The Saturday Night Live Cold Open
We began our descent last week by looking through the window with Peyton Loftis in William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness. If you came here straight from the energetic-by-comparison promises of the “About Me” section and the Manifesto, you’re owed a deep apology.
But this place was always about walking through the dark with a flashlight so that we saw the shadows and could laugh and be amused as we continued our way through. But it’s still the darkness, and sometimes we trip and fall, and that always leaves scars. So we couldn’t lay the foundation for this space without starting out in the very deepest depths of the dark. If you don’t want to experience any of the night at all, it’s best to exit now. (Please use the stairs, though, not the window.)
Peyton chose to open her window and jump out to meet the birds and fly. Which she could not do. Our next book features a bird, but its window operates more like a trapdoor. And there is a window, but the really scary part is when our protagonist looks out of it, and everything seems perfectly fine. Of course, we’re talking about literature, so it’s clearly not going to be. Even more, since you’re here, you know it’s not going to be.
But we’re gonna keep this one light and funny for as long as possible, and that’ll be right up until we hit the well.
Part 1: Toru’s Hymn Book
Toru begins his morning with spaghetti and classical music with the rigor and determination of someone who knows it will keep the world from shifting under his feet. Routine is his religion. There’s nothing wrong with that; everyone’s got their religion. And even if your leader leads you to South America, it could be okay. But if he asks you to drink Kool-Aid, that’s another story. So Toru‘s pot boils. The music plays. The day is supposed to unfold in its usual manageable shape. And while routine is not Kool-Aid, it is a fragile God at times, and all it takes is a phone ringing at the wrong moment to expose the seams.
But in literature, there are just certain things. So ironing and spaghetti are far more important than you might think. There must possibly be a reason why he is opening the novel with spaghetti, especially when it’s going to eventually and shortly lead to ironing. You can hear first-time readers now: This person is always on the bestseller list?
A woman calls and asks for just 10 minutes of his time. 10 minutes. Not eight or nine, not 11 or 12. But 10. It’s an oddly precise request. Toru is startled as he tries to explain he’s cooking spaghetti, which is not something most people feel they need to see as their hill to die on, even if it is 10:30 in the morning. But the woman isn’t interested in the spaghetti. She wants the 10 minutes. And for Toru, we’ve reached that point, as we did in our last book: the center cannot hold.
We don’t have Toru drinking any Kool-Aid. And the rock Sisyphus is pushing hasn’t come down the hill yet, but it has already started to roll. Toru forgets the spaghetti, but then he rescues the spaghetti. He then has to iron to recover from having to rescue the spaghetti.
We don’t know it yet, and while we do know most women would probably enjoy their partners ironing of free will, we may discover that most women also wouldn’t mind what we’ll call for now a “10-minute phone call.” Not eight or nine minutes, because that would be too short, or 11 or 12 minutes, because that would be tiring. 10 minutes definitely hits the sweet spot. But let’s push that aside for now.
Toru is in his comfort zone. To him, that’s all that matters. It’s been slightly pushed aside by the phone call, but he’s had his spaghetti and now he’s settling in to iron. And when Toru settles in to iron, he really settles in to iron.
And then his wife calls.
Part 2: Open Mic Poetry Hour
His wife calls. She asks how he is. He says he’s ironing. She immediately knows something is wrong. Now, it’s not because of the way that he irons, though frankly, that’s kind of a little odd. Toru has to iron all of his pieces in a strict, 12-step precision way, saying it aloud, otherwise it is ruined entirely. No, just the fact that he’s ironing is enough to tell his wife he’s not well. This is a relationship. Long-term observation, you know, figuring things out with the person that you adore or are ready to kill depending on the particular night. It’s why Adam asked Eve about the apple—or blamed her, depending on how you look at it. So Toru’s wife asks about the ironing, and then it gets even worse.
She asks if he can write poetry.
There are two stages to being a writer. The first is dreading the question, “What do you do?” and relaying that you are a writer. Because they’ll always ask, “Have you been published?” as the next question. Then, as you get more comfortable declaring that you’re a writer, apparently an aura begins to come off of you, because the next thing you’ll hear is, “I write too. Poetry.” Never a novel. Never a screenplay. Always poetry. And sure, you can feel sorry for the actual poets, but let’s face it: they have to have built up some kind of wall for it at this point. Imagine Fitzgerald working on Gatsby and someone asking him, “What do you do?”
“Writing the Great American Novel.”
“Oh, that’s cool. I write poetry.”
Toru’s wife tells him that they can just live on her salary for a while. Toru says that he’ll think about staying home—which, since the novel has about another 600 pages to go, is about the most Toru answer expected. If the next 500 pages or so were just that, giving him an extra 100 for spaghetti and ironing, we’d never get out alive. Thankfully, she insists he go look for the cat.
It’s Murakami, so there’s always a cat, but it’s never just a cat. Kind of like an alley in a horror film is never just an alley, but we’re not there yet. So we can kind of figure Toru is not just a guy looking for a missing pet, since this is Murakami. And thank God the universe is starting to shake, or we’d have 50 pages of Toru’s spaghetti and 50 more of his ironing.
But before Toru can head out for the alley, the phone rings again.
