Crimea and Punishment

A friend of mine bought me a Murakami novel a couple of weeks ago. He came by to deliver it but I so rarely hear the bell downstairs or even answer the phone in my post-pandemic insulation.  It will take me a while to adjust to spontaneous door-knocking and full-frontal facial nudity.  While he didn't leave the book, in his honor I took another one from the good old NYPL.  I liked it-- until the end, that is.  Many writers have this issue with endings... like they fall in love with their characters and can't bear to leave... or they have multiple finishings... like a sort of round table discussion in their head, with the characters in triplicate, discussing.  And it hurts the book; a good story already has an ending. 

In this case, the characters sort of split off-- like they could see another version of their own reality... death and life coexisted-- the ending and the plot.    One of the women even had white hair and black hair, not that this is so unusual in our cosmetically facile culture.  After all of the credible reality and details Murakami set up, it just seemed like a cop-out.  A space ship comes down and airlifts someone... or you simply disappear, like one of those strange mysteries.  In our society, missing people haunt us; for the most part, like milk-carton children or even that Gabby Petito-- there is evil in the explanation. 

It was especially disappointing because I identified with the character. Hard to imagine Japanese girls being messy and badly groomed... on my visit there they were spectacularly put together... but it was part of her charm.  Murakami protagonists-- and narrators-- are often disarmingly direct and candid.  It seemed obvious to me that her disappearance was out of character and engineered by the author.  I prefer when the characters tell us writers what to do, lol.  Literary fate.

I am resisting the temptation to go off on one of my academically ingrained analysis-tangents.  Murakami can inspire this sort of thing... and every so often, despite the omnipresence of detail, there are these blurred adventures which step out into a sort of unlikely dream, or alternate reality.  For the realists and sleuths among us, this can be challenging and annoying.  But lately I have had these overpopulated dreams-- with plots and armies and characters and weather and animals;  they last for what seems like hours and bring me into a morning-after mental hangover.  Not unlike these novels. Waking I find some of the tragedies and losses of my imagination quite real.   

Even more than that, it forced me to think about perceived and actual realities, as manifested in the narrative of this horrid Ukranian war.  I don't pretend to understand the complexities of the disagreements and the difficult history of Crimea and its affiliation. As often in these territorial wars, the people inside the borders are not as cleanly delineated as the political boundaries.  But the main issue is the humanitarian crisis that has emerged.  And the manipulated distributed journalism in Russia is disturbing, unless we are misunderstanding entirely.  Lack of transparency, personal threats, imprisonment for opinions-- these are all qualities of a bullying and paranoid government.  While a solution seems near-impossible, it is unacceptable that innocent civilians pay the price of despotism and aggression.

Mysteries abound; people are missing, lost.  Families are divided and things have been left behind.  I have read Russian stories claiming they are rescuing Ukraine from Nazi forces.... they are liberating and protecting the people.  The POW soldiers insist a similar fiction has been their motivation.  Another story today accused the Ukrainians of inventing casualty statistics-- of  'staging' these photographs of the dead and wounded for effect.  How can these realities co-exist?  

Fake news... we are all-too well-acquainted with the term and the meaning.  The UK poet laureate used the term in his new official poem decrying the war.  'False news is news with the pity edited out,' he says, with maybe  a little intentional clumsiness... but I choose to continue to see it as news with the truth removed, and reality skewed or divided or manipulated.  Rather than 'Resistance' the poem seems to convey a sort of impotent spectator-ly dismay.  

Maybe acceptable in fiction, this lassitude of conviction and failure to convict... but with the reality of a war, the threat of annihilating a country... well, not nearly enough.  I'm not sure what is demanded of us here... perhaps if the theatre of conflict was closer to us, we'd be more active, more alarmed.  It seems discussion and talk have been dismissed;  how did we end up here, watching a hideous version of political failure become bloody and tragic history?  Why is war the chronic destroyer of peace?  Are there not enough problems without these absurd man-vs.-man killings in the name of some propagandistic principle?  

I think it's time we name a few additional sins.  The seven seem not nearly sufficient for what ails not just Eastern Europe but the global geo-political pandemic of greed.  I wonder how long it's been since Putin read Dostoevsky... a writer who understood endings.  And sin. At this moment in time repentance may seem a lot more appealing than conciliation.