What do you do when there's nothing better to do?
Almost Transparent Blue (1976) is Ryu Murakami's first book- and it has no plot, no structure, no real point except to document a nineteen year old kid's descent through a steady route of sex, drugs, the occasional Doors album and the pervasive feeling of pointlessness.
["Trouble? Hey, that's good, coming from you! Listen, you just don't just show your butts in front of other people, maybe you don't know it, but you shouldn't act like dogs."]
Life isn't hateful, it's just there to be lived; much like drugs are there to be taken, and people are there to be fucked. Considering a million and one writers have approached this whole destructive fucking/getting high nihilistic attitude in the last thirty years, this book is supposed to be a droll read - regardless of whether it was one of the first to emerge from the makeshift genre. But it's not. The prose, even in English translation, is fucking sublime - much like William Gibson, a few sentences are enough for me to chew on all night, like a big ol' piece of gristly meat.
["That school building floating in the darkness was like the golden exit at the end of a long cave"]
These aren't the kids that are reacting to society, but the result of a society that has expanded so fast that it has created cracks for those left behind to fall into. They're stopgapping between school and work, ignoring social convention that equates success with how fast you kill yourself in a 9 to 5. They're wasting time, losing themselves, losing their minds (quite literally in places), losing their sense of self... and if you can't identify with that for a second, then you've never truly lived.
What Murakami achieves with this book, is the tearing away of your eyes from the Japanese cliché - the growth, the technology, the business, the order, the efficiency, the intelligence - and shows the other outcomes to the post-WWII society: that some people aren't functioning, that it's not all flawless expanse, that hey! Japanese kids take drugs and fuck themselves stupid too. That the Japanese have feeling and emotion and something else beneath their surface besides that which you expect.
["I know, I've really known for a long time, finally I understand, it's been the bird. I've lived til now so I could understand this."]
And as obvious as that might sound, it still seems - thirty years after this book's conception - that the aimless disordered tiny existences these characters have are still a new side of the Japanese to the Western World.
Perhaps in it's homeland it's a simple portrayal of wasted muddled youth - just another Catcher in the Rye. But in the foreign world it seems to be a telescopic eye into lives that someone'been very successful at hiding.
2 weeks ago
