The African woman in the apartment next to me

I finished Kafka on the Beach, the novel by Haruki Murakami. The plot was similar to The Wind-up Bird Chronicles but much better done. I am happy to recommend both books to those of you who like to read fiction. Murakami’s stories contain a lot of mystery and magic. His characters are always interesting and sometimes memorable. He is comfortable weaving elements of music appreciation, philosophy and explicit sex into the story. And he is very easy to read. The books are real page-turners, literary metaphysical thrillers that capture and hold your interest. If I had to write the blurb, I’d say he is a “post-modern Garcia-Marquez” or a “New World Garcia-Marquez” or perhaps a “New Wave Garcia-Marquez.” Though I wouldn’t go so far as to describe him as “the Johnny Rotten of Garcia-Marquezish Japanese fiction." Hell, I wouldn’t even describe his fiction as Japanese, but the Garcia-Marquez bit has to be there with some adjective. You simply must use "Garcia-Marquez" if you're going to describe Murakami in a blurb.

I also got my complete collection of Studio Ghibli movies and have already watched a couple of them. I’m thinking I might forgo blogging about them here and write a sixteen-part philosophical treatise based on them instead. Yea, that could paralyze me for years. Just my kind of writing project.

But thinking about the previous post in which I wrote about ghosts and spirits in Japanese fiction, I realized that even though I mentioned Mishima and Oshima, their work is not riddled with Ghosts like Murakami or Hayao Miyazaki. Oshima’s Empire of Passion is a ghost story, but that’s the only one I know. Of course they have both done a lot of work that’s unfamiliar to me, but that which I know is very human in a modern way. They are a long way from the spirits of the forests.

And I was just joking about the Japanese woman in the apartment below mine. Her bedroom is not really directly below ours, it is a couple rooms to the northeast. I confess, it was just more dramatic putting her directly below. And there’s an African woman in the apartment next to me who’s dreams mingle much more with mine. But there’s no drama in that, at least not in the context of Japanese literary and cinematic artists.

You know I am a materialist in the philosophical sense. I don’t believe that anything exists except matter. I don’t believe in gods or ghosts or spirits of the forest. I understand that on a universal scale, regarding both time and space, our lives, and even our species, are no more significant than ants. And if it makes no sense for ants to have an afterlife, then it makes no sense for us either.

But like so many, I have the ability to maintain contradictory beliefs. It’s all well and good that I don’t believe in ghosts, yet I have seen so many of them. How do I reconcile those two facts? I know it sounds cliché, but I suspect drugs were responsible, or more accurately, herbal concoctions. But I’m not sure. There are other possible explanations.

It was like this. Many years ago I began seeing ghosts when I was deep into a journey into a deep, dark nowhere place. We had already seen so many things that had the psychological and emotional impact of a hard punch in the gut or a savage whack on the back of the neck with a blunt instrument that suddenly seeing ghosts was not particularly noteworthy. We had watched starving children standing naked in the sand with horribly distended bellies. Even though we’ve seen that in pictures so many times, it’s hard to reconcile when you actually see them in the flesh. I remember thinking, maybe they’re just fat? And worse than that, I was surrounded in a market by about twenty horribly deformed children pushing themselves on little boards with rollers. Some were missing limbs, most were twisted in excruciatingly abnormal positions, their faces and bodies skeletal. And get this. I saw a man put a straight razor in his eye. I could see the blade slide across the white of his eye, almost feel the white of his eye wrap around it, and see the eye pop back to normal when he pulled it out. That will put you in a different head space. You better believe it. And there was a lot more, though not quite so dramatic.

Anyway, to make a long story short, we were in a border town at the edge of two distinct worlds, both of them very strange, to buy cheap gas and we bought some weird dope as well. I don’t remember the details well enough to describe how we felt. It was marijuana, but it seemed there was something else in it as well. Probably some kinda witch doctor shit. Even the old man felt it, probably from the second hand smoke. We were weirded out, all three of us, for at least a month after that, probably more like a year.

The next night we went off road to find somewhere to sleep. We ended up in the middle of a rock strewn dirt field where there were a lot of little rock mounds, kind of like the moon if it were one hundred degrees and humid on the moon. Anyway, that was the first night I saw ghosts. I woke up and they were huddled in the floor of the van. They weren’t wavy or glowing or anything like you see in the movies. They were very real people who were just barely distinct from the shadows. But distinct they were. I could see their every feature, their steady breathing, even the fabric of their clothes. I actually have some corroboration on this. The old man woke up and saw me sitting up. We had a little conversation in which I told him that there were people in the van. He was startled at first, but then laughed and said I was talking in my sleep. But I was wasn’t. I was awake. We both remembered the conversation the next morning.

And I know this makes the whole thing sound hokey, but when it was light and we got out of the van, we realized we were parked in a graveyard. And the footprints of 10 or fifteen people trampled the dust around the van. I know that all sounds pretty dramatic, but by that point in the trip, it was just another thing. And I continued seeing ghosts off and on for the rest of the journey, which lasted another month. It was interesting seeing the ghosts, but there were no revelations or anything profound. At first I’d stay awake and study them, but after awhile I’d just go back to sleep after studying their features for a few minutes. I haven’t seen any ghosts since getting back to Europe.

So like I said, I’m a materialist and think it was most likely some combination of the psychic toll of all the weirdness and human suffering we witnessed and some kind of witch doctor shit mixed up with the dope, but another part of me, the non-materialist part, considers another explanation.

I’d gone into the whole thing ignorant, but I’ve studied it quite a bit since. The people in those places live in a ghost and spirit infested world. Nothing ever happens by chance and nobody ever dies of natural causes. And it was very far from what we know as civilization. Most places didn’t even have electricity. Perhaps different places on earth have different characteristics, especially outside the bustle of modern civilization. Perhaps in those countries some shade of those who suffer horribly and die hang around for awhile. I never saw any happy ghosts. They all seemed grimly resigned to their fate. The African woman in the apartment next to me used to know all this. She still does if she thinks back, but for the most part civilization has chased away her ghosts and spirits, just as it has ours.

And maybe Japan is one of those places on earth that is eminently habitable for the sprit world. We think of Japan as a place of big modern cities, but actually 90 percent of the land is mountain wilderness. The forest is a major character in all three of the artists I’ve been writing about -- Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Murakami, and Miyazaki. Maybe they just know something we’ve forgotten. Don't get me wrong, I don’t believe for a minute in the supernatural, but it’s always possible that there’s a lot of natural we have yet to discover.

Yes, but more likely they just use the local collective unconscious to make art that affects us. Most everyone likes watching a good ghost story in which it's difficult to tell what's imagination and what's reality. Telling that kind of story can be fun as well.