Ushikawa?

It's the funky looking, off-putting, chain smoking character that Murakami named "Bull-river," Ushikawa.

I got to page 426 in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and by 427 when the description comes in I remember thinking, This has to be Ushikawa, and then on 428 he introduces himself: "'The name is Ushikawa. That's ushi for "bull" and kawa for "river". Easy enough to remember, don't you think?'"

I mention it because, depending on how far along you've gotten in 1Q84, you'll have run into Ushikawa again.

This also highlights a few random thoughts I was having.

Like with Against the Day and Pynchon, this was another time of reading a later work before an earlier work. With Pynchon, I didn't know that Bodine was one of the recurring names of a set of characters.

With having read 1Q84 before The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which itself was written maybe a dozen years prior, this Ushikawa made his first impression on me in the newer story. Had I read Wind-Up... first, I believe that I surely would have recognized him in 1Q84 before his name came up, as did other Ruke-man fans.

Another thought I was having was the pace at which I'm making it through Wind-Up Bird...

I started it back in December when I was busing it to tutor sessions on the PV peninsula. It's not like the book is difficult and reading it is a slog (see Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon), and, for the record, nothing by the Ruke-man that I've found could ever really be considered a "slog."

Something about it though...it never gripped me, or at least hadn't as of the 420 pages. Maybe it is starting to now, at least, with  the random 3rd person breaks about the boy and the "newspaper articles" filling in some holes. (The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace also has a multi-pronged narrative approach with transcripts and articles and such...)

And it's not like I haven't had time to read. If that had been the case, like I imagine it is with my blog-mate, I could understand the lag better. When the Bleeding Edge comes out in September, what with my schedule being what it'll be, that could easily be the case at that time. But, while I've been reading this book by Murakami I've also read: Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman; half of a Tesla bio by Margaret Cheney; And Still We Rise by Miles Corwin; As They See 'Em by Bruce Weber; The Dinosaur Heresies by Dr. Bob Bakker; and The Tao of Baseball by a Canuck writer and thinker who goes by Go. The Goldman and Weber books were both gifts from Uncle Dan and Auntie Peg; and along with the Corwin book and Bakker book, everything is non-fiction, which is easier for me to breeze through on my LA Metro rides than even something as smooth as Murakami.

So...what...

Seeing Ushikawa in multiple spots is the same for me as seeing the Traverses in multiple spots, or even my own character Cooper. I have a character named Cooper who has bit roles in both my short The New American Patriot as well as in the current novel I'm working right now.

So, I was excited anyway. I've been busy with a different writing project lately; I'll go into it in detail a little later...

See you at the Birthday Party!

PIPD2013

Today marks Pynchon's birthday, and so (apparently) it's celebrated by Pynchonophiles as Pynchon In Public Day.

Scribble a muted horn on something; talk at a random stranger about the climbing a hemp plant like Jack on a beanstalk; imagine yourself crammed into a V2 or on an airship or throwing pies from a hot air balloon over the Alps.

Celebrate the Oeuvre!

2013 Shaping Up as Nice Year for New Books

Along with Bleeding Edge, we're also getting (maybe, depending on the translation) Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and the Year of His Pilgrimage from the Ruke-man himself, Haruki Murakami. I hadn't even heard about the book until today, even though it's selling a million copies a week since it was released in Japan in April.

Here's a link to an article about a rare public appearance and talk about the book's story.

I'm not sure if this means anything, but...

So, I know on this site there's been a certain focus on Pynchon (of course), as well as Murakami, and I've mentioned David Foster Wallace, Chandler Brossard, and Richard Flanagan on occasion as well. Flanagan wrote Gould's Book of Fish, and once I'd finished it, I  remember thinking that it had surpassed Mitchell's Cloud Atlas as my favorite non-Pynchon, non-Murakami novel.

Since then I think it may have crawled up the list, and rivals some of Murakami's best work. It's seriously good, and I've been thinking about getting a copy for you, Norm, but that's not relevant to this discussion. Before I got it I thought it was about a guy, or a family, fishing. I couldn't have been more misguided. Still, easily the best book I read in 2012.

In any case, there's a post here. I remembered the other night that Flanagan has his chapters each revolve around his main character's painting of a specific fish, about how that fish represents one of the weirdos he's met on his prison island, and about how he breaks down the sections of the chapters: he uses Roman numerals. That was the one thing I wanted to take another glance at: the Roman numeral breakdowns. I remembered that in my own book, Robot Crickets, in the last section I used Roman numerals as well for the sectional demarcations. It wasn't apparent at the time for me that it was in direct homage to Flanagan, but it would now be hard to argue that it wan't.

I noticed that I had used periods at the end of the numerals, and when I opened up Gould's... I saw he hadn't. But then I noticed something weird about the random pages that I opened each book to:

I'm not sure if it's easily seen here, but both pages have, on the left side, section VIII, and on the right side, section IX. In Gould's..., this is the page 200-01 spread, in chapter Leatherjacket (since each chapter is named for one of the twelve fish Gould paints, the numbers assigned to those chapters come from the reader, meaning this is chapter 5). In Robot Crickets, this is the page 82-3 spread, when the two tiny aliens Silde and Nafil and readying the meatball.

So, like the title of this post says, I'm not sure this means anything. Just one of those random moments...