It isn't every night, but when he's there it's always the same. He orders a whiskey with water and ice, sits reading his book, then pays up and leaves. Kamita, Kino tells us, "looks like he could be yakuza," but there isn't really anything concrete he bases this assessment on. Although there is that one night, when two thugs seem to be intent on beating Kino up, and Kamita tells them to meet him outside instead -- then twenty minutes later Kamita comes back in, unruffled and unperturbed, and calmly tells Kino that the two "won't bother him again."
Other than that, Kamita seems to be a perfectly ordinary thirty-something, enjoying his quiet drink and his book. But still, there's something off kilter about the whole situation, as if what we're seeing isn't quite real. That sense magnifies as the story progresses. Kino's cat mysteriously disappears. Then he starts seeing snakes everywhere he goes. He asks his aunt -- who had once owned the building housing his bar -- if she'd seen snakes around the place, and she says she hasn't. But then she cryptically adds, "[Snakes] often help guide people. But when a snake leads you, you don't know if it's in a good direction or a bad one... [A snake] hides its heart somewhere outside its body, so it doesn't get killed. If you want to kill a snake, you need to go to its hideout when it's not there, find its beating heart, and cut it in two."
All through this, we become increasingly unsure if what we're experiencing through Kino is real. Murakami is the master at creating a believable Unreliable Narrator -- where we're never certain how much to trust. Especially when the mysterious Kamita tells Kino one evening that it's absolutely imperative he close the bar "before the rain comes," and leave town. Kino is instructed not to stay in one place for more than a day or two, and send postcards to his aunt -- no message, don't write his name, just his aunt's address and a stamp -- so Kamita will know he's okay. "She asked me to keep an eye on you," Kamita tells Kino, "to make sure nothing bad happened... When it's all right for you to return, I'll get in touch with you."
Amazingly, Kino accepts all this with few questions. Closes his bar, and leaves... just as the rain starts to fall. But a few days into his trip he ignores one of the directives, and puts his name and a short message on a postcard to his aunt. That evening, there's a knock on his hotel room door, quiet but insistent. It goes on for hours:
Kino pulled the covers up, shut his eyes, and covered his ears with his hands. I'm not going to look, I'm not going to listen, he told himself. But he couldn't drown out the sound. Even if he ran to the far corners of the Earth and stuffed his ears full of clay, as long as he was still alive those knocks would relentlessly track him down. It wasn't a knocking on a door in a business hotel. It was a knocking on the door to his heart. A person couldn't escape that sound.
And that's where we leave him. We never find out who's behind the door, or even if there was someone at the door. We never find out who Kamita is, why he did what he did, or how he had a connection to Kino's aunt. We never learn for certain the significance of the snakes and the disappearance of his cat. It is weird, surreal, evocative, tantalizing -- and ultimately, we're left to figure out the answers for ourselves.
This kind of ending drives some people crazy. Me, I love it. It's the kind of story that stays with you, rather than just handing you the whole thing tied up in a neat package with a ribbon on top. It keeps you working at it, trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. All the clues are there, it seems to say to the reader. You're smart enough to figure this out.
It's why one of my favorite Doctor Who episodes in recent years is the haunting "73 Yards." The Doctor's companion Ruby is being followed by an old woman who always stays exactly 73 yards away from her, making enigmatic hand gestures. Ruby, of course, can't get close to her, but anyone else who approaches the old woman and speaks to her ends up terrified, running away in fear -- and then turns against Ruby, refusing to have anything more to do with her. (In two horrifying scenes, this includes the stalwart Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, and Ruby's own mother.) We get hints at the end of who the old woman is and what's going on, but it's never really resolved completely; certainly, we never see the whole picture.
It's creepy, unsettling... but also brilliantly plotted and deeply intriguing.
One of the most critical things for developing an understanding of how things work is a tolerance for uncertainty. The rush to find an answer -- any answer -- is completely antithetical to true knowledge. On one level, I get it; it'd be nice if things were simple. It'd all be so much less trouble. But the basis of curiosity is in the suspension of that tendency, of allowing yourself not to know for a while, but to think, "Okay, I can do this. Let's see how this all works."
The drive to fill in the answer blank and be done with thinking is a large part of what's gotten us into the political situation we now have in the United States. It's the "All we have to do is..." mentality. All we have to do is... put tariffs on other countries, and industry will come roaring back to our own. Get rid of all the illegal immigrants, and our streets will be safer. Cut the size of government, and waste and fraud will magically disappear. Believe what Donald Trump says, world without end, amen.
And it's fed by the talking heads on the news, too, who give us little bite-sized pieces, nice and manageable -- and due to our tendency to gravitate toward the media we already believed, nothing that'll challenge our preconceived notions. Nothing that forces us to question.
Nothing that says, "Here are the actual facts. Now, put them together. You don't need me to tell you what to believe, you're smart enough to find the answer yourself."
Psychologist Todd Kashdan said, "If we are interested in producing a population of critical thinkers armed with courage, resilience, and a love of learning and discovery, then we must recognize, harness, and cultivate curiosity." But the flipside of that is if you want to produce a population of people who will blindly follow an amoral autocrat, who will swallow every last bit of party-line propaganda from his mouthpieces, then make them incurious, unquestioning, and the unable to sustain uncertainty.
The frightening truth is that the last thing our current elected leaders want is a populace who asks uncomfortable questions, who probe deeper, who tolerate ambiguity, who examine their own biases and those of the people they meet. No, they want followers who'll wear a gold pin with Donald Trump's face on it. It's easy to get scared people to fall for hero worship -- and scared people are far more susceptible to bullying by the greedy and power-hungry.
I get that we live in uncertain times, and as someone who has had a lifelong struggle with anxiety and depression, no one knows better than me how uncertainty can provoke fear. But I'm asking you to hold that fear in your hands for a while. Examine it and be curious about it. Ask it questions. Find out about your biases -- we've all got them, but they're not dangerous as long as you keep them where you can see them. This approach may not be as instantly gratifying as having Fox News tell you, "Here's what to think," but in the end, it'll be worth it.
Believe me about this much, at least; in the final tally, a deep understanding is worth the anguish of being in the dark for a while.
Be brave. I trust you to figure the answers out.
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I think you'll like this:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puZQ5bk1T7U
Spot on... that is REALLY cool!
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