Prosaically Explaining a Poem

Madness is as clear to the insane

as heaven to the down-to-earth;

and use of prose in order to explain

verse, litters its great literary worth.

Conclusions to which we’re afraid to leap

are those most likely to have major worth,

while waters when they are extremely deep

stay still when stirred to give conclusions birth.

Haruki Murakami’ writes in his novel, “Sputnik Sweetheart”:  

Somebody has said if it’s something a single book can explain,

it’s not worth having explained.  What I mean is don’t leap to any conclusions.

In “‘Dream Weaver: “The City and Its Uncertain Walls’ Review of Murakami’s Time Machine,” WSJ,11/1/24, Boyd Tonkin, reviewing The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, writes:

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Mr. Murakami revisited the 1980 novella. In that “weird and tension-inducing situation,” he explains, he expanded a narrative around the dream-enclave of his early story. This more realistic—though still uncanny—frame makes up the bulk of the new novel. So the apprentice and the master Murakami, age 31 and 71respectively, now meet in these pages: a rendezvous as spooky as any in his plots.

Here the unnamed 17-year-old narrator falls chastely in love with a girl one year his junior. Angelic but fragile, cast from the limited mold of Mr. Murakami’s early heroines, she tells him of the lovely but static town where she dwells in her imagination. In Murakami-land, dreams—which the heroine imagines as a “crucial water source nurturing your heart”—may become truth. The narrator travels to the town, depicted like some illustration from a medieval manuscript or the bejeweled backdrop to an anime film from Japan’s Studio Ghibli. Unicorns graze outside impenetrable walls guarded by a gruff Gatekeeper. A willow-shaded river winds among tumbledown buildings. New arrivals must check in their shadows at the gate. Supervised by his beloved, or an imaginary avatar of her, the narrator works in a bookless library as a “Dream Reader,” absorbing the stored “joy, sadness, or anger” of strangers.