Keeping Up with the Understanders - April 2025

What happened to all of my April? Murakami, Russell, Giselle and more!

What happened to all of my April? Where did it go? There’s too much spring for me to know what to do with. Somehow I’ve managed to finish seven books and watch fourteen movies and go outside and go to work and work on my writing projects and even journal. I guess that’s where all of April went. The magnitude of my desire is too much for one April to handle. Now the birch is coming back, forcing my body to eject all the tears and mucus it has stored up over the winter. It’s like a spring cleaning of the mind and body, letting the pollen dig a clear path towards summer through my nostril and eye canal. Everything April has given to me I want to endow to you, my loyal reader. I want to feed the whole world like a mama bird, I want every seed to grow tall and strong. And I am dying for a party.

Message from your friend Grey

Hello, readers! Just a quick aside to let you all know that I’m creating a little art/lit magazine for a school project and submissions are open to all of you! The magazine’s theme is “pressure”, whatever that means to you! Submit art, poetry, stories, photos, anything you can come up with—just get it to me by around May 15th, 2025! Message me at @bingokill on Tumblr for more info on where to send your work. Thank you! Now back to your regularly scheduled understanding.

Literature

The Greysigne Current Epic: The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky

We have less than 100 pages left now, and still it’s been going slower than ever. Since we’ve become such movieheads recently it’s been hard to commit to our buddy Myshkin. And I think there’s an irrational part of me that believes that I can protect him from the narrative simply by not continuing it. There’s a foreboding energy that does not align with the promises of new beginnings of April. But we keep going one step at a time. May will be the month of Myshkin.

Signe reads: The Bostonians - Henry James

The Bostonians broke my heart. While I was reading it I thought it was going to change my life. Not because it’s the best book I’ve ever read, or because it had the most compelling story. I loved it because it made me think, I felt like it was speaking to me, reaching out its hand and asking for my help. I thought I was going to be the one to save it, to bring it with me to the new age. And then it broke my heart. As I knew it was going to do. It was cruel. Now I don’t want to touch it. It’s like a boyfriend who breaks up with you but continues to live in your apartment. The Bostonians broke my heart and it better have changed my life.

Signe reads: Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami

I have so many conflicting thoughts on Murakami which I find so hard to articulate. I’ve read Kafka on the Shore, After Dark and Sputnik Sweetheart before, so I had some idea what I was getting into when I picked up Norwegian Wood at the library. I wanted something easy after being so emotionally drained by The Bostonians, and Murakami is just my type of light reading, something I would bring to the beach. At the same time it frustrates me, I start thinking about it too much until I don’t know what to think.

There are two main reasons I feel compelled to pick up a Murakami every now and then, the first being his effortless style. Even if his stories can be bizarre, dreamlike, and deal with heavy topics, he somehow makes writing look so easy. It pulls me in instantly, I’m ready to go along with anything he throws at me. I think this is especially true for Norwegian Wood, his attempt to write a more straightforward story. Using the first person narrative to describe everyday mundane things like what the characters are eating, discussing what music they like, or the sunday laundry, contributes to the feeling of effortlessness.

I can also see how this style of writing would frustrate readers. There is a repetitiveness in the mundane. His prose is beautiful, but sometimes it’s hard for me to take it seriously. Take the most famous line from the book: “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” It’s such a perfect quote to print on a tote bag it makes me nauseous. Also quite laughable to know that 1. this is said by an insanely emotionally detached character, and 2. he says it because he’s so impressed that the main character is reading The Great Gatsby… Which was apparently the craziest thing a Japanese college student could do in the year 1968.

The second reason why I’ll never stop reading Murakami is because he’s such an unabashed pervert. He has amassed many haters because of this, and let it be known that I am not one of them. There is something almost innocent in his literary perversion, I think it’s beautiful that he has the courage to make sexuality so very central in his writing, despite the haters. Especially since the main reaction I tend to have to his sexual descriptions is to furrow or raise my eyebrows in confusion. He doesn’t even seem to be that sexually depraved, it’s just the way and the frequency that he writes about fairly normal heterosexual interactions that makes it all seem odd and off putting. It fascinates me just how persistently unsexy the writing is, and this sense only increases the more sexualised literally every single female character becomes.

Something I realized this time around, after embracing my inner uneducated amateur-Jungian self after reading Man and his Symbols this year, is how the psychoanalytic qualities of Murakami’s writing finally made sense to me. Murakami’s sex-obsessed and effortless writing style seem to stem from his strong belief in the unconscious, his willingness to let it guide him deeper and deeper into his own mind. I envy that. It’s difficult to admit that, but I am insanely jealous of Murakami and all his haters and lovers. It reminds me of one of my favorite posts, this Weyes Blood tweet about Paul McCartney. Both McCartney and Murakami seem to have so little creative restraint it scares us all, for better or worse.

