Hear the Wind Sing

I lied. In Hear the Wind Sing,* his first novel, Murakami cleverly predicts his own fate at the hand of his most ignorant critics. He includes a fictional author named Derek Heartfield who was a contemporary of Hemingway and Fitzgerald but is now (1979) largely forgotten, in part because he dabbled in speculative fiction rather than writing “literature.” Hear the Wind Sing begins and ends with biographical information on Derek Heartfield. And from pages 101 to 104 there is a brief synopsis of a typical Heartfield story. Heartfield is described as having a difficult style, impossible stories, and infantile themes; yet the narrator claims “I’ve learned a lot about writing from Derek Heartfield. Perhaps almost everything.”

Of course Murakami went on to include significant elements of speculative fiction within his own writing. And some critics have deprecated his stories, themes, and even style. The style is not difficult, but it is highly structured. In some cases, the pattern seems to be the most important element, certainly more important than plot. Indeed, Murakami is often criticized for the thinness or even absence of his plots. Nothing really happens. Especially in Hear the Wind Sing.

And I think that’s why I like Murakami so much. Because nothing does really happen. In life, I mean. We read. We listen to music. We prepare tasty meals and clean up after ourselves (sometimes). We enjoy a cold beer and some salted nuts.

Nothing really happens. People are born and they die. They contract diseases. They meet and they part. They wait for something to happen. But it never really does. And maybe at the very end, we realize that all the time we have been waiting for something to happen, it has been happening. We just never noticed.

But if we are good readers and good people, we can learn from Murakami, learn to be in every moment. We can learn to make that sandwich, to eat it, and even to wash the plate and the mayonnaise knife. That sandwich is what’s happening. And so are we. And that’s enough. It really is.

So it’s true that the narrator in Hear the Wind Sing just wanders aimlessly. He meets a girl who eventually disappears. He remembers past loves and drinks beer with the Rat at J’s bar. He eats french fries. He listens to some music. He remembers reading the works of Derek Heartfield.

Listen. This is what happens in a story by Heartfield in a collection called The Wells of Mars.

The Martians have disappeared and have left behind deep wells, only these wells and no other trace of civilization. The Earthlings try to explore the wells. The explorers can be divided into two categories: some go down tethered so as not to get lost, and can thus not go far enough to discover anything; others go down untethered and never return.

Among the latter is a boy, “a young space vagabond” who is “tired of the vastness of space” and simply wants to die. But as he travels through the various passages in the well, he becomes more lighthearted and filled with positive energy. He loses track of time. He finally emerges from a different well, connected to the one he originally descended. He notices a change in the sun, which now looks as if it’s setting.

He hears the voice of the wind, which alerts him to the fact that the sun will explode in 250,000 years. The boy is startled and asks how this happens. It’s just old … a fact of life … everything and everyone dies … “Not a thing you or I can do.” Just the same, the boy wonders how such a thing could have happened so suddenly. But it turns out he had wandered through the wells for 15 billion years.

Now this voice says at one point that it is the wind, but that the boy might think of it as a Martian. The voice concedes that it is not even a voice at all, but that it is planting “hints” in the mind of the boy. So the voice represents the “Martians” who constructed these inscrutable wells. “[T]he wells were fashioned with consummate skill” yet “dug to avoid hitting any water veins.” The boy has wandered aimlessly through these wells.

The Martian/wind “says” to the boy: “we are wanderers through time—from the birth of the universe to its death. For us there is neither birth or death. The winds we are.”

The boy is left with a question: “Have you learned anything?” The response of the wind to this is laughter. And then silence. So the boy takes a gun from his pocket and shoots himself in the head.

Pointless wandering. Futility. The end.

But was it really pointless? The boy has forgotten the feeling of lightness and the “wondrous energy.” That was when he was actually in the well, untethered and in the eternal moment.

It turns out that the narrator and Murakami did learn a lot from Derek Heartfield, even though he didn’t even exist.

And you know, that sandwich is really really good. Put everything you have into making it and eating it and even washing the plate. It may be all we have, but it’s worth it.