Walking from page to page through Murakami's short stories collection "The Elephant Vanishes", I was gradually descending into gloom. At first, the descent was hardly noticeable, interspersed with bizarre humor, but the story "Sleep" was an express elevator down a menacing chasm. The final words of the story are:
"Locked inside this little box, I can't go anywhere. It's the middle of the night. The men keep rocking the car back and forth. They're going to turn it over."
These men are not burglars, but men in general, and life of this Japanese woman - a dark little box with no exit, fully in their control. The story begins almost hopefully: an intelligent woman, destined for housework as the result of choices imposed by society, awakes at night from a shocking vision and realizes what she has been missing. She stops sleeping and devotes the night, when her benumbed husband and son are sleeping, to herself - to reading, to thinking, to being alive. She feels energetic, her thoughts penetrate effortlessly the deepest layers of meaning within the novels, and yet the stealthy, unassertive method of sacrificing sleep in order to gain time away from housework reeks of desperation.
Yes, she reads, she thinks, but, unable to denounce housewifery, she steps acceptingly toward the onset of dementia. It is an unequal fight. The story is written in first person and the reader is free to judge the woman, but nonetheless Murakami has not made her admirable. He has made pitiful her prideful thoughts, her visits to the pool, her delight in husband-forbidden chocolate. And the story ends in gloom, there is no way out, no boat to sail in against the current. This is the way it is, the only way it can be right now. Murakami also suggests through the choices this woman makes in her life, that the plight of women in contemporary Japanese society is their own fault.
Unnerved and reluctant to descend even deeper away from the secure sunshine over NYC, I put Murakami back on the shelf and picked up Ryunosuke Akutogawa instead. Upon read Rashomon, I found myself watching undignified malcontents fight over plucked hair amid corpses piled atop the Kyoto gate in 1100's and decided that I am not prepared to deal with Japanese literature.
