The Alien Within: Representations of the Exotic in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature

8. The Alien Without: Murakami Haruki and the Sydney Olympics

C H A P T E R 8 T H E A L I E N W I T H O U T Murakami Haruki and the Sydney Olympics you faint & the city’s there like a pillow you wake in the morning each street is a beach— others have armchairs & opinions about things . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the city’s still hearing when they’re dead & gone —John Forbes, from “Sydney” But here I am in Sydney At the age of sixty-one With the clock at a quarter to bedtime And my homework still not done. —Kenneth Slessor, from “I Wish I Were . . .” T his chapter will focus on a single volume by the acclaimed Japanese author Murakami Haruki (b. 1949)—Shidonii! (Sydney!)—published in January 2001 by the Bungei Shunjü company in Tokyo. Three-quarters of this 409-page book, published originally as a single volume and then in two volumes in paperback, consists of Murakami’s Shidonii nisshi (Sydney diary), which records in twenty-three daily entries the minutiae of his life in Sydney and his observations on the Sydney Olympics. The diary also contains many Murakami Haruki and the Sydney Olympics • 179 reflections on Australia and its life and culture. This chapter will examine the Sydney Diary, rather than the remaining quarter of the book, which consists of diary entries before the Olympics written in Atlanta and Hiroshima, and four brief pieces written after the Olympics set in Tokushima and New York, which discuss Takahashi Naoko, the winner of the Sydney Olympic Women’s Marathon. Travel diaries are a fascinating form of expression, several examples of which (in both the English and Japanese tradition) have been critically acclaimed as important works of literature. In general, travel diaries focus on exotic locales and especially on the odd practices and customs of the inhabitants of these (usually) faraway places. Murakami’s Sydney! is no exception to this rule. The travel diary is well represented in the history of Japanese literature, one of the most famous examples being undoubtedly Matsuo Bashö’s (1644–1694) Oku no hosomichi (The narrow road from the deep north, 1702). We will begin with a consideration of the travel diary form and then examine other travel works by Murakami, before examining his Sydney Diary. The Travel Diary Genre Travel diaries are an old genre in Japanese literature. Travel accounts by monks, aristocrats, and others have been preserved from Japan’s distant past. Donald Keene, in the first volume of his acclaimed history of Japanese literature , cites the travel diary by the monk Ennin (793–864), which describes a journey to China, as one of the most important of the numerous such accounts that are extant.1 Many of these works approach the status of literature and have long been recognized as such in Japan. A standard dictionary of Japanese literature begins the entry on travel literature (kikö bungaku) with discussion of three travel diaries dating from classical times: Tosa nikki (The Tosa diary, ca. tenth century), Kaidöki (Journey along the seacoast road, 1233), and the Izayoi nikki (The diary of the waning moon, ca. thirteenth century).2 Earl Miner has analyzed one of the most important of the literary travel diaries, Bashö’s The Narrow Road from the Deep North. In his 1996 book entitled Naming Properties, Miner compares Bashö’s work to a number of other travel accounts, principally Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775). He has a number of useful observations on the problems involved in reading and evaluating travel diaries, so we will take his observations into account when reading Murakami’s Sydney diary. 180 • Chapter 8 The first issue is that of the relationship between the writer of the account and the persons and places named in it. To quote Miner: “The problem turns on the traveler’s capacity to give meaning to the names of those people and places. . . . No doubt all narrative involves not merely sequence but continuum to some telos, an end often realized in the sequential process itself.”3 Miner is considering here the larger problem of reference in his discussion of the nature of fiction and factuality. This is important to the investigation of travel accounts because it helps to determine how to read these accounts: if literature is essentially a fictional construction, then what of travel narratives that are essentially factual? Another issue Miner addresses is the aim of such...