Hear the Wind Sing

1. Hear the Wind Sing is Haruki Murakami's first novel, and, even if the only edition available is the one published by Kodansha in 1987, it is crucial to understand the development of Murakami's fiction for here he introduced the themes that would attract readers around the world in his later novels: mortality, isolation, disappearance. This novel is also considered as the first book in his Trilogy of the Rat that will continue with Pinball, 1973 (also not widely distributed in English) and end with A Wildsheep Chase.

Here was the voice of an I, who was mute until he was fourteen and would interest seemingly disturbed women, just like the woman who only had four fingers on her left hand. There were also suggestions that he was a student-activist (protest rallies, student strikes) , but notice how he relegated this part of himself into the background, as if it was not that important, but later, on a different issue, he would tell the woman with only four fingers on her left had that he was "always forgetting to say whatever's most important," anyway.

2. This slim novel is a testament on writing; the narrator acknowledges it as a novel, and that he wrote these pages while having himself spurred on with beer and cigarettes. Although early on he recognizes that "there is no such thing as perfect writing," he later claims that "at least this writing is my present best."

Murakami created a fictional Derek Heartfield as his narrator's model, "one of those few writers distinguished by an ability to put up a good fight with words." Our narrator would quote from Heartfield's equally fictive works, and this one he said about good writing: "The task of writing consists primarily in recognizing the distance between oneself and the things around one. It is not sensitivity one needs, but a yardstick." Heartfield, who killed himself by jumping off the Empire State Building, was an American--and it probably contributed to early criticisms against Murakami's being too westernized. There's "nothing of value in living authors," and so aside from Heartfield's he would intensively read Flaubert's Sentimental Education, and others, despite a radio dj's warning that reading only isolates a person.

3. It is difficult to create true art when you experience hunger, he thought. "If it's art or literature you're looking for, you'd do well to read what the Greeks wrote. In order for there to be true art, there necessarily has to be slavery." And so this is also somewhat a critique on the production of art as work against the labor that is demanded by a capitalist economy.

Our narrator would be friends with The Rat, a rich guy his age who hated the rich. The Rat was "horribly unread," until he decided to "write a completely different kind of novel," which has no sex and no one will have to die. The Rat began reading Henry James, Moliere, Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ, and dreamed of writing "for the cicadas and frogs and spiders, and for the summer grass and the breeze." But he couldn't write a thing--not one line. Until our narrator would leave the town to go to Tokyo, and would receive a manuscript of The Rat's novel every Christmas, with this dedication (because his birthday's December 24): Happy Bithday and White Christmas--reported to be the initial title of this novel.

~ After Haruki Murakami's Hear the Wind Sing (1979)

Lapu-Lapu

1. Originally published in Pilipino Komiks from November 1953 to September 1954, Francisco V. Coching's Lapu-Lapu is a 25-part komiks serial that was reissued in book form by Atlas Publishing in 2009. This is the first graphic novel to be featured here in Atisan Novels. For illustrated novels such as this I will only comment largely on their literary aspect: the use of language to depict beauty, narrative and meaning; its visual aspect I will leave to more qualified critics and practitioners of that particular art.

2. Lapu-Lapu is of course considered the earliest Filipino hero, even before there were Filipinos in the islands not even collectively called the Philippines yet. Filipinos were taught this in early school--that Lapu-Lapu fought against, and eventually killed, the man who claimed to have first voyaged around the world, Ferdinand Magellan. Only much later would students learn, if they were lucky enough, that the source of his heroism was an account by Magellan's chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta. This travel account called Primo Viaggio Intorno al Mondo could be Coching's main source of most historical details in his narrative. These precolonial events we also read in later history textbooks, of course, although rendered in ways less dramatic and descriptive.

Coching's contribution lies in his own imagination of Lapu-Lapu's life outside Pigafetta's gaze. Here Lapu-Lapu had a strong huntress and Sultana, Miraha, for a beloved, and he had to fight against Datu Rahab and the Chinese Kim Long in order to win her hand in marriage, even if he already had her heart secured. His younger sister was Yumina, who fell in love with Arturo, a member of Magellan's fleet. Enrique, Magellan's translator, who considered Lapu-Lapu and his men as his own people, also figured heavily in the narrative. The story was inevitably romantic; it was a hero's story, after all. The story had to end in Lapu-Lapu's success in battle, for why spoil his victory with our privileged knowledge of how things would eventually turn out, only a few decades later, after Legazpi successfully established a colonial system in the islands? Novels have the luxury of a happy ending, of an end, at least.

3. The editor of Atlas admitted that Lapu-Lapu was one of the titles they chose to reissue because "it was part of our history." It was indeed a good marketing choice: I imagine teachers requiring their students (in grade school, and maybe even high school) to read this novel in order to get a glimpse of Lapu-Lapu's life despite the text's obvious fictionality. Jose Rizal, with his novels Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo and the eventual mass production of their komiks translations, set the tone toward this mass confusion between history and fiction. Meanwhile I look forward to other komiks novels from Atlas.

~ After Francisco V. Coching's Lapu-Lapu (1953-54)

The Judgment

1. The Judgment is Chart Korbjitti's study of the complicity of communal opinion and traditional sense of normalcy in the destruction of an otherwise virtuous young man. The young man was Fak, who was rumored to take his mentally ill stepmother, Somsong, as wife after the death of his father Foo. Gossip directs the formation of extended narratives, and, interestingly, of actual lives: Fak became an alcoholic in a misguided attempt to avoid the people's judgment. This led to his ultimate ruin.

Meanwhile the people who spread the rumors had their own lives to think about, and Fak's scandal was only something in the periphery of their concerns, without realizing that the stories that only help them pass time was the root of someone else's tragedy.

2. Korbjitti exposed religion's central role in the formation of morality and its paradoxical difficulty in maintaining such morals for its own subjects. Fak's childhood revolved around the temple and "was filled with the smell of incense, the sound of chanting and the sight of the heavens and hells of Buddhist mythology." He was a model boy even before he became a novice. But when he disrobed to help his father with work, the abbot reminded him that "the world of man moves between extremes ... and lacks the serenity of religious life."

Fak would miss the insinuations that "teahouse" (as brothel) and "having rice soup for lunch" (as making love) suggest; it revealed how much he misunderstood the "world of man's" play with signifiers, which was consequently detrimental to his attempts to build true relationship with people. He trusted the headmaster of the school where he served as janitor, only to be betrayed in the end; he initially doubted the sincerity of Khai the undertaker, only to realize later that the old man was the only real friend he had. Fak tried to make work the source of his happiness, but there was an ironic commentary on his further dehumanization whenever he did.

3. There was also a critique on progress: while the village was being modernized (with the construction of road leading to the city, the arrival of electricity and various appliances with it), the people remained the same with their old beliefs and biases, except, of course, for Fak. In a narrative such as this, change seems a privilege exclusive to its hero. In the end Fak had to die, and his death only meant that he was no longer allowed knowledge of things and events in this world of man, for better or worse.

~ After Chart Korbjitti's The Judgment (1981)