Scheherazade by Haruki Murakami -- Commentary
Scheherazade
By
Haruki Murakami
The
New Yorker, October 13, 2014, pp. 100-109.
Translated
from the Japanese by Ted Goossen.
In Haruki Murakami's revisitation of this ancient classic, a
woman the narrator calls 'Scheherazade' tells stories to her lover, Habara,
"because she wants to." She
seems to need to talk. Nothing is at
stake, certainly not her life. Habara
was enthralled by the stories because he was "able to forget the reality
that surrounded him, if only for a moment." They "eased [him] of worries and
unpleasant memories," and he needed this more than anything else.
The lovers don't call each other by their names. He doesn't know hers, and she doesn't use
his. "She barely spoke during their
lovemaking, performing each act as if completing an assignment." She would leave at 4:30 to prepare dinner for
her family, and Habara would be left to dine alone. He watched DVDs and read long books.
There wasn't much else to
do. He had no one to talk to. No one to phone. With no computer, he had no way of accessing
the internet. No newspaper was
delivered, and he never watched television.
(There was a good reason for that.)
It went without saying that he couldn't go outside. Should Scheherazade's visits come to a halt
for some reason, he would be left all alone.
It is a little hard to figure out what this relationship is
all about -- that is, why it even exists.
Habara had met Scheherazade for
the first time four months earlier. He
had been transported to this house, in a provincial city north of Tokyo, and
she had been assigned to him as his "support liaison." Since he couldn't go outside, her role was to
buy food and other items he required and bring them to the house.
Apparently, having
sex with him was part of her assignment as well.
no vow, no implicit
understanding -- held them together.
Theirs was a chance relationship created by someone else, and might be
terminated on that person's whim.
So there seems to be some large, mysterious institutional
force governing their lives and defining their roles and their functioning
within this rather choreographed relationship.
It sounds like he might be under some sort of house arrest, or perhaps
he has some disability or injury that he is recovering from. It is never clear why these two people meet
frequently and what motivates them, or why Habara has such a sense of
confinement. It is also unclear why they
could not continue to meet even if this nameless, faceless force decided to
terminate their "liaison."
I think this ambiguity, this absence of internal motivations,
is important. Perhaps it is a comment on
Japanese society. I haven't lived in
Japan, so I cannot speak authoritatively on this, but from casual observation,
it seems that many Japanese people live very structured lives that are defined
by external forces, social expectations, that are a pervasive, overarching
presence in their lives. Thus, much of
what they do and how they live is done in order to fulfill these imagined
requirements and obligations, rather than from a deeply personal sense of
purpose. People don't know why they are
doing what they are doing, but they know they are supposed to do it -- so they
do. What is the "reality that
surrounds" Habara that he is so eager to forget, and thus so readily loses
himself in Scheherazade's narratives?
Japanese society.
I once met a young Japanese woman who had freshly arrived in
the United States. I asked her,
"Why did you come to America?"
She replied simply, "Freedom."
I was a little taken aback by that blunt response and all that must have
been behind it, but I think it is not an uncommon sentiment among young
Japanese women. Japanese society can be
burdensome and confining for young people and this relationship between Habara
and Scheherazade, defined and controlled by a powerful unseen force, evokes
that sense of invisible boundaries and sweeping tides.
There is nothing resembling spontaneity in this whole story,
with the possible exception of their conversations. The conversations after sex seem to be the
only place in their lives where they can interact of their own volition and participate in life as themselves.
Their sex was not exactly
obligatory, but neither could it be said that their hearts were entirely in it.
. . Yet, while the lovemaking was not what you'd call passionate, it wasn't
entirely businesslike either. . . to what extent did Scheherazade see their
sexual relationship as one of her duties, and how much did it belong to the
sphere of her personal life? He couldn't
tell.
