While Murakami has been able to take us to the mountains of Hokkaido in A Wild Sheep Chase, an isolated sanatorium in the world in Norwegian Wood or a wonderland through an enigmatic library in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, among many other real and fantastic (or not) places, is only in the labyrinthine streets of Tokyo suburbs where all his stories are born.
These magical places are the result of almost a century of a very particular urban development in which multiple layers (stories, characters, abandoned gardens...) overlap. And among those layers, characters like the teenager with a limp in her left leg that whispers at Tooru Okada things about death as she strokes his wrist, naturally appear (or disappear, like the cat Noboru Watanabe).
At the end of this post I have extracted a fragment of the story The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday´s Women where the writer describes some of these Murakami spaces without which, perhaps, his words wouldn´t have sprouted the way they did, for example, in the novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, continuation of the previous short story, that arises in one of those voids that Tokyo suburbs offer.
The description refers to a phenomenon that some urbanism theorists call subdivurbanization. This phenomenon comes mainly from two facts: the big increase suffered by inheritance taxes and land prices in Tokyo throughout the twentieth century within a framework of sole ownership of the plots; and the short life spam of Japanese residential constructions, which is approximately 26 years.
The first of the facts, which refers to increased inheritance taxes and land prices, comes together with the low birth rates in Japan (only children, couples without children, like Murakami´s characters). This combination has forced the inheritors of the first plots of suburban early twentieth century (240m2 approx) to subdivide them into 2 or even 3 plots. These divisions and Tokyo planning regulations requiring certain separation between houses have generated: impasses, small chinks where weeds grow, overlapping shadows, empty gardens with no apparent owner...
As shown in this chart, the largest increase in land prices and taxes occurred between 1985 and 1990. The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday´s Women was written in 1985. Real estate speculation in Tokyo has produced a very particular form of urbanism. The city functions as a body made up of small cells that create a homogeneous landscape within its heterogeneity. Its components can be replaced by new ones without altering the final result, like a rhizome.
The second fact referring to the short life of constructions, explains how buildings of the first generation (1920) coexist with buildings of 3 later generations until today within the same neighborhood. The first houses, with a large front garden and a more traditional style, began a process of introversion of families inside their homes. With the development of the next generations, houses have evolved into a more mixed style (east / west) and have locked themselves even more.
Density has increased and the number of windows has decreased, same as vegetation that now grows within the small cracks that urban development has left behind.
Tokyo is a paradoxical case where exacerbated capitalism resulted in a strange democratization of the limited space in the city, or even one might say, in some kind of organic anarchy. Inside this "body" is where Murakami stories find their perfect habitat to be born and to grow up to limits that can only be found in the deepest guts of this habitat.
In the excerpt that follows, we can see how the main character of the story goes gradually into these small streets and how, without any apparent change, the “organism” catches him, passing on from his normal life to the magical world of Murakami through the spatiotemporal tunnel created by all those little houses that seem uninhabited and its interstices.
The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday´s Women
"A LITTLE BEFORE two o’clock, I climb from my backyard over the cinder-block wall into the passage. Actually, it’s not the corridor you’d expect a passage to be; that’s only what we call it for lack of a better name. Strictly speaking, it isn’t a corridor at all. A corridor has an entrance and an exit, forming a route from one place to another.
But this passage has neither entrance nor exit, and leads smack into a cinder-block wall at one end and a chain link fence at the other. It’s not even an alleyway. For starters, an alley has to at least have an entrance. The neighbors all call it “the passage” for convenience sake.
The passage meanders between everyone’s backyards for about six hundred feet. Three-footsomething in width for the most part, but what with all the junk lying around and the occasional hedge cropping in, there are places you can barely squeeze through sideways.
From what I’ve heard—this is from a kindly uncle of mine who rents us our house ridiculously cheap—the passage used to have an entrance and an exit, offering a shortcut across the block, streetto-street. But then, with the postwar boom years, new homes were built in any available space, hemming in the common ground to a narrow path. Which ushered in the none-too-inviting prospect of having strangers walking through backyards, practically under the eaves, so the residents surreptitiously covered the entrance. At first an innocent little bush barely disguised the opening, but eventually one resident expanded his yard and extended his cinder-block wall to completely seal it over. While the corresponding other aperture was screened off with a chain link fence to keep the dogs out. It hadn’t been the residents who made use of the passage to begin with, so no one complained about its being closed at both ends. And anyway, closing it wouldn’t hurt as a crimeprevention measure. Thus, the path went neglected and untrafficked, like some abandoned canal, merely serving as a kind of buffer zone between the houses, the ground overgrown with weeds, sticky spider webs strung everywhere a bug could possibly alight.
Now, why should my wife frequent such a place? It was beyond me. Me, I’d only set foot in the passage one time before. And she can’t even stand spiders.
Yet when I try to think, my head’s filled to bursting with some gaseous substance. I didn’t sleep well last night, plus the weather’s too hot for the beginning of May, plus there was that unnerving telephone call.
Oh, well, I think, might as well look for that cat. Leave later developments for later. Anyway, it’s a damn sight better to be out and about than to be cooped up indoors waiting for the telephone to ring.
