Comments from Bin

 

When reading Haruki Murakami’s Ice Man, I felt an overwhelming sense of despair: a despair destined to move toward coldness and obliteration. The heroine’s embrace of the Ice Man might be read as a kind of surrender—submission to death, to nothingness. What is striking, however, is that she chooses this icy path of destruction out of love (the text makes it clear that she truly loves the Ice Man). Perhaps this suggests that, deep down, human beings harbor a longing for their own annihilation. The individual’s helplessness in the face of fate, attraction, and loneliness lends a kind of grand narrative to the human condition.

At the same time, it is worth asking: is the individual really without any power to resist destruction? Might there be a burning flame capable of melting the endless despair of the Antarctic? I believe such a flame does exist. It appears when “my straw husband” and “I” are on the verge of collapse in a quarrel. It appears in the public bath when a woman who broke up from a relationship manages to cleanse herself of the karmic burden of self-contempt. It takes the form of a radiant spring that leads Kiyoko out of the closet.

I suspect that the pervasive nihilism in Japanese literature is related to the spread of Buddhism in Japan: the selective absorption of ideas such as “all is suffering” and “all joy and beauty are fleeting.” This has made Japanese literature especially adept at probing themes of death and nothingness. Yet, as Buddhism also teaches, “the end of death is life.” The light of hope and self-redemption may flicker—perhaps faintly—at the end of the road of destruction. And when spring arrives, “I” will leave Antarctica behind.