Mohsin Hamid Reads Haruki Murakami

The New Yorker: Fiction - The New Yorker

In this episode of The New Yorker Fiction Podcast, author Mohsin Hamid reads and discusses Haruki Murakami's short story 'Man-Eating Cats,' originally

Key takeaways

• Murakami's stories often revisit motifs across different works, suggesting a deep, evolving creative process rather than isolated narratives.

Main topics

• The nature of reality in literature
• Literary repetition and thematic continuity across works

Notable quotes

"We fabricate our experience of reality. And writers that play with... that process have always interested me."

Conclusion

Hamid's reading and reflection on 'Man-Eating Cats' reveal how literature can serve as both

Transcript preview

Speaker 8 (0:04) The Speaker 2 (0:05) city moves fast, but your vibe, that's different. Sharper, smoother, more alive. Speaker 8 (0:15) The new Speaker 2 (0:20) Honda City isn't just made to drive, it's made to feel. The new Honda City, all new vibe. Speaker 3 (0:36) This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from The New Yorker magazine. I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker. Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss. This month we're going to hear Man Eating Cats by Haruki Murakami, which was translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel and appeared in The New Yorker in December of 2000. Speaker 4 (1:00) I suddenly felt as if I had vanished. It was the weirdest sensation. The person sitting on that plane was no longer me. My brain had mistakenly attached itself to some convenient packaging that looked like me. Speaker 3 (1:14) The story was chosen by Mohsin Hamid, who is the author of five novels, including Exit West, which appeared on the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list, and The Last White Man, which came out in 2022. Speaker 3 (1:28) Hi, Mohsin. Hi. So the last time you were here, you read a story by Jorge Luis Borges, and this time it's Murakami. I'm wondering if, for you, there's some kind of through line between the two of them or something similar about them that appeals to you, or if they appeal to completely different aspects of your reading life. Speaker 1 (1:48) I've always been, I think, attracted to writers who crack reality in some way. Speaker 1 (1:58) Whether that was, you know, the Speaker 6 (1:59) modernist writers of the early, mid-20th century, Borges and Calvino or, you know, Speaker 1 (2:07) Camus or Virginia Woolf, or more recent contemporary writers like Murakami, I think the world, as the neuroscientists are increasingly telling us, is not as real as we think. And, you know, we fabricate our experience of reality. And Speaker 6 (2:24) so writers that play with... that process have always interested me. Speaker 3 (2:30) I mean, it seems we're all in on this fabrication because we don't get confused by each other's reality very much. But I guess in both of these writers, there is an alternate reality that is confusing to us. Speaker 4 (2:45) Yeah, I think we are all in, Speaker 6 (2:47) as you say, and we don't get too confused by our own fabrications, although sometimes we may misunderstand them when speaking to each other. But I think it also, at this present moment, it sets us up for another kind of confusion, which is when we see words fabricated by machines, we can imagine those to also be a similar reality to the ones that we fabricate. But that's right. I think there's a creative process to articulating what it is to be human that we do through words, and that we sort of imagine that we're talking about things that are real. But in fact, we are constructing something. And writers like Murakami, like Borges, remind us of how we construct these things. Speaker 3 (3:28) So we've published more than 30 stories by Haruki Murakami and The New Yorker, I think. What is it about man-eating cats that most appealed to you? Speaker 1 (3:38) So this story is how I first encountered Murakami. And I think what attracted me to the story was, in a sense, the story around the story, or my story around the story. So I published... my own first novel, Maud's Smoke, in January of 2000. So Speaker 6 (3:57) when this story came out in the New Yorker, I had myself, in a way, just come out as a novelist and entered into a world. And back then, in a not pre-internet era, but let's say an early internet era, the way that one found out about book readings and talks is you'd open the New Yorker or the Village Voice or some publication, and in the New Yorker, there'd be these, you know, this... tiny snippets in the front saying so-and-so's be reading at KGB at 6 p.m. on Tuesday. And so there was a whole, I guess, printed world of being a writer that I was looking at and experiencing. And I'd heard of Murakami. Somebody had already, I think, recommended or perhaps gifted me a Murakami book at this point, but I'd never read Murakami. And so I read the story and I resolved to read Murakami. And instead of reading one of the books that was recommended or that I'd been given, I next went and bought a new book of his that came out, I think, a few months later or perhaps maybe in the same year. But around that time, which was Sputnik's Sweetheart. And so this story for me is a story of my own entrance into novelhood and into Murakami readership. Speaker 3 (5:09) And probably when you read Sputnik's Sweetheart, you were surprised to find some little pieces of man-eating cats in it. Speaker 1 (5:16) You know, I think Borges would have been very happy that Speaker 6 (5:20) Borges so