book club: after the quake, landscape with flatiron
It’s February and they’re going out to the beach at midnight.
Zach: Okay, we’re back. Last month we talked about “ufo in kushiro,” a story about a man whose wife left him. It was the first story in the collection after the quake. The second story is “landscape with flatiron.”
Santorri: Can I summarize it?
Esmerelda: You did the last one. I want to.
ZE: Actually I was thinking Reuben could.
Reuben: Me?
ES: You are Reuben, aren’t you?
RB: If they want to, they should do it. I didn’t like this one.
ZE: Okay. Esmerelda? Shoot.
ES: All right so there’s three characters in this one: two kids and an old guy. Juko—
ST: Junko.
ES: —That’s what I said—and Keisuke are the young guys.
ST: Junko’s a woman.
ES: And the old guy is Miyake. He likes building bonfires out of driftwood. And every time he makes a bonfire he calls up Junko and she comes down to the beach and hangs out with him while the fire burns.
ZE: Is that it?
ES: Well that’s the premise.
ST: The fire represents the wreckage of his life. Miyake is mysterious and stoic, and it’s apparent throughout the story that he’s accumulated a lot of grief and regret in his life. He uses the fire like a ritual cleansing of his soul. When—what?
ZE: Let’s just tell the audience what happened in the story first.
ES: So at the start of the story Junko is watching TV and Miyake calls and tells her to get down to the beach for a fire. Her roommate Keisuke comes with her. Is he her boyfriend? He kind of acts like it. Complains the whole time.
RB: It’s February and they’re going out to the beach at midnight.
ES: I didn’t know it got cold in Japan.
ST: Japan has some of the highest snowfall in the world. In some parts the winters can seem Canadian.
ES: So they go out to the beach for the bonfire.
RB: “ ‘What’s so great about bonfires?’ ” The boyfriend asks that. And Junko answers, “ ‘What’s so great about Pearl Jam?’ ‘Pearl Jam has ten million fans all over the world,’ Keisuke said. ‘Well, bonfires have had fans all over the world for fifty thousand years,’ Junko said.”
ES: Pearl Jam hasn’t been around for fifty thousand years.
ST: But fire has. It’s a primordial force, elemental to the identity of humans—sorry, I’ll get back to the story.
ZE: Reuben, why’d you quote that? I thought you didn’t like this story.
(Reuben shrugs)
ST: “ ‘People will be lighting fires long after Pearl Jam is gone.’ ” I liked that …So—they get down to the beach and Miyake is making the fire. He’s, like, a master of stacking wood and starting a fire. He talks about how he learned it in Boy Scouts. The narrator compares him to a sculptor. And as he lights newspaper with a cigarette lighter to get it started, Junko lights a cigarette with a match. So—Junko and Keisuke don’t think the fire is going to light but Miyake is confident it will and then it does.
ES: I think the cigarette matters.
ST: What?
RB: She thinks the cigarette matters.
ES: I think the cigarette matters. Junko smokes it when the bonfire starts. She lights it with a match; and Miyake lights the fire with a cigarette lighter.
ZE: What do you think it means?
ST: Well, it could be, I suppose, an analogy for their relationship…
ES: —And then he pisses him off.
ZE: Who pisses who off?
ES: You know.
ZE: I know, but tell the audience.
ES: The guy. The young guy asks Miyake if he knew anyone in the earthquake and Miyake gets pissed off. He calls him a farm boy.
ZE: So it’s a touchy subject.
ES: Well obviously he knows somebody who died there.
RB: His family died there.
ZE: Did they?
RB: Why is the old man getting upset about the kid asking him if he didn’t have anyone die?
ES: He doesn’t know if his kids are all right.
ST: He’s estranged from his family, as we’ll find out in a bit. So that’s why he gets upset. The question from Keisuke represents his greatest weakness, his vulnerability of not knowing if his family has survived—ahem, so then there’s a flashback. Junko has some thoughts about not having a real family.
ES: Oh yeah, that world-class a-hole.
ST: The reader learns her father ogled her.
ES: Honey, he did more than that.
ST: Did he? The narrator just says—
ES: This is one of those parts where you can only read so much. You gotta read between the lines.
ST: Yes, Reuben?
RB: I didn’t say anything.
ST: So—she runs away. She moves to this town, gets a job at the convenience store, moves in with Keisuke.
RB: She was also flunking out of school.
ES: What? Gee, why do think that might be?
ZE: Are they dating? That might be a read-between-the-lines thing too.
ST: Doesn’t say.
RB: No.
ST: And Miyake. Everyone in the town knows him because of his accent. And he comes into the convenience store three times a day because he doesn’t own a fridge.
RB: *chuckles*
ST: It is weird.
ES: Some people have their idiosyncrasisms. What’s the big whoop? So then she sees him making a fire on the beach a few days later. And I think she’s a little firebug. A little kleptomaniac.
RB: Pyromaniac.
ES: I said that. And he says that he’s a painter and he came out to this town because it gets all this driftwood.
RB: And there’s no refrigerators.
ZE: Why doesn’t he have a refrigerator, though? The author tells us—But wait, go back to Junko and the fire.
ST: I’ve got it here: “It was the first time that Junko felt a certain ‘something’ as she watched the flames of a bonfire: ‘something’ deep down, a ‘wad’ of feeling.”
ZE: “A deep, quiet feeling” she calls it.
RB: He cops out.
ST: I think it’s understandable that she would feel this way about fire. She’s been abused, dehumanized her whole life. She struggled in school, she works at a convenience store, she must be miserable with her whole life, cut off from any kind of love, or kindness, or—
ZE: Wait, Reuben, what do you mean?
