Piblokto Madness

The Piblokto Madness bed, Inchmale called it. “Intense hysteria,” she recited now, from memory, “depression, coprophagia, insensitivity to cold, echolalia.”
- William Gibson, Zero History (2010)

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Something. Day after day you watch the sun rise in the east, pass across the sky, then sink in the west, and something breaks inside you and dies. You throw your plough aside and, your head completely empty of thought, you begin walking toward the west. Heading toward a land that lies west of the sun. Like someone possessed, you walk on, day after day, not eating or drinking, until you collapse on the ground and die. That’s hysteria siberiana.”

I tried to conjure up the picture of a Siberian farmer lying dead on the ground.

- Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun (1999)

According to Wikipedia, Piblokto Madness and Hysteria siberiana are the same disorder. If you Google hysteria siberiana all you get is references to Murakami and the Wikipedia article identifying it as Piblokto. I'm going to take a guess here and say Gibson did exactly what I did - read about this strange disorder in Murakami's book, Googled it, and then started reading about Piblokto. Then he went on to write a really good book in which includes this strange disorder, something I didn't do. 

Gibson is fascinated by Japan and Japanese culture. He has written some pretty good essays on Japan, collected in 2012's Distrust That Particular Flavor. It includes pieces on Beat Takeshi, Hikaru Dorodango (shiny balls of mud), Japanese culture in the late 20th Century, and his experience of Tokyo. I can't recall Gibson writing specifically about Murakami but I wouldn't be surprised if he was a fan. 

I like Murakami too. I don't know many people who know of Murakami and don't like his work. I think many of them would be hard pressed to say why they liked it. I know I have trouble articulating the reasons. It is easier to articulate what is wrong with Murakami's work - the books are too similar, they have no clear meaning and often lack conclusions, they are sometimes (like 1Q84) about 1000 pages too long. 

I taught A Wild Sheep Chase and was forced to admit I had no idea what anything in the book meant, I just really liked it. The students and I decided to attack the book by making a list of things we didn't understand and then spent three hours trying to connect them. The clearest conclusion anyone managed was the student who offered the opinion the book itself was the wild sheep chase. I thought the class was a disaster but when I asked them at the end of the term, that class was the clear favorite of the majority of students. 

If I was forced (as I am here forcing myself) to explain why I like Murakami so much, I would say it has something to do with Hikaru Dorodango. Here is an example:

 

There are instructions available online if you wish to make your own shiny mud ball but be forewarned, the process is time consuming. These objects are the result of an obsession. And I think Murakami's work is obsessional as well - he is reworking his own life, over and over. His obsession is with those parts of his life that lack a coherent narrative. How, for instance, does a person fall in love? This is an enormously important event in an individual's life! So why do we insist it just happens - as if it was the most mundane occurrence.

Murakami's protagonists face the world in all its complexity. They are frequently amazed how much of their lives just happens. They are sometimes treated to a glimpse of the mechanisms by which things just happen. And the reader is sometimes provided with the characters' incomplete attempts to explain their own lives. Which makes Murakami a bitch to read - how much is really happening (should the reader interpret as actually occurring to the character), how much is the character's imaginings, when are bizarre events real, when are they just (?) the characters imagination, when is Murakami (as author) leading the reader astray? 

 

Despite the odd events in many Murakami books (Sheepman, for example) I take his work to be almost exclusively interested in, and dedicated to, "real" life. That is, life as it occurs not just to Murakami or his characters but to all of us. And I take the inclusion of magical elements as a reminder (or possibly an admonition) that life is magical - not in the fake-guru "listen to your heartbeat" bullshit magic way but in the sense of massive complexity and continuous random events producing a world we can nevertheless navigate, all the while maintaining an internal monologue that is neither real nor unreal. It might not be magic literally (not like making a bird fly out of your sleeve). That something so incomprehensibly bizarre in every detail should produce something marginally comprehensible in toto is magical. That is what I find in Murakami's work and why I only read it when I am relatively certain of the ground under my feet.