The Semester of Angel Hair

While boiling some pasta for lunch today, I suddenly thought of the Haruki Murakami short story "The Year of Spaghetti." I checked to see if it was in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, one of several Murakami books I have with me in Baltimore; it was. This is old school Murakami: minimal, angular, often unflinchingly raw. This was one of the stories in 100% Girl, the (Chinese-only, alas) short story collection which was my introduction to Murakami, and which I found in my grandmother's house at about age 14--the perfect age to get one's soul stolen by Murakami (or Neon Genesis Evangelion for that matter, but that's a separate story). I still don't know who could've bought that book. It was probably my uncle, back in his college days.

The story is about a young man who cooked spaghetti. The second sentence reads: "In 1971 I cooked spaghetti to live, and lived to cook spaghetti." This sentence is possibly the unlikely nexus where the disenfranchised proletariat of the 19th century and the disillusioned young bourgeois academic of the 21st (me, or something like me) coincide. Ironically enough, for a story that promises a narration of spaghetti, the major plot event occurs when the narrator isn't cooking spaghetti at all. He is lying on the tatami staring at the ceiling when his friend's ex-girlfriend calls, wanting some money that the friend (who never appears) owes her. The narrator says he doesn't know where the friend is, and lies that he is cooking spaghetti to excuse himself from the phone, even going through the motions of "[filling] an imaginary pot with water, [lighting] and imaginary stove with an imaginary match"...the works. The narrator concludes his reminiscing with, "At the time, I didn't want to get involved with anyone. That's why I kept on cooking spaghetti, all by myself...Can you imagine how astonished the Italians would be if they knew that what they were exporting in 1971 was really loneliness?"

Obviously not the most subtle of Murakami yarns, but one still has to laugh with him, and at ourselves; replacing "cooking spaghetti" with "going to school and/or work," or "writing a novel," or "discovering oneself and pursuing one's career" (or "doing research" or "recording electronic music," for that matter) instantly makes for a more familiar scenario. A scaffolding to support an inflated, hollow life, which keeps the roof from falling in, but also oneself from getting out, even when one's run out of road and is simply spinning one's wheels. Eventually automation sets in and reflexes and habit engage. The system closes upon itself and becomes self-sustaining, self-fulfilling. Then it becomes necessary to cut loose. You are not your modus operandi.

Specifying the culprit act as "cooking spaghetti" simply reveals the ridiculousness of the whole setup. But as usual, we laugh at the joker partially because he is not as different from us as we'd desperately like to believe.

Is this a criticism of a generation, of a phase, of a way of life? Perhaps, but I'm not sure. Most likely, it's simply another way for me to cook spaghetti, as it were.