✦ Refrakt: 04 — Retracing Your Steps

I almost never re-read. For a while, I read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises each year, probably the book I’ve read most, but that habit has fallen by the wayside. Even as I’m working through my backlog now, I think about the mountain of books I want to read: they haunt me from my bookcases, from my e-reader library, from my wishlists. How can I afford to go back, when I know I’m already not going to have enough time to read everything I want to in this life? I can feel my mortality creeping in.

And yet, I recently decided to embark on a complete Murakami Haruki re-read. I’ll happily tell people he’s one of my favorite writers, quirks and all (I think we’re about due for public opinion to swing around on Murakami again in the positive; but that’s for another time). He’s one of the authors for whom I’ve read most of his books, and what I haven’t yet read I’ve savored out, anxiously delaying the inevitable moment I’ll have nothing of his left to read.

But I finally decided to read his full bibliography. He’s got a new book coming out in Autumn (The City and Its Uncertain Walls), and I thought it would be fun to read everything chronologically, from order of release until now. (I’ve already broken my goal, as I’ve started the new The City and Its Uncertain Walls after reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World for the first time, as Walls is sort of a follow-up to Wonderland’s narrative; I wanted to read it while the outline was still top of mind.) I remember a few focused classes in film school where we would watch a director’s filmography front to back, and I think few things taught me more about filmmaking, storytelling, art-making then simply observing an artist at work. No reason I couldn’t replicate this scenario on my own, across mediums.

Even among books I count as some of my favorites, I’ve only read them twice at most; going through everything here again has opened up new depth I didn’t see the first time. Murakami has a hesitant connection to his earliest works, which are often referred to as “the Rat Trilogy” for one of the series’ central characters. Murakami considers them sub-standard, and that was my impression too when I first read them. Yet with each read my admiration for even these works grows. Murakami’s style isn’t fully-formed yet—you don’t really feel it until A Wild Sheep Chase, in my opinion—but you can see him reaching for something. There’s a sense of yearning and loss that pervades these books, makes them linger with me like the ground wet from a rain.

Beyond the unexpected depth that re-reading can reveal, there’s also the matter of simple comprehension. Unless I’m balancing on the edge of sleep, I rarely have to re-read an English sentence to understand it better (maybe I need to read harder books!), but I often have to take a second pass at Japanese sentences. I recently read Ashizuri Suizokukan, which is a manga consisting of several short stories that range from silly to dream-like. Occasionally, these are punctuated by journal-like entries: writings on types of fish, or things the protagonist remembers from childhood. On my first pass, I couldn’t make heads or tails of these sections, picking out only a few sentences, a few words, but not grasping the larger meaning. I’d read them front to back, taking in what I could, and then simply read them again. On this second pass, it was like all the gaps filled themselves in, building onto the framework I’d constructed on my first read, the meaning and context suddenly revealing itself to me.

I’ve also gone back and forth on different pieces of media in Japanese. I tend to know what I’m going to be able to understand and what will be a challenge for me, and whether or not I feel like I’m up for the challenge. I’ve started several video games, struggled to understand, and once I realized it wasn’t simply a bad day but beyond my current level, put it aside. And then, sometimes months later, I’ve come back, now understanding perfectly what on first pass was only a mess to me. Being able to see yourself make progress is one of the best parts about studying something.

Rarely am I striving for perfect understanding. I think that’s probably impossible, anyways. But it’s frustrating to have read a book, and not remember why I liked it or didn’t like it, or worse, simply not be able to remember it at all. I’ve started to take more notes on books I’m reading, both novels and non-fiction, but simply re-reading has made a big difference, too. I’m never going to be able to get around to every book I want to read—and that’s okay. I want to savor what I'm able to make time for.