After this ambiguous set up of the relationship between Habara
and Scheherazade, the story shifts focus and is taken over by a reminiscence
Scheherazade relates from her adolescence that dominates the remainder. Habara and Scheherazade, the couple, retreat
and Scheherazade herself steps forward to claim center stage, specifically, a
relationship -- or, rather, an obsession -- she had in her teens, which
impelled her to break into houses -- not to steal things, but to satisfy a
psychological compulsion. So it becomes
a story within a story, or rather, a substory taking over what had been the
main thread.
Scheherazade was obsessed with a boy in her high school
class. She broke into his house (rather
easily through the front door with a key hidden under the doormat), and
proceeded to go through his things, lie in his bed, smell his clothes, take a
couple of innocuous souvenirs, and -- very importantly, leave some small
mementos of herself behind in inconspicuous places. She is a rather aggressive girl, but in a
very indirect way. She never approaches
the boy himself. She tries to get close
to him through the things he uses and
lives with: by occupying the space he occupies, but when he is not there.
she began thinking about what
to leave behind. Her panties seemed like
the best choice. They were of an
ordinary sort, simple, relatively new, and fresh that morning. She could hide them at the very back of his
closet. Could there be anything more
appropriate to leave in exchange? But
when she took them off, the crotch was damp.
I guess this comes from desire, too, she thought. It would hardly do to leave something tainted
by lust in his room. She would only be
degrading herself. She slipped them back
on and began to think about what else to leave.
Murakami does not write very well about sex. He does not seem to understand it. What I mean is he is detached from visceral
passion. Lust. He doesn't want to let himself or any of his
characters feel it. Neither Habara nor
Scheherazade feel lust or strong passion in their relationship, and the above
passage repudiates lust as a motivating force in Scheherazade's behavior as a
young girl toward the boy in her dreams.
It sanitizes her obsession with the boy.
It desexualizes her smelling his shirt and taking it home, lying in his
bed, looking at his hidden pornography. It
makes the girl seem unreal and discredits her obsession with the boy. If she had stuffed her wet panties under the
boy's pillow and approached him with a dripping cunt that was eager to fuck, it
would have given her character more credibility. She would have to do it in a Japanese way, of
course. Murakami could figure that
out. But Murakami cannot write the story
that way. He wouldn't know what to do
with a girl like that. Believe me, there
are plenty of Japanese girls who are not afraid of lust.
Scheherazade actually has more interaction with the boy's
mother than she does with the boy. In
fact, it seems likely that the boy never became aware of Scheherazade's
interest in him, although it is very clear that his mother did -- and she put
the kibosh on it.
When my break-ins stopped, my
passion for him began to cool. It was
gradual, like the tide ebbing from a long, sloping beach.
The subsiding of Scheherazade's interest in the boy is as
amorphous and inexplicable as her obsession.
But it was the mother's actions that locked the door and made the house
inaccessible to her. The boy himself was
still readily available. Scheherazade mentions
watching him in classes at school and watching him on the soccer field. She could have approached him in any number
of ways. It leads me to think that this
obsession was more about the mother than it was about the boy. Nothing she did had any impact on the boy, or
even reached his awareness. But the
mother knew everything, or at least would soon discover everything, and
Scheherazade knew this. Still she
pressed forward in defiant provocation. It
was an attempt at asserting independence -- from the mother -- through
sex. But it was quashed. And it appears she never recovered.
Habara and Scheherazade have one more lovemaking session, at
Scheherazade's suggestion, and then she dresses and leaves. It is not clear why Habara is left ruminating
about the possibility -- or rather, the certainty
-- of losing Scheherazade, and the greater specter of losing connection to all
women. Being "deprived of his
freedom entirely" was the way he put it.
The invisible puppetmaster that pulls the strings on all of their lives and
limits them to a very narrow range of possibilities, seems destined to pull the
plug on his tenuous connection to humanity and leave him completely
desolate. This is his greatest
worry. There is nothing in the story to
substantiate this fear, any more than there is anything in the story that
explains why this affair is even taking place.