The spring sun cuts clean and crisp through the ceiling of overhanging branches, scattering patches of shadow across the ground. With no wind, the shadows stay glued in place like fateful stains. Telltale stains sure to cling to the earth as it goes around and around the sun for millennia to come.
Shadows flit over my shirt as I pass under the branches, then return to the ground. All is still. You can almost hear each blade of grass respiring in the sunlight. A few small clouds float in the sky, vivid and well formed, straight out of a medieval engraving. Everything stands out with such clarity that I feel buoyant, as if somehow my body went on forever. That, and it’s terribly hot.
I’m in a T-shirt, thin cotton slacks, and tennis shoes, but already, just walking around, my armpits and the cleft of my chest are drenched with sweat. I’d only just this morning pulled the T-shirt and slacks out of storage, so every time I take a deep breath there’s this sharp mothball smell, as if some tiny bug had flown up my nose.
I keep an eye peeled to both sides and walk at a slow, even pace, stopping from time to time to call the cat’s name in a stage whisper. The homes that sandwich the passage are of two distinct types and blend together as well as liquids of two different specific gravities. First there are the houses dating from way back, with big backyards; then there are the comparatively newer ones. None of the new houses has any yard to speak of; some don’t have a single speck of yard space. Scarcely enough room between the eaves and the passage to hang out two lines of laundry. In some places, clothes actually hang out over the passage, forcing me to inch past rows of still-dripping towels and shirts. I’m so close I can hear televisions playing and toilets flushing inside. I even smell curry cooking in one kitchen.
The old homes, by contrast, hardly betray a breath of life. Judiciously placed hedges of cypress and other shrubbery guard against inquisitive eyes, although here and there you catch a glimpse of a wellmanicured spread. The houses themselves are of all different architectural styles: traditional Japanese houses with long hallways, tarnished copper-roofed early Western villas, recently remodeled “modern” homes. Common to all, however, is the absence of any visible occupants. Not a sound, not a hint of life. No noticeable laundry, either.
It’s the first time I’ve taken in the sights of the passage at leisure, so everything is new to my eyes. Propped up in a corner of one backyard is a lone, withered, brown Christmas tree. In another yard lies several childhoods’ worth of every plaything imaginable—a virtual scrap heap of tricycle parts, a ringtoss set, plastic samurai swords, rubber balls, a toy turtle, wooden trucks. One yard sports a basketball hoop, another a fine set of garden chairs and a rattan table. By the look of them, the chairs haven’t been sat on in months (maybe years), they’re so covered with dirt; the tabletop is rainplastered with lavender magnolia petals.
One house presents a clear view into its living room through large glass sliding doors. There I see a kidney-shaped sofa with matching lounge furniture, a sizable television, a cellarette topped with a tank of tropical fish and two trophies of some sort, and a decorator floor lamp. It all looks as unreal as a set for a TV sitcom.
In another yard, there’s a massive doghouse penned in with wire screening. No dog inside that I can see, though. Just a wide-open hole. I also notice that the screening is stretched shapeless, bulging out as if someone or something had been leaning into it for months.
The vacant house my wife told me about is only a little farther along, past the one with the doghouse. Right away, I can see it’s vacant. One look tells you that this is not your scant two-or threemonths’ absence. The place is a fairly new two-story affair, yet the tight shutters look positively weather-beaten and the rusted railings around the upstairs windows seem about ready to fall off. The smallish yard hosts a stone figurine of a bird with wings outstretched atop a chest-high pedestal surrounded by a thicket of weeds, the taller stalks of goldenrod reaching clear to the bird’s feet. The bird—beats me what kind—finds this encroachment most distressing and flaps its wings to take flight at any second.
Besides this stone figurine, the yard has little in the way of decoration. Two beat-up old vinyl chaises are parked neatly under the eaves, right next to an azalea blazing with ethereally crimson blossoms. Otherwise, weeds are about all that meets the eye.
I lean against the chest-high chain link fence and make a brief survey of the yard. Just the sort of yard a cat would love, but hope as I might, nothing catty puts in an appearance. On the rooftop TV aerial, a pigeon perches, its monotone carrying everywhere. The shadow of the stone bird falls across the tangle of weeds, their blades cutting it into fragments of different shapes.
I take a cigarette out of my pocket, light up, and smoke it, leaning against the fence the whole while. The pigeon doesn’t budge from the aerial as it goes on cooing nonstop.
Cigarette finished and stamped out on the ground, I still don’t move for the longest time. Just how long, I don’t know. Half asleep, I stare dumbly at the shadow of the bird, hardly even thinking.
Or maybe I am thinking, somewhere out of range of my conscious mind. Phenomenologically speaking, however, I’m simply staring at the shadow of the bird falling over stalks of grass.
Gradually I become aware of something—a voice?—filtering into the bird’s shadow. Whose voice? Someone seems to be calling me".
*Main sources of this post: Tokyo Metabolizing (Kitayama K., Tsukamoto Y. y Nishizawa R.); Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday´s Women (Murakami H.); several articles in architecture and urban planning magazines; and my own experience in Tokyo.