Recently in literature Category

Years ago (maybe 1999?), Maggie sent me this poem, "Errata" by Charles Simic, who is the current American Poet Laureate. I believe it was published in his first poetry collection, What the Grass Says.

Errata

Where it says snow
read teeth-marks of a virgin
Where it says knife read
you passed through my bones
like a police-whistle
Where it says table read horse
Where it says horse read my migrant's bundle
Apples are to remain apples
Each time a hat appears
think of Isaac Newton
reading the Old Testament
Remove all periods
They are scars made by words
I couldn't bring myself to say
Put a finger over each sunrise
it will blind you otherwise
That damn ant is still stirring
Will there be time left to list
all errors to replace
all hands guns owls plates
all cigars ponds woods and reach
that beer-bottle my greatest mistake
the word I allowed to be written
when I should have shouted
her name

It is 11:56 p.m. and Haruki Murakami begins his novel, After Dark, as follows.

Eyes mark the shape of the city.

Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature--or more like a collective entity created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old. To the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flicker and flare up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city's moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.

The tendrils of night furl and unfurl in his novel about surveillance, forboding, theft and violence in the haunts of late night Tokyo: Denny's, convenience stores, love hotels, basement rehearsal spaces for jazz bands, empty playgrounds. In Murakami's worlds, things are always sad but all is not lost.

After Dark, everything is a jazz motif. Its title comes from a Curtis Fuller song called "Five Spot After Dark," a synchronous encounter that takes four minutes before midnight between a boy named Takahashi and a girl named Mari. James Sanders recently said that without characters in films about cities, the city is nothing. In After Dark, without Tokyo, the characters in Murakami's novel are nothing. With their author and their city, they are motifs and riffs. The novel situates people against each other who can't speak, can't give away the secrets, can't quite bring themselves to take the next step that would bring them one-half step further, save for one moment.

These moves are those of a jazz piece. Indeed, Murakami came to novel-writing from an obsession with jazz and from running a jazz cafe, he wrote in a recent New York Times piece. "When I turned 29, all of a sudden out of nowhere I got this feeling that I wanted to write a novel -- that I could do it," he wrote. He didn't know where to start. "My only thought at that point was how wonderful it would be if I could write like playing an instrument." He's now approaching 60 and still takes inspiration from music, from "Charlie Parker's repeated freewheeling riffs," and the "quality of continual self-renewal in Miles Davis's music."

Murakami never fails me with a mix of simplicity and depth, a jazz piece you know well, a style with which you're acquainted. Like McCoy Tyner's hands, it starts familiar and then you find yourself in a darker place you'd not imagined, wondering how the quiet thunder started and then where it went once it dissipates. "Unimpeded by other schemes, this hint of things to come takes time to expand in the new morning light," Murakami writes in After Dark. The city holds the characters. The notes of the trombone fade. The thunder settles.