In the world Murakami creates these invisible forces that
shape and define and limit our lives are both capricious and malevolent. We can't see them or influence them, yet we
are always under their shadow.
Scheherazade gave a hint to the nature of that unseen, but all powerful
governing force: the all knowing and all intrusive Mother, who locks doors and
hides keys and crushes all free spirited love and passion.
One can look at this story in two ways as a commentary on
the outward forces in Japanese society that define and structure and limit the
lives of people, but it also represents a depiction of internal, unconscious
forces within the self that restrict and crush the individual spirit.
The original story of Scheherazade was, perhaps, the
earliest literary representation of a serial killer. It remains paradigmatic. An all powerful king who had felt betrayed
and abandoned by one lover takes his revenge on all women thereafter. Every day he marries a virgin and has sex
with her. The next day he beheads her
and marries another. This continues
indefinitely, and endless stream of murdered, slaughtered virgins. It is a tale of unbounded cruelty and
hostility toward women from an original injury by one. The king is so insecure and so lacking in his
own sense of loveability that he feels he must kill each new woman or she will
surely betray and abandon him. This
original insecurity and sense of being unloveable did not start with the lover
who betrayed him, but rather, started with his mother who was never able to
make him feel loved and secure in her love.
His rage was so extreme that he had to kill every woman he came in
contact with. It was the only way he
could relate to women. The betrayal of
the first woman who touched off the spree was only the spark that lit a
tinderbox that had been waiting for many years.
The injury that she inflamed had been inflicted many years prior, and
indeed, goes back to the cradle. Killing
women was palliative, but not curative.
It assuaged his rage temporarily, like a valve letting off steam, but it
did not begin to heal the original injury of neglect and abandonment that
continued to fester and give rise to new waves of rage that demanded
appeasement. This is why serial killers
need to keep on killing. The mere
venting of rage is not a cure. Sex alone
is also not a cure. Scheherazade had the
right idea.
Habara feels that abandonment by Scheherazade is
inevitable. It is only a matter of
time. This expectation was present
before he ever met her. It had nothing
to do with anything she did or said. His
fear of being deprived of his freedom entirely is not a fear of external forces
-- there are no external forces -- but rather of internal anxieties and
insecurities that might cripple and disable his ability to connect on any level
with women. Scheherazade's stories eased
him of "worries and unpleasant memories" -- most likely in relation
to women. He very likely had many of
them starting way back with a mother who could not love or make him feel loved,
and perhaps abandoned him. Lust and
passion are way too dangerous for a man this fragile. Deep attachment is the utmost danger, because
from an early age he learned that strong attachment leads to devastating
disappointment -- over and over again.
This is what the story is about.
The original story of Scheherazade ends optimistically, even
triumphantly. Murakami's contemporary
reworking is less optimistic, but has some promising trends. The original story is a story of healing,
through, perhaps, sated rage, coupled with satisfying sex, coupled with a
continuing narrative whereby the wounded ruler becomes invested in the
future. Being able to see a way forward
that is not an abyss of abandonment and devastation is a very important aspect
of the healing process. That is what
Scheherazade's narratives were able to do for the murderous king. He was eventually able to fall in love with
Scheherazade and make her his Queen. A
decisively optimistic outcome.
In Murakami's story there is less healing and less
optimism. Murakami's story ends with
gloom and foreboding. What is positive
in Murakami's tale is that Scheherazade and Habara were able to connect with
one another in genuine communication from the heart through the stories she
told after sex. Sex was not the primary
avenue of communication for this couple.
Their sex was obligatory and somewhat perfunctory. The real action between them occurred
afterward, when she told him stories of her past. He took a genuine interest in her life and
she found a receptive audience for things she needed to reveal. This very positive connection aroused Habara's
anxieties of abandonment. There has not
been enough time to effect a healing of his underlying vulnerabilities and
injuries, but if they continue, perhaps for A Thousand and One Afternoons, they
might achieve a similar outcome to the original tale.