Part 3: D.H. Lawrence on the Phone
The mysterious woman on the phone is back, insisting that she knows him. Toru demands that she prove it, which is the only thing that we recognize so far in the novel. But he passes up the opportunity to pick an interesting topic. Instead of going for something far more interesting—again, this is Toru—like having someone explain what that breakup text meant when they dumped you and said, “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” he just asks her to guess how old he is. Because yeah, that’s just statistically unlikely she could nail it based on his voice.
She says she knows him, and he knows that she knows him. She wants him to imagine her outfit. Of course, most men would leap at the chance. Some would go tasteful with some kind of business attire. Some would go stylishly retro with a Playboy bunny outfit. Others—say, the fast, wickedly funny, smart, brunette readers, taking the personal demographic of the blogger into account—might say, “I don’t know, but I’m really hoping maybe Grinch pajamas.” Toru, of course, says he has no idea. And then she tells him she just stepped out of the shower.
Toru realizes, horrified, that it’s phone sex. As does every single reader of Murakami who has ever picked up one of his books. Murakami phone sex: for people who thought regular Murakami sex wasn’t bad enough. The kind that wins the award no one wants for reasons no one understands why they even have it. The kind that makes you wonder if the author has ever met another human being in a dimly lit motel room. And you have to stop thinking about it because he’s been a happily married man his whole life, and you can’t help but wonder if his wife is a reader.
Thankfully, Toru ditches the call because of the cat.
Part 4: Do Alleys Make Sequels?
The alley behind the house is mossy, spider-filled, and leads nowhere. Perfect for a Murakami novel, or for anyone looking for a portal to a place that will finally explain the five Phantasm movies (or is it six?), one of which is 20 minutes’ worth of film spliced entirely together from a previous entry—a not uncommon thing in horror films.
Surprisingly, Toru steps into it anyway. The air is thick and quiet and strange, and the silence is just too off. And at this point, if there are any non-Murakami readers left—and maybe some Murakami readers as well—they’re hoping for a hell dimension that will throw Toru into it, just to hear him say, “I’ve got experience with this, and it is not hot enough for spaghetti.” But if it was a door that opened to another dimension, Toru likely would apologize for the inconvenience.
At this point, we discover that it’s just possible that Toru is our lead character from The Hero with a Thousand Faces—if Joseph Campbell had been born really weird. And May, a teenage girl with a squeaky voice and unsettling, far-too-wise wisdom, is our Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings. Which are based on books, but probably most people don’t even know that. It is our first sign that the ordinary rules have begun to shrink. She’s our threshold guardian, a Gandalf in the alley—if Gandalf were a teenage girl with a limp and the talent of a psychological surgeon, cutting right to the core.
Toru hasn’t reached the well yet, but he’s already falling.
You remember we talked about a well, don’t you?
Part 5: Your English Teacher
The bird calls overhead—you know, the one from the title, if it helps—a strange mechanical sound like a toy winding down. Toru hears it and finally feels something start to shift inside. The bird is a metaphor, of course, and Murakami doesn’t hide his metaphors. The title again, right? He leaves them out in the open like a warning label. But it’s still kind of cool. You don’t have to go to college to understand what he’s telling you. The bird winds down, time winds down, Toru’s routines wind down and are not salvageable.
Magical realism isn’t traditional fantasy. It shows a mirror to the world in a different way; it exposes things. It doesn’t whisk you away to another world for no reason. It reveals cracks in the world, or in people, as it reveals the cracks in this one. Toru’s spaghetti, his ironing, his counting—even these are coping mechanisms, not quirks. They’re the scaffolding he uses to keep the darkness at bay, but the world presses in. Remember it’s literature. Remember it’s also life. The center does not hold. The phone calls. The alley. The bird. The girl. The silence. The sense that something is shifting beneath the surface, even if he can’t quite name it.
And then the well. The descent. The place where the inner landscape becomes the only landscape.
Toru climbs down because he has nowhere left to go. The world above has become too strange, too loud, too inconsistent to be a place for him to fit in as he knows it. Down in the well, stripped of spaghetti and ironing and avoidance, he has to confront the dark. He has nothing left—not his religion, not his rituals. The well is not just something that can be seen as a metaphor for depression, but for existential dread itself; it’s all of them at once, distilled into a single, inescapable space of darkness.
The wind-up bird keeps calling. Time keeps winding down. Toru, passive no longer, begins the work.
And this is where the novel stops being funny.
It’s a long, long way down, and when we mocked Toru on the opening page about his spaghetti and his ironing, those jokes fall away. This is where the reader realizes that the humor was a flashlight, not a shield. Like always, it’s a way to navigate the dark, not to avoid it. It’s a way to help us make the descent more bearable.
Toru’s journey is not by itself heroic. It is necessary. He begins the novel as a man who can barely handle a phone call. He ends it as someone who has been stripped of everything he once used to keep himself upright. The routines are gone. The illusions are gone. The scaffolding is gone. All that remains is the inner landscape, raw, unfiltered, and unavoidable.
Not triumph. Not transformation. Just the work of facing what’s inside.
The same work that shadows every page of this blog.
Next week: We’ll discover even if you get your dream, if you couldn’t afford it and it’s handed to you, the first page telling you that you murdered someone is probably a hint. It’s all downhill from there in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.
Onward.