Norwegian Wood is a novel about death, sex and coming of age. Toru Watanabe is a college student learning to deal with life after the suicide of his best friend. He gets entangled with two very different girls, the introspective and depressive Naoko and the spontaneous and independent Mieko. I’ve always struggled with Murakami’s female characters, they are not simple sexual objects but have strong distinct personalities, and yet they always seem trapped in the sexual gaze of the male (often young) protagonist. In previous books it gave me a sense of unease, and at the same time it always fascinated me.

It only started to make sense when I started seeing the secondary characters not as real people, but archetypes existing in the protagonist's psyche. Naoko and Mieko share so many qualities of the anima, which Jungian psychologist M.-L. von Franz describes as

“the personification of all feminine psychological tendencies in a man’s psyche, such as vague feelings and moods, prophetic hunches, receptiveness to the irrational, capacity for personal love, feeling for nature, and – last but not least – his relation to the unconscious.”¹

You don’t have to like it, but Mieko and especially Naoko have this exact function in the story. Naoko’s mental health struggles are kept so vague, her beauty is so otherworldly. Von Franz writes that “women who are of ‘fairy-like’ character especially attract such anima projections, because men can attribute almost anything to a creature who is so fascinatingly vague, and can thus proceed to weave fantasies around her.”² It seems so obvious for us today, that such projections are fantasies, ala manic-pixie-dream-not-like-other-girls. But I think it’s reductive to reduce anima projections to fantasies that are meaningless.

Fantasies tell us so much about the psyche, our desires, and what we lack. They stem from somewhere, and Murakami lets them run free. I think women on the internet for decades have struggled on what our “take” should be on these projections, if we should embrace or reject them, if they are authentic or false. It becomes its own prison. Why are we unable to stop arguing about someone else’s projections?

I’m speaking very generally here, but the more gender essentialist our society seems to become in these reactionary conservative times, the more interested I get in women’s perception of collective cultural anima projections, as well as men’s perception of collective animus projections. The more we think about trad wives and girl math, the more powerless we seem to become in defining our own experiences. We are drowning in projection and fantasy. How do we liberate ourselves from the fantasy of others? From our own fantasies? Maybe we can learn from Murakami, maybe one solution is to take that one big leap into our unconsciousness. Maybe if we thought about and explored our own fantasies, they could tell us something that people on the internet can’t.

Diving deeper into the psychoanalytical connection, I found a thesis by J.P. Dil on the topic “Murakami Haruki and the Search for Self-Therapy”, which analyses Murakami’s use of writing as self-therapy in connection to the psychoanalytic theories of Jung and Lacan. I have not read it all because this is supposed to be a short blurb (haha) but I find the topic very interesting. I didn’t know that Murakami didn’t start writing until he was 29 years old, after some sort of epiphany while watching a baseball game.

Murakami described writing as a form of self-therapy to the Jungian psychologist Kawai Hayao. This would align with Jungian theory, as Dil writes that “Jung believed in a creative unconscious that was actively engaged in cure” and that “for Jung the notion of self-therapy (i.e., of a self healing itself) is entirely feasible.”³ Dil argues that Murakami uses writing as a response to a sense of personal and political loss, as well as the decline of what Lacan called the big Other in post-war Japan. He connects it to Peter Homan’s explanation of psychoanalysis as a response to loss:

“[P]sychoanalysis is a creative response to loss. It seeks to replace what is lost with something new. But mourning is only part of this picture; creativity is the other half. The creation of anything new and valuable, I argue, has its origins in the old and in the particular ways the old is abandoned and then altered.”⁴

I find that idea so captivating, the idea that creating art or undergoing some sort of psychoanalysis follows the same type of process. I feel we are undergoing a similar sense of loss culturally today, that people go to desperate lengths to dig up old lost artefacts and bring them back to our time. If we manage to create something new and valuable it remains to be seen…

It reminds me of my favorite sentence from Norwegian Wood:

“Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum – a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I’m watching over it for no one but myself.”⁵

This one really gripped me. I want to ask Murakami for forgiveness for all the nasty things I've just said, just from that sentence alone. The sense of loss looms over the sentence like a big fat cloud. What do you even do with a sentence like that? I feel the need to consult some sort of manual. I think I’ve always had my own empty museum. I think it was where I grew up. I think my museum knows me better than myself.

