It’s like this. You are in a strange place where you have never been before. Everything is odd, strange, removed and slightly uncanny. The receptionist is hairless, the cat snores, the room is tiny but when you wander planless without booking ahead the ‘rugged shore’ (ariso) suite is what you get. You are so to speak cast up on the lee shore of life. Strangely the bath facility is excellent and there’s a surprise; the bath attendant is a talking monkey, a pleasant fellow but how, talking? There is an explanation but the anomaly remains resistant. Anyway he goes by the name of the Shinagawa monkey.
“How is the bath?” the monkey asked me.
“It’s very nice. Thank you,” I said. My voice reverbated densely, softly, in the steam. My voice sounded almost mythological. It didn’t sound like it came from me, but rather like an echo from the past returning from deep in the forest. And that echo was.....hold on a second. What was a monkey doing here? And why was he speaking in a human language?
In Japanese mythology the monkey is a mediator between the gods and men. He is, in this story of Murakami’s, a psychopomp, a creature of the imaginal that liminal reality that we can pass into without being aware of it. Only after the visionary episode are we aware of the discontinuity with our normal continuum. We step in and then we step out.
What is the teaching or the instruction in the guise of the monkey’s revelation? It is this: every transaction leaves a trace in the domain of emotional forensics. Becoming obsessed with female women although physical union is out of the question the Shinagawa hominid reveals that he has an occult power.
“So because of all this I had to find another method of ridding myself of these unfulfilled desires.”
“What do you mean by ‘another method’?”
The monkey frowned deeply. His red face turned a bit darker.
“You may not believe me,” the monkey said, “You probably won’t believe me, I should say. But I started stealing the names of women I fell for.”
You take and you move on. The effect on the women is a subtle loss of identity, the erosion of their boundary, their shore. The monkey can’t help it, it’s a dopamine thing but hey he’s given that name lifting up.
“After I came to this town, I made up my mind to stop that kind of misconduct. Thanks to which, the soul of this wee little monkey has found a moment of peace. I treasure the names of the seven women in my heart, and live a quiet, tranquil life.”
Is he telling the truth? There’s a tail to this monkey tale with a twist. Amusing and also profound.
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