Teaching English with "A Shinagawa Monkey" : in search of Haruki Murakami
"I do steal people's names...In doing so I'm able to remove some of the negative elements that stick to those names. I don't mean to boast but if I'd been able to to steal Yuko Matsunaka's name back then, she may very well not have taken her life...I might have taken away some of the darkness that was hidden inside her," the monkey said. "Take her darkness, along with her name, back to the world underground."
"When you steal names you take on both the good and the bad?"
"Yes, that's right," the monkey said. "I have no choice. If there are evil things included in them, we monkeys have to accept those, too...I beg you, don't kill me. I'm a monkey with an awful habit, I know that, but I may be performing a useful service."
-excerpts from A Shinagawa Monkey, a short story by Haruki Murakami
A monkey (who can talk) lives in the Tokyo sewers and re-surfaces to steal name tags...
Murakami writes many a hard-boiled story, with elements of old detective novels, even if this time, it's a monkey, not a man, who is tied up and interrogated by tough guys who speak in comical almost-Forties film dialogue. Some really ordinary-seeming guy, or gal, is drawn into a detective mystery genre that merges into a journey into the sub-conscious, a surrealist's history, occasionally verging on science fiction, a layer-cake of confusion, Murakami-style... I never feel I know what he's saying, but almost always, I think I know what he is saying.
A regular gal, Mizuki Ozawa Ando, starts to forget her name. She has no other memory problems. It gets so bad, she has to wear a name bracelet, which she affects to glance at casually when someone asks her name.
She sees a therapist for this issue, an ordinary-looking woman named Tetsuko Sakaki, who seems to have extraordinary connections, if not powers. Tetsuko brings Mizuki underground, quite literally into the sewer system, where Tetsuko's henchmen have located the monkey who steals names. Shinagawa is not a variety of primate, it is a Tokyo district. The monkey reveals what he knows about Mizuki in taking her name. He knows and reveals more of her sub-conscious to her than years and thousands of dollars of therapy...
And now to go off on another tangent, or finally, to get to the point...
This story is part of a little trip to, or a whole life in Thailand, where I discovered it in the huge Kinokuniya bookstore in Siam Paragon, Bangkok. It is part of a series of short stories called Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, by Murakami. I used this story to teach English in private tutoring classes in Bangkok. It never failed to amuse people. Japanese people, Korean, Thai, and of all ages.
Amuse people? With a monkey's obssession for a young woman who commits suicide?
The word "amuse" may appear wrong in this context, but Murakami is really not the "Yukio Mishima*-unrelenting despair" type. There is a lightness and humor throughout the story mixed with the extraordinary mundaneness of Mizuki's life before she meets a primate who psychologizes her in answer to third-degree interrogation by muscular toughs.
In Bangkok, I met a lot of Japanese people, like Teppei, one of my students who had never read Murakami in it's original language Japanese due to the difficulty of reading Kanji. Certain words can only be written in Kanji, which is much more complex than the Japanese alphabets. This can be discouraging to the Japanese in terms of reading, or at least in terms of reading the work of authors with more complex vocabulary. I never appreciated what an advantage I have in not being compelled to memorize thousands of complex characters. My Japanese friends were astounded not only to witness my reading of Murakami novels in English and French. I had to explain that, frankly, in French, if you aren't familiar with the words, you can guess their meaning. (And I have read those same novels in English first, anyway) A lot of French words have similar roots to English, and at one time, I once read that that Channel used to be a lot shallower, making those two countries almost, I say practically one country. I learned to read French in grade school, when I was a geeky little kid with thick glasses, when I had no life and a lot more time and energy to learn tedious grammar. I could not be forced to do that now, even if tied up and threatened in an underground basement, like a Shinagawa monkey.
My student, Teppei, aged twenty-two, was so taken by Murakami, in English, that he wrote to me about the author after returning to Japan. Teppei, who confessed when we first met, to avoiding reading books altogether, began to read Murakami in both languages, and also began to really enjoy reading different authors, period.
I adored my Thai students, especially the two doctors in the Renal Medicine Department of Chulalangkorn Hospital. I tried to put them down as a reference in a C.V. and people thought I was joking. Dr. Ussanee, a lovely young woman, and Dr. Chen, a Thai of chinese origin. We spent hours saying things like, "A woman's right to choose her shoes**", in an effort to motivate Ussanee to pronounce the "ch" in "choose". Many Thai people, in fact, many people throughout the world cannot make this sound. The result of this shortcoming sounds something like, "shoo-es her shoes".
Teaching pronunciation is a physical act. I learn how to explain something that I have done all my life without a thought. Think it over. To make the "chh--" sound, you put the tongue firmly at the back of the top set of teeth to start and then you back away quickly from the teeth. "Shh---" is more relaxed, the tongue loosely placed behind both sets of teeth.
The French pronounce my last name, Cho, as the French word for "hot", "chaud". The combination of having "hot" as a last name, and a foreign, more "exotic" first name makes me sound like a pornstar. I try to move quickly when they call my name in a doctor's waiting room, I try not to let people have time to digest what they have heard. Madame Hot, the doctor is ready to see you now.
"Yukio Mishima*-unrelenting despair" : this is a remark that is not meant all together to be completely serious. However, young people do commit suicide in at least on of his novels, i.e. Spring Snow. His novels written in a language of exquisite beauty, and with compelling insight into human behavior and presented consistently without a trace of humor in sight.
"A woman's right to choose her shoes**" : I took this from a an episode of Sex and the City, where a character on the show feels "judged" for owning four hundred dollar Manolo Blahnik shoes. I knew Ussanee would like that since, half the time, she wanted to motivate us to read fashion magazines with her, to improve her English.