often plays with how, you know, there's different editions and different versions and different texts. And this appearance of what looked like man-eating cats in Sputnik's Sweetheart, in some places it seemed almost verbatim. but yet in a different story, different concept, different structure. There was something about that, about the way in which Borges would often play with mirrors. And Murakami often has repeated motifs and themes that come up across his stories. But the process of writing is oftentimes the process of playing with an idea, sometimes across drafts, sometimes across one's entire writing career. And I think... encountering Murakami doing that, you know, live, so to speak, watching the process sort of happen right there in front of me with the story and then a novel that had echoes of the story. It felt like, I think, a very intimate experience. It felt like being inside a writer making their writing. Speaker 3 (6:23) When you first brought up this story, I couldn't remember if it had been an excerpt from the novel or... its own thing. So I asked Murakami, and it turned out that the story was written in Japanese in 1991, and Sputnik Sweetheart was written in the late 90s. But he said he didn't actually remember the details of his thinking, but he thought he might have written Sputnik Sweetheart with the intention of revisiting this story in some way. So obviously it has. many of the themes that continue to obsess him in it. Speaker 1 (7:02) Yeah, I think, I guess I've never met Murakami, but there have been certain encounters that have stayed with me. Speaker 6 (7:07) He had a wonderful interview in the Paris Review, that series where they do a very long interview with a writer. And I think it was in this interview that he spoke about writing as being like a process of mesmerism, that one has to mesmerize oneself to enter into this state where one can write. And that he would say that he said that, you know, he would wake up very early, right early in the day and then proceed upon some, you know, prodigious exercise routine of swimming and running and biking. He was, perhaps is, a marathoner and a triathlete. And then he would sort of listen to music and call it an early night. And that he would repeat this process every day in exactly the same way. and that this achieved a sort of mesmerism. He was mesmerizing himself to go into the place where he would write these novels, and he would emerge with a very large book after, you know, some months or years of doing this. That always stayed with me, partly because I've tended to write much smaller books and also have tended to follow not that process, but a process which was, you know, in some ways similar. And mine involved, you know, going for a walk. So I think if you write... these large Murakami books, you need the full triathlon experience. If you write small novels like I do, an hour or two strolls is probably enough. But I think this notion of entering into this other state, this other place, and of course, when one is in that place, ideas and thoughts and themes are moving around, and they're finding expression in different forms and different works that one creates. So it's not surprising that from Murakami's mesmerized writing state. something emerged in 1991 that would emerge in a different form a decade later. Speaker 3 (8:55) Well, we should talk more about that after we hear the story. And now here's Mohsin Hamid reading Man-Eating Cats by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel. Speaker 4 (9:10) Man-Eating Cats. Speaker 4 (9:13) I bought a newspaper at the harbor and came across an article about an old woman who had been eaten by cats. She was 70 years old and lived alone in a small suburb of Athens, a quiet sort of life, just her and her three cats in a small one-room apartment. One day, she suddenly keeled over face down on the sofa, a heart attack most likely. Nobody knew how long it had taken for her to die after she collapsed. The old woman didn't have any relatives or friends who visited her regularly, and it was a week before her body was discovered. The windows and the door were closed, and the cats were trapped. There wasn't any food in the apartment. Granted, there was probably something in the fridge, but cats haven't evolved to the point where they can open refrigerators. On the verge of starvation, they were forced to devour their owner's flesh. I read this article to Izumi, who was sitting across from me. On sunny days, we'd walk to the harbor, buy a copy of the Athens English-language newspaper, and order coffee at the cafe next door to the tax office, and I'd summarize in Japanese anything interesting I might come across. That was the extent of our daily schedule on the island. If something in a particular article caught our interest, we'd bat around opinions for a while. Izumi's English was pretty fluent, and she could easily have read the articles herself, but I never once saw her pick up a paper. I like to have someone read to me, she explained. It's been my dream ever since I was a child, to sit in a sunny place, gaze at the sky or the sea, and have someone read aloud to me. I don't care what they read, a newspaper, a textbook, a novel, it doesn't matter. But no one's ever read to me before. So I suppose that means you're making up for all those lost opportunities. Besides, I love your voice. We had the sky and the sea there all right, and I enjoyed reading aloud When I lived in Japan, I used to read picture books aloud to my son Reading aloud is different from just following sentences