Emotional Management System by Murakami

One concept that is popular today is the concept of “Zen.”  We are encouraged to be mindful, live with intention, and center ourselves.  It is fascinating to study what “zen” means because it seems to have many nuances.  One of its elements is to get out of one’s mind.  In other words, stop thinking about what it all means.  The Urban Dictionary describes it as “a way of being. It also is a state of mind. Zen involves dropping illusion and seeing things without distortion created by your own thoughts.”   http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=zen

The last concept is of interest here. Recognize illusion and see things as they really are.  The illusions of one’s own life grow while processing life events and encounters in the context of feelings about self.

Haruki Murakami is a popular Japanese writer whose work is poetic and reflective.  In the novel, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, his narrator describes how he handles the emotional distress of contact with unpleasant people. He is able to uncouple the emotions others elicit and set aside an encounter for later consideration.  It strikes me as one example of “zen” as defined above.

Toru Okada is unemployed with a failing marriage, trying to figure out what to do next.  He is a bit lost and strange people keep entering his life.  Like a high school aged girl who persuades him to accompany her one day to work for a wig manufacturer.  He helps her record the number and type of bald men on the street near a subway entrance.  A typical day for Toru as he waits to discover what he is supposed to do next with his life.

Reflecting on how he handles people in his life he muses:

A person may anger or annoy me, but not for long.  I can distinguish between myself and another as beings of two different realms. It’s a kind of talent (by which I do not mean to boast: it’s not an easy thing to do, so if you can do it, it is a kind of a talent – a special power).  When someone gets on my nerves, the first thing I do is transfer the object of my unpleasant feelings to another domain, one having no connection with me.  Then I tell myself, Fine, I’m feeling bad, but I’ve put the source of these feelings into another zone, away from here, where I can examine it later in my own good time.  In other words, I put a freeze on my emotions.  Later when I thaw them out to perform the examination, I do occasionally find my emotions still in a distressed state, but that is rare.  The passage of time will usually extract the venom from most things and render them harmless.  Then, sooner or later, I forget about them.

He takes some pride in this “emotional management system” as it keeps his world in a “relatively stable state by avoiding useless troubles.” 

What an ideal system for dealing with the frustrations of life.  But it is not perfect for Toru and he goes on to admit how it will not function in regard to his brother-in-law, Noboru Wataya.  He

knew what kind of man he was [a famous author and media personality].  And he had a pretty good idea of what made me tick as well.  If he had felt like it, he could have crushed me until there was nothing left.  The only reason he hadn’t is that he didn’t give a damn about me.  I wasn’t worth the time and energy it would have taken to crush me.

How much could he despise his brother-in-law?  Toru had set up a lunch meeting with Noboru to inform him of his devotion to his sister, Kumiko , whom Toru then announced he planned to marry.  Noboru said nothing during the entire lunch and then at the end could only say,

To tell you the truth, I can neither understand nor care about what you have been telling me…  To state my conclusion as concisely as possible, if you wish to marry Kumiko and she wants to marry you, I have neither the right nor any reason to stand in your way… But don’t expect anything further from me, either.

An emotional management system is strained and may fail when the stress is effective in threatening one’s sense of self-worth.  Toru always felt as if Noboru Wataya lay just around the corner in the the known world.

Ok, let’s face it.  [He] hated the guy.

From Murakami, H. (1977). The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. New York, NY: Vintage Books.