Jazz Structure in Haruki Murakami Novels
One cannot avoid music when reading a Haruki Murakami (Japanese, b. 1949) novel. His writing is steeped in the songs of his time; and he's getting up there now, so the musical landscape is wide and varied. However, things get weird quickly because chronological time, as we understand it in our limited human way, has no place in his novels. This necessarily applies to music. His stories are adventures in dimensionality; places where linear and literal thinking are often suspended. The brain and consciousness may or may not have boxes, junctures and escape routes, but allowing myself to imagine them as a portal to imagination is magical.
Bearing this in mind, in this current time of cancer treatment when I am accepting the new limits of my physical body, positive and imaginative mental portals become lifelines. Knowing this, I sought out mental adventure for the year ahead.
I had the good fortune of stumbling back into a group of fellow readers at Book Oblivion.
I signed up for a year of the Literature Track. Nothing is better for healing than finding our tribes and sharing passions.
Our first book of the quarter is, bestill my heart, the new Jay Rubin translation of End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland. Never ones to sit back and accept the overworked Americanized interpretations works, Book Oblivion goes DEEP. So deep, in fact, I often feel like I'm hanging on by a teensy thread from which hangs the limits of my intelligence and psyche. As with any exciting mental pursuit, art follows! The living and subconscious realities, threads, chains, nameless tethers, broken and whole, have quietly and pervasively entered my drawings and art.
But this is a story about jazz and Murakami. While I'm still a few hairs short of a Fan Girl, I do love Haruki Murakami. There are a few of his books I haven't read and those odd manga adaptations of his short stories, but for the most part, I have explored most of his canon. I don't re-read books. I re-read his books.
His words, unsettled though they often are, have gotten me through some of the most difficult times of my life (the deaths of loved ones and the current journey with metastatic breast cancer). How is it that such obtuseness is so comforting? I don't know. And the biggest mystery remains that I can concentrate on such trippy and oft ungraspable tomes when my grief and trauma-addled brain some days cannot even manage an episode of The Office.
This is all to say: jazz. Murakami loves it; and I really do (did?) not. I do know that he was the proprietor of a Tokyo Jazz bar called Peter Cat. In his novels, jazz is often the soundtrack, but not exclusively so, for it is then followed up by classical pieces, Bob Dylan, Duran Duran and Pat Boone's Danny Boy. So you just never know musically where you will go. The great news is that when creating the drawing above, I had many Spotify playlists to choose from, which of course, lead me down rabbit holes of delightful discoveries and new artists. I am even warming to jazz. Thanks Haruki!
The above drawing is based on the C Major jazz scale (as I understand it; and there is always a chance I do not), which is as follows: I (C) • ii (Dm) • iii (Em) • IV (F) • V (G) • vi (Am) • vii (Bdim). I may be reaching or just off-planet, but I do believe that Murakami, whether intentional or not, largely follows this structure in his parallel narrative novels, such as the one we just read, End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland.
Applied, it becomes this formula:
I: The tonic/root note is the heart of the overall novel, in this case, it really was a heart! It seems to be about finding our human heart as it relates to the rest of humanity, and the acceptances and sacrifices we undergo in the process.
ii and ii: The minor chords are the supporting characters and the splinter arcs of the narratives. The reader is edged into chaos, the world starts spinning and there is instability, or a more apt Japanese word is kawariyasui (which takes the positive spin and largely translates to "change full"). As a reader or listener, we don't know where we are going and this is uncomfortable.
IV and V: These are the parallel narratives of the story, linked in inescapable ways as if tethered by a tacit filament. In this case, one is End of the World and the other is Hard-Boiled Wonderland. The two major chords have interactions throughout the novel and keep the novel on track so it doesn't dissolve.
vi and vii: Again minor chords but this time instead of uncertainty, they are pining to go back home, to our root note, our major C chord, the heart of the story, to the discoveries the protagonist makes in regards to love. We feel this and badly want to continue the experience to see if we do, in fact, go home.
Just as each writer navigates this territory, so does each musician.
In concluding a piece, Murakami and jazz share this quality: ambiguity. I honestly don't know if our main protagonist, the Calcutec, did or did not find, evolve or retain his heart, or if he gave up wholeness (light + shadow) to live in the wandering Forest in a suspended state, to live with a woman he grew to love. But even that can be seen as a kind of sacrificial love. There are a myriad of interpretations, at many points in the jazz novelistic structure, but specifically in regards to the conclusion. This which makes Murakami such a fascinating and exciting writer.
Okay, maybe I am a Fan Girl.
Comments