Reading Murakami’s Drive My Car

I love the fact that my public library lets me check out ebooks so that I can often start looking at a book just minutes after I find myself thinking about it. (If you are not familiar with ebooks and public libraries here's more information on the process from the Brooklyn Public Library which lets any resident from New York State use their service. The process is similar for most public libraries in the United States.)

The first story in Murakami's collection of stories Men Without Women, Drive My Car, is the inspiration for Hamaguchi’s Oscar winning picture. Since finishing Happy Hour, I have decided to see other Hamaguchi movies that I have available through the streaming subscriptions on my television (Criterion Channel and HBO Max).

I found the story Drive My Car one worth thinking more deeply about because two of the most important characters appear only indirectly in a conversation between an actor and his driver. This phenomenon of indirectness in a narrative is one example of one of my favorite techniques in fiction and motion pictures: the unreliable narrator.  Let me give just a few examples unreliable narrators.

First, in movies:

• In Spielberg's E.T. perhaps the most important character is one who never appears: Eliot's father. As an adult watching the movie, it became obvious to me that it is entirely possible to see the plot of an alien child left behind on earth as an elaborate distraction that Eliot created to deal with his missing father.
• In Life of Pi, we see and hear an elaborate story about a tiger named Richard Parker and a boat at sea. But, at the end of the story the narrator himself suggests that maybe there was no tiger.

Second, in fiction:

• In The Catcher in the Rye we hear Holden Caulfield complaining about how everyone he meets is a phony. Yet, on further reflection it appears that Caulfied is the real phony. After this realization, one wonders how much of Caulfield's story was true. 
• In my opinion, Vladimir Nabokov was the master of the unreliable narrator. His book Lolita sold very well largely because of its "nymphet" theme. But the whole story is narrated by the pseudonymous Humbert Humbert who appears to be a narcissist who never seems to consider the thoughts and feelings of the title character Lolita. 
• By far, the most far-out use of an unreliable narrator is Nabokov's Pale Fire. The book Pale Fire is a poem said to be written by the late John Shade with an introduction, commentary,and index (far longer than the poem) by Charles Kinbote. A wikipedia entry says this about Kinbote:

Kinbote appears to be the scholarly author of the Foreword, Commentary and Index surrounding the text of the late John Shade's poem "Pale Fire", which together form the text of Nabokov's novel. In the course of initially academic but increasingly deranged annotations to Shade's text, Kinbote's writing reveals a comic melange of narcissism and megalomania: he believes himself to be a royal figure, the exiled king of Zembla and the real target of the gunman who has in fact murdered Shade. Using the scholarly apparatus of reference and commentary, Kinbote first intertwines his own story with the commentary on Shade's poem, then allows the poem to slide into the background and his perhaps delusional world to move into the spotlight; as Kinbote had hoped John Shade would produce a poem about Zembla's exiled king, this shift provides some satisfaction for Kinbote.

Let me end this entry by going back to the topic I started with: Haruki Murakami's story Drive My Car, let me also suggest that compared to his longer work like the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Drive My Car is a fairly minor work. However, when I read I often think about how a story connects to the other books and stories I know by this writer. The fact that Murakami has written other long, strange, and, in my mind, interesting books changes the way I understand his shorter works.