with your eyes Something quite unexpected wells up in your mind a kind of indefinable resonance that I find impossible to resist Taking the occasional sip of bitter coffee, I slowly read the article to Izumi. I'd read a few lines to myself, mull over how to put them into Japanese, then translate aloud. A few bees popped up from somewhere to lick the jam that a previous customer had spilled on the table. They spent a moment lapping it up, then, as if suddenly remembering something, flew into the air with a ceremonious buzz, circled the table a couple of times, and then... again as if something had jogged their memory, settled once more on the tabletop. After I had finished reading the whole article, Izumi sat there, unmoving, elbows resting on the table. She put the tips of the fingers of her right hand against those of her left to form a tent. I rested the paper on my lap and gazed at her slim hands. She looked at me through the spaces between her fingers. Then what happened? She asked. That's it, I replied, and folded up the paper. I took a handkerchief out of my pocket and wiped the flecks of coffee grounds off my lips. At least, that's all it says. But what happened to the cats? I stuffed the handkerchief back in my pocket. I have no idea. It doesn't say. Izumi pursed her lips to one side, her own little habit. Whenever she was about to give an opinion, which always took the form of a mini-declaration, she pursed her lips like that, as if she were yanking a bedsheet to smooth out a stray wrinkle. When I first met her, I found this habit quite charming. Newspapers are all the same no matter where you go, she finally announced. They never tell you what you really want to know. She took a Salem out of its box, put it in her mouth, and struck a match. Every day, she smoked one pack of Salem's, no more, no less. She'd open a new pack in the morning and smoke it up by the end of the day. I didn't smoke. My wife had made me quit five years earlier, when she was pregnant. What I really want to know, Izumi began, the smoke from her cigarette silently curling up into the air, is what happened to the cats afterward. Did the authorities kill them because they'd eaten human flesh? Or did they say, you guys have had a tough time of it. Give them a pat on the head and send them on their way? What do you think? I gazed at the bees hovering over the table and thought about it. For a fleeting instant, the restless little bees licking up the jam and the three cats devouring the old woman's flesh became one in my mind. A distant seagull's shrill squawk overlapped the buzzing of the bees. And for a second or two, my consciousness strayed on the border between reality and the unreal. Where was I? What was I doing here? I couldn't get a purchase on the situation. I took a deep breath, gazed up at the sky. and turned to Izumi. I have no idea. Think about it. If you were that town's mayor or chief of police, what would you do with those cats? How about putting them in an institution to reform them, I said. Turn them into vegetarians. Izumi didn't laugh. She took a drag on her cigarette and ever so slowly let out a stream of smoke. That story reminds me of a lecture I heard just after I started at my Catholic junior high school. Did I tell you I went to a very strict Catholic school? Just after the entrance ceremony, one of the head nuns had us all assemble in an auditorium, and then she went up to the podium and gave a talk about Catholic doctrine. She told us a lot of things, but what I remember most, actually the only thing I remember, is this story about being shipwrecked on a desert island with a cat. Sounds interesting, I said. You're in a shipwreck, she told us. The only ones who make it to the lifeboat are you and a cat. You land on some nameless desert island, and there's nothing there to eat. All you have is enough water and dry biscuits to sustain one person for about ten days. She said, all right, everyone, I'd like you to imagine yourselves in this situation. Close your eyes and try to picture it. You're alone on the desert island, just you and the cat. You have almost no food at all. Do you understand? You're hungry, thirsty, and eventually you'll die. What should you do? Should you share your meager store of food with the cat? No, you should not. That would be a mistake. You are all precious beings chosen by God. and the cat is not. That's why you should eat all the food yourself. The nun gave us this deadly serious look. I was a bit shocked. What could possibly be the point of telling a story like that to kids who just started at the school? I thought, whoa, what kind of place have I got myself into? Speaker 4 (16:33) Izumi and I were living in an efficiency apartment on a small Greek island. It was off-season, and the island wasn't exactly a tourist spot, so the rent was cheap. Neither of us had heard of the island before we got there. It lay near the border of Turkey, and on clear days, you could just make out the green Turkish mountains. On windy days, the locals joked, you could smell the shish kebab. All joking aside, our island was closer to the Turkish shore than to the next closest Greek island. And there, looming right before our eyes, was Asia Minor. In the town square, there was a statue of a hero of Greek independence. He had led an insurrection on the Greek mainland and planned an uprising against the Turks, who controlled the island then. But the Turks captured him and put him to death. They set up a sharpened stake in the square beside the harbor, stripped the hapless hero naked, and lowered