Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey by Murakami (from 'First Person Singular' collection)

 

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.

Reading Murakami for the First Time

   To prepare. I was meditating this morning, quite early. Before as I was sitting down I read a little from ‘Upadesa Sahasri’ of Sankara.

Unhappiness is seen in the Self when the mind roams against one’s will on account of Ignorance. But it is not seen in it when the mind is at rest. It is therefore, not reasonable that unhappiness is in the innermost Self. (From Chap.XVIII: Thou art That)

That is simply true.  

Coming back to the sitting room with my tea and toast I spotted a book of short stories by Murakami ‘First Person Singular’ probably bought in the Madras (dog charity) shop and never read. I had not read anything by him so I picked it up. Things fall in your path. Light comes through the leaves of the sycamore and illuminates a clump of bluebells.

Notes on ‘Cream’:

Winding up the hill is the loudspeaker on the top of a car saying ‘we are going to be judged, it will come’. The narrator seems to be sent to this place through an error or a trick. A park in a port town, cranes and container ships stacked up. There is metaphorical depth which is achieved by not talking about it. This is the quiet Sunday of your life. You sit in a little park to unspool a moment of duration. A moment apart from all the others in a little park.

And a question. Why? In an aimless season you were given an aim but the target was closed off, annulled. The wheels are spinning but there is no traction. Panic. Then a man appears. He is dressed in what is perhaps in the Japanese way the mature version of the narrator who is significantly talking to a younger friend about this whole incident. Is this man coming from the future as a guide with a teaching. “A circle with many centres”. Get to grips with the ‘creme de la creme’.

The guide/sage/ - “I gave up and opened my eyes. I needed more clues.

But the old man wasn’t there anymore.”

So the narrator left the bouquet of flowers on the bench in the arbour as though a transferred homage from the performance that never happened in a concert room whose gates were chained.

“And the unique cream that must be there deep inside me.”