-fiction books on music (!): his conversations with conductor Seiji Ozawa called “Absolutely on Music”. He’s a modern eclectic.