him onto it. The weight of his body drove the stake through his anus, and then the rest of his body until it finally came out of his mouth. An incredibly slow, excruciating way to die. The statue was erected on the spot where this was supposed to have happened. When it was first built, it must have been impressive. But now, what with the sea, wind, dust, and seagull droppings, you could barely make out the man's features. The locals hardly gave the shabby statue a passing glance. And for his part, the hero looked as though he turned his back on the people, the island, the world. When Izumi and I sat at our outdoor cafe, drinking coffee or beer, aimlessly gazing at the boats in the harbor and at the far-off Turkish hills, we were sitting at the edge of Europe. The wind was the wind at the edge of the world. An inescapable retro color filled the place. It made me feel as if I were being quietly swallowed up by an alien reality, something foreign and just out of reach, vague yet strangely gentle. And the shadow of that substance colored the faces, the eyes, the skin of the people gathered in the harbor. At times, I couldn't grasp the fact that I was part of this scene. No matter how much I took in the scenery around me, no matter how much I breathed in the air, there was no organic connection between me and all this. Two months before, I had been living with my wife and our four-year-old son in a three-bedroom apartment in Unoki in Tokyo. Not a spacious place, just your basic functional apartment. My wife and I had our own bedroom, so did our son, and the remaining room served as my study. The apartment was quiet, with a nice view. On weekends, the three of us would take walks along the banks of the Tama River. In spring, the cherry trees by the river would blossom, and I'd put my son on the back of my bike, and we'd go off to watch the Tokyo Giants' Triple-A team in spring training. I worked at a medium-sized design company that specialized in book and magazine layouts. Calling me a designer makes it sound more interesting than it was, since the work was fairly cut and dried. Nothing flamboyant or imaginative. Most of the time, our schedule was a bit too hectic, and several times a month, I had to pull an all-nighter at the office. Some of the work bored me to tears. Still, I didn't mind the job, and the company was a relaxed place. Because I had seniority, I was able to pick and choose my assignments, and say pretty much whatever I wanted to. My boss was okay, and I got along with my co-workers, and the salary wasn't half bad. So if nothing had happened, I probably would have stayed with the company for the foreseeable future. And my life, like the Moldau River, or more precisely, the nameless water that makes up the Moldau River, would have continued to flow, ever so swiftly, into the sea. But then I met Izumi. Izumi was 10 years younger than I was. We met at a business meeting. Something clicked between us the first time we laid eyes on each other. Not the kind of thing that happens all that often. We met a couple of times after that to go over the details of our joint project. I'd go to her office or she'd drop by mine. Our meetings were always short, other people were involved, and it was basically all business. When our project was finished, though, a terrible loneliness swept over me. as if something absolutely vital had been forcibly snatched from my grasp. I hadn't felt like that in years, and I think she felt the same way. A week later, she phoned my office about some minor matter, and we chatted for a bit. I told a joke, and she laughed. Want to go out for a drink? I asked. We went to a small bar and had a few drinks. I can't recall exactly what we talked about, but we found a million topics and could have talked forever. With a laser-like clarity, I could grasp everything she wanted to say. And things I couldn't explain well to anyone else came across to her with an exactness that took me by surprise. We were both married, with no major complaints about our married lives. We loved our spouses and respected them. Still, this was on the order of a minor miracle, running across someone to whom you can express your feelings so clearly, so completely. Most people go their entire lives without meeting a person like that. It would have been a mistake to label this love. It was more like total empathy. Speaker 4 (22:15) We started going out regularly for drinks. Her husband's job kept him out late, so she was free to come and go as she pleased. When we got together, though, the time just flew by. We'd look at our watches and discover that we could barely make the last train. It was always hard for me to say goodbye. There was so much more we wanted to tell each other. Speaker 4 (22:36) Neither one of us lured the other to bed, but we did start sleeping together. We'd both been faithful to our spouses up to that point, but somehow we didn't feel guilty for the simple reason that we had to do it. Undressing her, caressing her skin, holding her close, slipping inside her, coming. It was all just a natural extension of our conversations. So natural that our lovemaking was not a source of heart-rending physical pleasure. It was just a calm, pleasant act, stripped of all pretense. Best of all were our quiet talks in bed after sex. I'd hold her naked body close, and she'd curl up in my arms, and we'd whisper secrets in our own. private language. We met whenever we could. Strangely enough, or perhaps not so strangely, we were absolutely convinced that our relationship could go on forever. Our married lives on