Insomnia captured by Murakami

I’ve only just discovered Haruki Murakami, thanks to a very good friend who bought me The Elephant Vanishes. Thank goodness it’s short stories rather than novel length because I need to cogitate on Murakami. I need to engage with him in slow, small chunks so that I can explore the fragments at my leisure. His is not a style to simply skim for plot and turn the page. It’s not that it’s particularly dense or erudite. But it’s left of centre. His writing is … a bit skewy. I understand the words, the characters, the situations, the urban landscape (mostly). But there’s always a sense of the off-beat. At first I thought maybe this slight dislocation came from being a translation, but I that doesn’t explain it because it’s not just the words and phrasing. His stories in The Elephant Vanishes seem of our world, but our world refracted.

I’m probably overstating this, as I can’t quite explain it. Yet. All I wanted to do, really, was share an excerpt that beautifully captured my own experience during bouts of insomnia. Captured it but shone it back to me through a dark prism.

“Finally, as the sky began to grow light in the morning, I’d feel that I might be drifting off. But that wasn’t sleep. My fingertips were just barely brushing against the outermost edge of sleep. And all the while, my mind was wide awake. I would feel a hint of drowsiness, but my mind was there, in its own room, on the other side of a transparent wall, watching me. My physical self was drifting through the feeble morning light, and all the while it could feel my mind staring, breathing, close beside it. I was both a body on the verge of sleep and a mind determined to stay awake.

“This incomplete drowsiness would continue on and off all day. My head was always foggy. I couldn’t get an accurate fix on the things around me – their distance or mass or texture. The drowsiness would overtake me at regular, wavelike intervals: on the subway, in the classroom, at the dinner table. My mind would slip away from my body. The world would sway soundlessly. I would drop things. My pencil or my purse or my fork would clatter to the floor. All I wanted was to throw myself down and sleep. But I couldn’t. The wakefulness was always there beside me. I could feel its chilling shadow. It was the shadow of myself … No one in my family, not one of my friends or classmates, realized that I was going through life asleep.

“It was literally true: I was going through life asleep. My body had no more feeling than a drowned corpse. My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think that my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. Hold tight, I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to.

“And then, when night came, the intense wakefulness would return. I was powerless to resist it. I was locked in its core by an enormous force. All I could do was stay awake until morning, eyes wide open in the dark. I couldn’t even think. As I lay there, listening to the clock tick off the seconds, I did nothing but stare at the darkness as it slowly deepened and slowly diminished.”

Ironically, the title of this short story is ‘Sleep’.