What's a dabchick? Doesn't matter.

If you’ve never read Murakami Haruki’s short story Dabchick, then you’re missing one of the great pieces of Japanese literature. The story is published in Murakami’s short-story collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, which has all different sorts of stories. Some of them are realistic, others not so much. Some of them make sense, others…not so much. Some are rather long, others are just short little blips of stories. I haven’t finished the collection, but Dabchick is my favorite of the collection so far. It’s definitely my favorite of Murakami’s short stories.

Like many of Murakami’s writing, Dabchick is absurd. Things don’t make sense, the backgrounds of characters aren’t discussed, major details of the story are left unexplained. In many cases, this may leave the reader with the feeling that they can fill in the blanks. Something about Murakami’s writing, however, encourages the reader (or me, at least) to leave the blanks as blanks. Don’t imagine how the narrator is dressed besides that he’s wearing tennis shoes. Don’t guess at what would happen if he turned left instead of right. But even less than that. There’s no imperative “don’t.” Murakami’s writing is hazy, as are his worlds, and they much less resist filling in the blanks than they do simply sit there as a haze over the narrative.

Now, bear with me a moment, because this might seem like I’m taking my own left turn. Puns, though, are the purest form of humor. You may like them or dislike them, but whatever the case, they are jokes that rely on nothing more than funny connections. Those connections could be word-play, or meaning-play, or they could just be simple absurdities. Did you hear the one about the magic tractor? It went down the lane and turning into a field. A dad-joke, maybe, but also hilarious.

There’s a certain amount haziness to this joke about the tractors. The humor of it rests on the face that “turns” and “turns into” sound similar but are completely different. But when you try to imagine what it looks like for a truck to turn into a field, to actually become a field, what picture comes up in your head? It may be different for different people, but the whole idea of a pun isn’t that you imagine it. It’s that you laugh at the connection.

Puns aren’t about politics, they don’t play on social or gender relations, they’re not satire, nor do they have any deeper meaning. They are simply funny, which is what I mean when I say that they are “pure” humor. In the same way, Murakami’s story Dabchick is a funny story. It’s just funny and just absurd, which is one of the reasons that it works.

In a way, there’s not all that much in Murakami’s story for there to be a story. What is this job the narrator is going to take up? Where in the world is he? Why are the directions wrong? Why does the doorman have to take a bath after lunch? Why wasn’t the narrator given the password? What actually is the password? For the world of the story, these things (the job, the location, the password) are all very important, but we don’t know what they are. The whole plot actually works to undermine the most important parts of itself, so that all we’re left with is a man walking down a corridor, a conversation, and a bird.

Nor do these parts really fit together. Everything seems to go wrong. The directions don’t work. The narrator doesn’t know the password. The doorman gives more hints than he should have. The bird is thinking about death. Nothing works out. We as the readers are told nothing. And yet the story still have a start, a climax, and a conclusion. It’s still a really funny story (if a bit weird). It still works as a story, but there’s just so little content.

And then there’s the meaning. Is there a meaning? I don’t think so. Like puns, the story is there for the joy of it. There is one, single part that suggests a world outside of itself, and that’s when the doorman suggests that it’s tough to get a good job. The story was published in 1981, so unless I’m missing something about the Japanese job market in the early 80s, this is just a throwaway comment. The story contains itself, even though it’s unfinished.

All this is part of what makes Dabchick so fun. Murakami is known for his absurdism. He’s known for coming up story that don’t make any sense. One of the joys of reading him is to be left in the dark about things. After you read a few of his stories, you know that you’re not going to be filled in on everything that is going on or has gone on. But somehow the stories make sense. Somehow they’re still stories and they work as stories. And the blanks become part of the joy.

It’s not just about the joy, though. I think I need stories that don’t have a wider connection with, well, anything. If you’ve been reading this substack for a bit, you may be surprised at this. I thrive on finding deeper meaning and connections. I started writing on substack to get to the bottom (if there is a bottom) of what I’ve been feeling towards Japanese literature generally and Japanese fantasy specifically ever since I was a kid. Most of what I do for my day job is help people find meaning in their lives. But sometimes a story has to be just a story, and Murakami is great for that.

I spent a bit of time in academia studying literature, and for a while all we did was dissect the text. What does this story mean? What’s really going on here? Why use this word instead of another word? Often, this was fun, but most of the time the answers had to be something cultural or political. And I really mean that: they had to be cultural or political. If a story wasn’t about culture or it didn’t have a political comment to make, then either it wasn’t a successful story or you weren’t digging deep enough. That’s a lot of culture that goes into making a story, and when people write, they always do so from a specific and very cultural point of view. Studying these things helped me, and when I explained them to others they helped my students, understand a story more fully.

But what about wonder? What about joy? Not everything has to be about a specific point of culture. Political readings don’t need to be constantly jammed down a story’s throat. Sometimes my students knew more than I did about a story, even though I had a fancy degree from an overly expensive graduate program. I remember having a conversation with a woman, just after I graduated from my masters’ program in English literature, who talked so beautifully about how a story we both read together was about redemption. Redemption. That’s not a word you use in academia. But how much of life is about redemption? A lot more than taxation and the intricacies of voter registration.

We all need fantasy. We don’t just need to take a break from the world we live in. We don’t just need a vacation. We need to step outside of everything we know to be real and see something else, because the world is not encompassed by what our culture tells us to be true. There’s a whole lot out there, and fantasy helps us see some of it, imagine some of it, and (most importantly) to be receptive for new and amazing things coming your way.

So when you hear a pun, don’t groan. Remember that your soul is growing. The same with Murakami. He helps us understand just how much there is to the universe.