Nr. 3 (28) anul VIII / iulie-septembrie 2010 - ROMDIDAC

e grasped but, rather, a void, an impossible limit beyond which our Imaginary
and Symbolic constructions of reality fail to go. 4 This void is what is most often
left at the end of Murakami’s novels. The moment of illumination, that moment
when the promise of the Real is eventually revealed to be nothing but a “wild
sheep chase”, coincides with a waning process of memory and a persistent
feeling of vacuum.
After Shimamoto’s physical self disappears, the evidence of her existence
also vanishes. Over the years, Hajime had kept in a drawer an envelope with
the money he had received from an unknown man for not pursuing Shimamoto
again. The disappearance of the envelope raises questions in Hajime’s mind
as to whether Shimamoto was real or not. This is a crucial point in his search
for the Real; it marks his understanding of the way memory works and his
realization of the illusory nature of existence. Memory, he says, is just like
a chain built out of several links; each link needs another link to uphold the
reality of its existence; in order to support our impression of reality, we need
to have this chain in its complete form, because, if one link breaks down, our
whole perception of reality is turned upside down:
Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely
on a certain reality-call it an alternate reality-to prove the reality of events. To what
extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent
these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction
to draw. Therefore, in order to pin down reality as reality, we need another reality
to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its
grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the
very maintenance of this chain that produces the sensation that we are actually
here, that we ourselves exist. (SBWS: 176)
As a result of Shimamoto’s wavering ontological status, and probably also
due to an attempt at emotional exorcism and forgetfulness, Hajime eventually
asks the pianist in his jazz bar to stop singing the song which he played when
he and Shimamoto used to meet. As if he were a character from Casablanca,
he puts an end to Shimamoto’s memory and to the dear value this song held
for so long. Suddenly, the song doesn’t impress him as before, it is no longer
marked by that special affection needed to perceive it by the memory as a
“Madeleine”.
It is always the extraordinary, the special, the peculiar that Hajime looks
for. Music reactivates pleasant memories only when the mind can associate
it with individual experience. Liszt’s concertos have little value even when
played by virtuosi with excellent technique. The performance does not reach
to his soul, or as, he describes it, it throws a curtain between him and the
pianist. Being used to listening to Liszt concertos on a scratched disk, Hajime
misses that particular scratching sound which marks the intimacy between him
and Shimamoto. It is not so much Liszt, as that anomaly contained solely by
Shimamoto’s disks that lures Hajime into the impression that it is the only Liszt
interpretation that can elicit emotions from him. Liszt’s music on that particular
disk is thus rendered unique by the simple fact that it brings together two people
and it opens an avenue towards the sentimental recesses of memory.
By the same token, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle delves deep into the
burrows of the mind through the association between Rossini’s opera La Gazza
Ladra (The Thieving Magpie) and the elusive bird that never allows itself to
be seen, but whose song, resembling the sound made by a wound spring,
Ex Ponto nr.3, 2010
169