Yoshimoto Writes a Strange, Somewhat

¶ … Yoshimoto writes a strange, somewhat surreal story called "Newlywed." Ryu Murakami writes a gritty, but somewhat lyrical story called "Almost Transparent Blue." Yoshimoto's story takes place in a very short span of time. A man married to a woman named Atsuko, gets drunk in a bar and takes the metro/subway home. One the train he encounters what he thinks is a smelly, older homeless man. When the train empties, the homeless man silently and suddenly transforms into an attractive adult woman. They have a pleasant, albeit strange conversation about life and love. Murakami's story begins in a dirty apartment of a young woman, a recreational drug user, or possibly a junkie. It is an odd story with an odd perspective in that the author is one of the characters in the story. The characters, primarily the young woman, speak to Murakami because he is there. He is both in the story and the writer of the story. This is an interesting, albeit strange stylistic choice, for the author of the story to be a main character in the story that he is writing and that the reader is reading. These stories retain some similarities, yet are very clearly distinctive. The paper will perform a comparison and analysis of the stories, including character, story, and text.

"Newlywed" at first, is written in short sentences. The story begins in media res, in the middle of things. The protagonist, the unnamed male, has already gotten drunk on whisky with friends. The protagonist is freshly married to a superficially lovely wife, Atsuko. Despite his new marital bliss, he actively avoids going home. He does not want to be in his home with his wife, which is why is he is on the train in the first place, when the homeless man/beautiful woman enters the train car.

The presence of the homeless struck me instantly. I have had the opportunity to travel to Japan in the past, and though it is unnamed, I presume that this takes place in some major city, such as Tokyo, which upon completing the story, I realized my instinct was correct. Even in the major cities, there is not much homelessness. Furthermore, relative to the homelessness in a country, such as the United States, the homeless in Japan are cleaner and "better off." In fact, in Japan, the homeless are relatively unseen, especially in public places like the subway. The presence of a homeless man on a subway in Japan is fairly strange and rare. The presence of the homeless in this place immediately alerted me that this would be a strange story. Once the other passengers left the train, and the homeless man transformed, my hunch that this story was abnormal solidified.

As "Newlywed," progresses, the sentences get longer. The thoughts become more complex and more poetic. The story seems like maybe a drunken hallucination, but it turns out to be more about the man's emotional state and his desires. The conversation with the woman makes him a different kind of intoxicated, as he says after an exchange with her, "My head was swimming." The dreamy conversation and odd train ride stir the man's heart and passions, and somehow motivate him to return to his wife. The boredom and fear of his marriage and wife is more about him losing a sense of magic in the world. The magic of the homeless man/beautiful woman transfers to him and awakens parts of him, within, that may have been dormant or decaying. This point is underscored as Yoshimoto writes,

"For me, the beautiful, all-encompassing web spun by this creature is at once so polluted, yet so pure that I feel compelled to grab on to it. I am terrified by it but find myself unable to hide from it. At some point I have been caught up in the magical power she has." (16)

While "Newlywed" has other themes and points, the story is fundamentally about the magical power of women over men, and the transformative power of love. Though this story is very much from the male perspective (male writer and male protagonist), in very Japanese style, the story is very indirect, and it is indirectly feminist. Japan is a country that is known for his systemic, institutional, and cultural subordination of women. Thus, it is additionally strange that on top of being a strange story about a strange encounter with a magical woman, that this story is about the power that women have over men, whether they are passerbys on a train late one night in Tokyo, or whether they are devoted, prim housewives that tirelessly devote themselves to the pleasure of their husbands.

The primary characters in "Almost Transparent Blue" include Reiko, Ryu, and Okinawa. They all abuse heroin together. As aforementioned, a distinctive quality of this story is the involvement of the author as a character in the story. This is one of several ways that the story demonstrates its self-awareness as a story, as a piece of literature, and its relationship to factual discourse. This story is very much aware of itself and its relation to real life, which on one hand is very interesting and unique, but on the other hand it disconcerting. There is a kind of a comfortable distance that readers can have while they read -- people read to escape, and to engage in worlds that are different from their own, even when the story is based in reality. This story disrupts this distance between the reader and the story. This story disrupts the distance between the author and the text!

Murakami is one of Japan's most famous modern authors, with a reputation for surreal and masterful storytelling, and "Almost Transparent Blue" is one of those examples. Murakami has an amazing talent for beginning stories in real life, in issues or actions that have or could quite plausibly happen, and then spinning them into fantastically surreal stories, in a way that is almost invisible to the reader until the reader is deeply immersed in the story itself. "Almost Transparent Blue" is an example of this kind of writing. A reader may not be certain what the crux or theme of the story is until deeply immersed in it, or until after the reader is done. This is the subtle power of the journey of Murakami's stories.