RB: He cops out.
ES: He heard you.
ZE: What do you mean?
RB: He doesn’t let Junko tell the reader what the feeling is. He says she’s too stupid to find a name for it. He only does that so that he doesn’t have to explain himself. He could have still told us because the story isn’t strictly limited to her brain.
ZE: Well what name would you give it?
ST: Contentment. It makes her feel human to connect to something so—
ES: I’d call it thrill.
RB: I think it’s not fair to ask us to find a name for it.
ZE: It’s lazy writing?
RB: Yeah. But, let’s get it over with. Tell the end.
ZE: Well we’re not near the end yet. We’ve got Jack London to talk about before they kill themselves.
RB: They don’t kill themselves. He craps out again.
ES: —Well the rude guy announces he’s gotta go see a man about a doctor, if you know what I mean.
RB: Horse.
ES: What?
ST: So then the conversation turns personal. Freed of the suppressive presence of Keisuke, Junko asks Miyake more vulnerable questions. She asks about his family in the Kobe region, where the earthquake was. He says he has two kids and a wife and he doesn’t know how they are because they’re estranged, like we were saying before; that’s why he got so upset. And they start talking about how they’re going to die and I’m sure this part is more autobiography on Murakami’s part because Miyake talks about how he’s certain he’s going to die in a refrigerator.
ES: Did Haruki die in a refrigerator?
ZE: Not yet. Well, he isn’t dead yet.
ST: But he often injects his characters into claustrophobic situations—the imagery of dying in a well in Norwegian Wood, the hidden tomb in Killing Commendatore. He must be projecting his own fears on to his characters, who fear becoming forgotten, irrelevant, choiceless to their fates. Like with an earthquake! You are irrelevant to the primal powers of mother nature. Like fire!
ZE: Jack London.
ES: The fire story.
ST: Junko’s favorite short story is “To Build a Fire” by Jack London. In it, a man struggles against the elements to build a fire in the Canadian wilderness.
RB: That’s a better story than this. Have any of you read it?
ZE: Mhm.
ST, ES: No.
RB: I looked it up after this one. He doesn’t cop out the way Murakami does. He lets us know that the guy dies. He freezes to death at the end of the story but Jack London uses the dog to tell the story so we know he dies.
ES, ST: Is the dog okay?
RB: Yeah.
ZE: The dog does fine, it’s implied. Or suggested, I guess you could say. But anyway, we’re getting off track: why does Junko bring up the story?
ES: Fire.
ZE: Right but what did she think about the story?
ST: She had an interpretation that the man in the story wanted to die, even though he was fighting dying.
ZE: And you haven’t read it so I’ll tell you: that’s a pretty astute observation, even if Junko’s teachers didn’t think so. The man does a lot of stupid things and risks his life unnecessarily. It’s almost as though he’s flirting with death, a risk taker. And London does a nice job of describing him dying, like someone trying to drown themself and their reflexes kick in and they start fighting for air before they die.
ES: That makes me think again about what happens at the end.
RB: What happens?
ES: Oh, shut up. You know what bugged me?
ZE: What?
ES: Well our main girl in the story…
ST: Junko.
ES: Juko is the one who brings up Jack London. And then the old guy tells her about how Jack London is convinced he’s gonna die at sea. Why did the man—
ST: Miyake
ES: —have to be the one to know about that? Why couldn’t Junko be the one to know?
RB: Here’s something else that bothered me. This is Miyake talking: “ ‘Premonitions can stand for something else sometimes. And the thing they stand for can be a lot more intense than reality. That’s the scariest think about having a premonition. Do you see what I mean?’ …[Junko] did not see what he meant.”
ES: I was saying something.
RB: I am too. He crapped out again. He didn’t want to say it outright, so he didn’t say it at all.
ST: Well, how would you say it? I would say: premonitions are sometimes reflections of our inner psyches and the psychic trauma we’ve endured in our lives shows up in our dreams again and again and again. Maybe Jack London wrote about freezing to death because of his outdoors experiences and his fear of dying. And maybe for Miyake, and by proxy the author, Murakami, fire is a way to control his fear, to excoriate—
RB: I would say let’s get to the end of the damn story.
ZE: Thank you.
ES: They talk about how Jack London killed himself with morphine. Did he really do that?
ZE: There were other factors. He was sick, too.
RB: Then the fire guy talks about his paintings. He’s a painter, remember? He has a painting of an iron, but the writer cops out again. Junko asks him it the iron is a symbol for something, and Miyake says, “probably.” Just, probably. Then Junko suddenly tells him she’s empty inside, and Miyake says they could kill themselves and she says “okay” and they agree to wait for the fire to go out and then they can die. They want to see through what they started. Oh.
ZE: Oh?
RB: I just got it.
ST: “When the fire goes out, you’ll start feeling the cold. You’ll wake up whether you want to or not.”
ES: What—what does it mean?
ZE: Next month, we’ll get together and talk about “all god’s children can dance.”
ST: Ooooh, this one is a masterpiece—true to Murakami’s form, he’s at his most surreal—
RB: Save it, kid. Thanks for reading. If you want to read “To Build a Fire” by Jack London, you should want to, this is a link to a free pdf.
ZE: Buying after the quake through bookshop would be a mistake; I’d get a commission and an over-inflated sense of my worth. You could save money by getting it through your library, thriftbooks, or your local bookstore.
ES: Honey, nobody reads this part. Why are you still talking?
ZE: I’m not sure.