Tangerines all the way down
Barn Burning, by Haruki Murakami
I
My favorite short story is Barn Burning by Haruki Murakami. Let me tell you about it.
The narrator of Barn Burning is a writer who meets a girl at a wedding. They strike up an ambiguous friendship, meeting once or twice a month to eat and talk about whatever is on their mind. She goes on a trip to North Africa for three months and returns with a new boyfriend, a mysterious young man who never seems to work, but has plenty of money. One day, while they smoke weed and listen to music together, the boyfriend opens up to the narrator about his unusual hobby: he likes to burn down barns. He goes on to say that he has found the next barn he wants to burn, that it is very close to the narrator, and that it’s been a long time since he found a barn so well worth burning.
Shortly afterwards, the girl goes missing, and stops returning the narrator’s calls. Months later, he runs into the boyfriend in a coffee shop. He asks whether the boyfriend ever burned the barn he was talking about, and mentions that all the barns near his house are still standing. The boyfriend is amused, and tells him that he must have missed it. He reminds the narrator that the girl is still missing, before taking his leave.
I discovered Barn Burning after watching a spectacular movie based on it, Burning by Lee Chang-dong. I didn’t expect to enjoy Murakami’s story after already knowing the whole plot. But I’ve since read it and reread it dozens of times. It has no surprises for me. Every time I read it, I feel the dread and confusion I felt when I first read it. It’s the kind of horror story that fits with my particular fears.
II
Barn Burning has quite a minimalist plot. There are only three characters, and essentially two events in the whole story. But these three characters represent so much, which is part of what makes the story so powerful.
The girl is our vision of goodness. The narrator remarks that she sees people for who they really are, rather than for their superficial characteristics. This puts her in the unfortunate position that is often assigned to women in a Murakami story, as the person to whom s-t-o-r-y must happen.1
The boyfriend is our embodiment of evil. Even before the revelation that he burns barns, we can tell that something is off about him. He seemingly has plenty of money without working, he coolly talks about world events, and we never learn why he was travelling around North Africa when he met the girl. When he talks about burning barns, he does so with a benign malevolence, remarking that he only accepts things that are already ready to be burnt, like the rain washing them away. Murakami even makes his ordinary tics, like scratching his beard or snapping his fingers, into unsettling actions.
Finally, the narrator is our neutral observer. All we know about him is that he is a writer, professionally competent, well-adjusted and informed about the world. Throughout the story, he takes no actions, and expresses no preferences. This witnessing quality is why the girl trusts him, and it is also what leads the boyfriend to open up to him about burning barns. Our narrator is a blank slate for both the girl and the boyfriend.
For what it’s worth, there’s no doubt in my mind that the boyfriend killed the girl, and that “burning barns” is his euphemism for murder. (Perhaps it’s even an honest description of what he sees himself doing, which most of us would call serial murder.) I don’t arrive at this conclusion because of any factual clues in the story – when you get down to it, all that happened is that the girl disappeared. That doesn’t mean anything bad happened to her. No, I arrive at this conclusion because the story that emerges from that ending is much more interesting than if she simply moved away to start her life from scratch. Let me outline what I think that story is.
With these three characters as his canvas, Murakami sets out to tell the story he wants to tell – about how we live in a fragile, carefully-maintained reality. He sets this up from the start when the girl demonstrates to the narrator a technique she learned from mime class, known as tangerine peeling.
On her left was a bowl piled high with tangerines; on her right, a bowl for the peels. At least that was the idea—actually there wasn’t anything there at all. She’d take an imaginary tangerine in her hand, slowly peel it, put one section in her mouth, and spit out the seeds. When she’d finished one tangerine, she’d wrap up all the seeds in the peel and deposit it in the bowl to her right. She repeated these movements over and over again. When you try to put it in words it doesn’t sound like anything special. But if you see it with your own eyes for ten or twenty minutes (we were just chatting at the bar, and, almost without thinking, she kept on performing it) gradually the sense of reality is sucked right out of everything around you. It’s a very strange feeling.
