An Odd Couple: Haruki Murakami & Vance Joy

1. Setting

Last year during the holidays, I ended up on a completely booked flight from Baltimore to Denver late on Christmas Eve Eve — December 23rd. I snagged an emergency exit window seat and pulled out my Kindle for the 4-hour flight. After a few short words to break the ice, the lovely couple next to me took out their books out as well, thank god. (The woman was reading Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol which I wanted to point out could be the title of any of his novels. I expect his next to be called The Secret Code or The Quasi-Historical Goosechase.)

I was confident that I would be able to finish the majority of my book, of which I was already about a quarter of the way through. I was reading what I now consider one of my favorite books of all time, Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.

The light from my kindle added to the orchestra of little glowing cellphones that the flight attendant had just asked to be turned off and stowed for the flight, which, everyone knows, is code for send one more text message to whoever is picking you up from the airport (“Taking off, love you!! *emoji*”) The cabin was twinkling like a string of Christmas tree lights, and as the plane pulled back from the gate, I dove back into Murakami’s novel.

2. Conflict

The Baltimore airport, BWI, is located about a 15-minute drive south of downtown. Anyone who has spent time in the mid-Atlantic will know that 15 minutes south of Baltimore means it’s only about 30 minutes north of DC. The two cities are surprisingly close and linked by a $8 train called the Marc. I take the Marc rather frequently to visit DC, and I have come to appreciate just how intertwined the two cities are. (The relationship between them is fascinating — in many ways, Baltimore defines itself as the anti-DC; weathered buildings, cobblestone streets, and old sailboats certainly make it “Charm” City, but the charm quickly transforms into abandoned neighborhoods, rampant crime, littered alleyways, and potholes like no-mans-land circa France, 1917. I digress.)

Because Baltimore and DC are so close, all the three major airports, BWI, Reagan, and Dulles, cater to residents of both cities. If you can’t find a cheap flight at one, it’s simple enough to get to another. As such, sometimes an insufferable, wannabe senator, recent Georgetown graduate, young professional New England boy who “works on Capitol Hill, ha, ha, here’s my card,” sometimes sits right behind you on the plane. In this case, some guy named Phil spent the entire god damn flight trying to flirt with the two busty Ukrainian girls sitting next to him. As a kicker, there was a slight language barrier, so all of this guy’s pick-up lines were spoken LOUDLY and de.lib.er.ate.ly. “WOW. ARE. YOU. TWO. TWINS?” “I’LL. BE. SKIING. AT. MY. DAD’S. HOUSE. IN. ASPEN. IF. YOU’RE. NEARBY.” “YEAH. I. WORK. ON. CAPITOL. HILL. HA. HA. YOU. LADIES. HAVE. CARDS?”

Long story short, fuck this guy.

3. Rising Action

So here was the problem — because this guy was not shutting up, I wasn’t going to be able to read in peace. I could have listened to music, but alas, I had recently gotten a new iPhone, and there was no music on it. I could have listened to a podcast, but that would have been just as distracting. Without wifi, Spotify was out of the question. This was my personal version of hell.

When all of the sudden an unlikely savior arrived: Vance Joy. He floated down in a pillar of light with a chorus of angels. My iPhone came miraculously pre-loaded with a single song — Mess is Mine (why, Apple?). This would have to suffice. I put the song on repeat and began reading.

4. Climax

Fast forward three and a half hours — I listened to the song 56 times in a row and read some 65% of the book (I’m a kindle user, you see, so I don’t deal in page numbers anymore). Amazingly, the song never got old. In fact, was stuck in my head for two weeks after the flight, and I still rather like it. This is a testament to both the book, which captivated me enough to ignore the music, and the song, which is enjoyable enough to endure three and a half hours of sustained listening without becoming completely insufferable.

5. Falling Action

*Casual Kafka on the Shore spoiler warning*

I finished the last 10% of the book on Christmas Eve before falling asleep. However, I found that I wanted to listen to the song while reading. I couldn’t concentrate without it. My reading environment was forever linked with that song, and I couldn’t finish the books until I was listening to it.

The song now involuntarily conjures imagery of the novel in my mind. I can’t listen to it without thinking about Komura Library or the entrance stone or Ms. Saeki. It’s a shockingly strong Pavlovian association, and I was stunned by how vividly the images popped back into my head; how much better I could remember scenes and passages.

The psychology buzzphrase “state-dependent memory” comes to mind. There have been countless studies in which students memorize a set of data while sitting in a certain environment — playing classical music, burning a certain candle scent, or even drunk — and then take a test on the data with the same stimuli (spoiler: they do better). I remember a neuroscience theory about memory and conditioning that say when we rehearse, axons physically grow in our brains, making the distance between neurons, or the synapse, smaller and thus the neural path less resistant. As we commit a fact to memory, axons are actually getting longer along those neural circuits, making them easier to activate, and thus easier to remember. 56 continuously listens of Mess is Mine lengthened an unlikely series of axons and dendrites somewhere in my brain, and now I can’t help but remember the novel when I hear it.

Music, and even music on repeat, is a very strong motif in the novel: Kafka Tamura listens to the song Kafka on the Shore on repeat, Hoshino falls in love with Mozart’s Archduke Trio, and Oshima and Kafka have a fascinating discussion about the value of imperfection in music over Schubert’s Sonata in D Major (which I am listening to as I write this). Music has powerful emotional properties in the novel, including the climactic scene in Hoshino’s story, in which he is inspired by Mozart’s music to follow Nakata for the rest of his life.

It’s somehow appropriate that I have my own musical association with the book. I imagine Murakami listened to music while he wrote the book. I gave the story my own soundtrack — I never thought that an Australian indie band would line up so perfectly with a Japanese surrealist novel. Sometimes things like that just work out, I guess.

6. Epilogue

I had an odd professor at Columbia who taught Music Humanities. Our first assignment was to write about how 2 songs made us feel, at a very instinctive emotional and aesthetic level: Josquin’s Sabat Mater Dolorosa and Beethoven’s Six Bagatelles op 126 no. 3. He returned my assignment disappointed — he wanted to me to describe it: exactly what came to mind while listening to the song? Snow falling? Ripples on a pond? Driving in the rain?

The images that come to mind while hearing a song are as real and legitimate interpretations as any when responding to music. Mess is Mine now has that profound, personal association — Kafka Tamura hacking his way into the forest, leeches falling from the sky, a beach with small islands off in the distance. I’m probably the only person on earth with this association, but it adds an intimate, exclusive value.

Another buzzphrase comes to mind as I write this: “the primacy of the signifier.” In a post-structuralist view of art, the interpretation of the individual viewer (or signifier) to a piece of art (or sign) is the only interpretation that matters (or at least the most important, or primary, interpretation). So take that, Murakami — my chance association with Vance Joy is more valid than all the care, effort, and intention that you poured into that brilliant novel.

As both a reader and a writer, I find this theory intriguing. On one hand, I wouldn’t write if I didn’t have something I wanted to say, and I wouldn’t read if I didn’t crave a foreign, alien view of the world. If the wannabe senator behind me on the plane or the busty Ukrainian twins or the woman on page 6 of The Lost Symbol were to read Kafka on the Shore, I can’t say that I would care. On the other hand, my relationship with the novel is profoundly my own, and I feel a deep personal connection with both the book itself and the author. I’m not saying you should care about my interpretation of the novel — I am certainly not recommending you listen to Mess is Mine 56 times. I am recommending you read the novel for yourself and build your own unique neural pathways. Otherwise, what’s the point of reading?