The narrator sees her pantomiming the peeling of a tangerine, and he is so taken by the image that he starts to feel like nothing is real. His first response after witnessing the tangerine peeling is to think of Adolf Eichmann on trial for war crimes! His reaction to the dissolution of reality is both relatable to me, and ironic given his trade as a writer. He dissolves reality for a living, but when it is done to him he feels a kind of primordial terror.
Perhaps he reacts this way because his own reality is a carefully maintained garden, and the boyfriend is a snake that has invaded. It happens first when he’s smoking weed with the boyfriend, and he recalls a school play where he was a villainous shop owner. It seems that being around this man is enough to make him feel the nature of evil. But then it happens more seriously, with the boyfriend’s declaration that he will soon burn down a barn that is very close to the narrator, and the girl’s subsequent disappearance. The facts of the story allow the narrator plausible deniability; he can pretend that the girl simply moved away without giving him her new contact information. And that is what he does, continuing to run past the barns every day without acknowledging their glaring presence.
Murakami’s stories often involve a passive narrator who simply observes what happens in his life without taking any steps to live in it. This is usually a source of suffering. In TV People, he tells the story of a man who sees mysterious men with TV heads walking around his home and his office. But he does nothing about it. Nor does he do anything about his crumbling marriage. Nor does he do anything about his shaky workplace relationships. The story ends with his wife leaving him, while he sits on his couch, unable to even reach for the ringing telephone.
In Not Knowing, Donald Barthelme says “the writer is someone who, embarking on a task, does not know what to do.” After all, writing is about constructing worlds in which action unfolds naturalistically, rather than according to the writer’s caprices. Perhaps Murakami’s narrator, as a writer, was doomed to observe reality instead of shaping it. That’s food for thought, to a writer who has not yet given up on the idea of shaping reality.
III
Tangerines have become my go-to metaphor for unreality. As the girl remarks, “What you do isn’t make yourself believe that there are tangerines there. You forget that the tangerines are not there.” When I sit on a bus scrolling Twitter while the sunset dazzles my world, it’s not because I decided that Twitter was more representative of reality than my physical world – it’s because I simply forgot that Twitter is not reality. When I see people comment on the latest viral article to get outraged at or the discourse of the day, I want to shake them and tell them the tangerines are not real.
But I only witness. It’s hypocritical for me, after all, to pretend that my own reality is securely fastened.
This past Halloween, I dressed up as Makima from Chainsaw Man. I put too much effort into my costume to reserve it for a couple of hours of partying, so I walked around Berkeley all day in costume. For most of that time, I felt like nothing was unusual; I checked my phone, drank my tea, and worked on my laptop like I normally would. But in the evening, as I started to really see that I was in costume, I felt a change stealing over me. I started to walk like Makima, to adopt her amused resting face, to clasp my hands behind my back like her. I haven’t cosplayed seriously since 2013, and I’ve never done a genderbent cosplay before. The red hair framed my vision like a video game HUD. I remembered what it was like to slip into someone else’s skin. I wished I had picked a less creepy character to be.
Last year I played Disco Elysium, a game in which you play as an alcoholic amnesiac detective who is trying to solve a murder case while also recreating his personality. Disco Elysium is a roleplaying game, meaning that almost all of the fun comes from picking what kind of character you want to be. I could be a hedonist who parties on, oblivious of all the people he’s hurt. I could be an unrepentant egotist who boasts of the lack of judgment for his sins. I could bury my personal failures in a political project, whether it’s communism or fascism or neoliberalism. I have all of these options, in Disco Elysium and in life. But I only played Disco Elysium once, and I played my true dominant self – in the story, that made me a straightforward guy who acknowledges and tries to amend his mistakes, but moves forward without dwelling too much on them. I started a second playthrough multiple times, but I couldn’t bring myself to do anything else. I was too attached to doing only what I would do in my own life.
Of course, cosplaying a character or roleplaying them in a video game doesn’t actually make you that character. But I couldn’t peel tangerines for that long without forgetting that they aren’t real.
In the movie adaptation, Lee Chang-dong gives his female lead much more depth. All of the characters get much more characterization than they could get in a short story, but it’s especially welcome for her.