I’ll leave you with one last quote from M.-L. von Franz, because I think she rocks. She writes how the anima can function as a guide to the inner world in practical ways. I think this applies to Murakami, and I think it should apply to more of us. There’s this sense that we need to get quick results from anything we try our hands at in the attention economy of today. Instead, I propose we devote some more time to our own anima or whatever you would like to call it, the mediator between the ego and the self. Take it away, Marie-Louise:

“The positive function occurs when a man takes seriously the feelings, moods, expectations, and fantasies sent by his anima and when he fixes them in some form – for example in writing, painting, sculpture, musical composition, or dancing. When he works at this patiently and slowly, other more deeply unconscious material wells up from the depths and connects with the earlier material. After a fantasy has been fixed in some specific form, it must be examined both intellectually and ethically, with an evaluating feeling reaction. And it is essential to regard it as being absolutely real; there must be no lurking doubt that this is ‘only a fantasy’.”⁶

Film

I’m still working on how best to format this section, especially since we watch a lot of movies nowadays and I don’t always have anything interesting to say about all of them. Do people want many short blurbs or more in depth sections about a few movies? I guess it’s my newsletter and I get to decide. But do let me know if you have strong opinions!

This month I’m going to group together the movies based on their country of origin, and rank which countrie I thought had the best to worst movies that we saw this month. Because why not.

Japan

The clear standout cinematic country this month by miles! The three Japanese movies we watched rocked our world so severely we still haven’t recovered. First of all, Swing Girls (2004), directed by Shinobu Yaguchi, easily became one of our favorite films of all time. I would recommend this movie to absolutely every single person in the world. Few movies have made me laugh and smile so much as this one, my cheeks were hurting from grinning when it was over. A group of schoolgirls have to replace the school brass band after accidentally poisoning the original band, which in turn leads to bizarre and hilarious events. I loved it so much, watch it to have the best time ever.

The other Japanese movies we saw were Battle Royale (2000) and Porco Rosso (1992), and both ruled. Everyone go watch a critically acclaimed Japanese movie right now and you’ll probably have the time of your life.

UK

We technically only watched one movie from the UK, Danny Boyle’s Glaswegian pearl Shallow Grave (1994). An instant addition to our bisexual film canon list, this film centers around three roommates who happen to come across a dead body and a big bag of cash, and decide to make the most of it. Christopher Eccleston gets sent to the Spongebob torture maze, Kerry Fox slays successfully, and Ewan McGregor fags it up to epic porportions. And I think that is what all films should be about. To think that this movie laid the groundwork for the cinematic masterpiece that is Boyle’s Yesterday (2019). I guess One Direction: This Is Us (2013) also belongs to this category?

American movies set in New York

Okay this is a fun category that I enjoyed this month, and yes New York movies are not the same thing as American movies. Here are the movies that I count to this category, ranked in order of my enjoyment: Valentino (1977), GoodFellas (1990) and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961).

I realize that Valentino, directed by British Ken Russell, is set in both New York and LA, but I had to make some category that made sense, so here we are. Ken Russell is my favorite director ever. Now there’s a pervert with style! I love how obsessed he is with sex, music, religion and dance. Valentino was sort of a flop for Russell, and maybe I’m stupid but I still ate it up. It’s a biopic about Rudolph Valentino, an Italian silent film actor and sex symbol whose early death at age 31 caused mass hysteria. It stars Rudolf Nureyev as Valentino, the most celebrated male ballet dancer in the world since Vaslav Nijinsky (who appears as a character in the movie, dancing with Valentino—pretty cool RPF yaoi from Russell as always). Now, Nureyev might be one of the greatest ballet dancers of all time, but greatest actor? I’m afraid not. He tries his best, and there are plenty of beautiful and talented women to support him on the screen (Carol Kane!) (Note from Grey: CAROL KANE!). If you like gaudy, over-the-top gay movies, this one's for you. It pairs greatly with a glass of red wine and someone dear to you to gossip with.

GoodFellas was a Good movie to enjoy with your Fellas, there’s not a lot more that I could say about it that has not already been said. Breakfast at Tiffany’s was pretty good, but the racism of Mickey Rooney’s character was so ugly and in your face, it’s impossible to ignore. Even without the racism I still think this movie would be a meh from me, but Audrey Hepburn plays a wonderful drunk. (Note from Grey: The standout from this movie for me was the actress who played Mag Wildwood, who apparently did very little else in Hollywood but who stole the show in my eyes. “NOW, whooo’s g-gonna bring me a B-BOURBON?”)

American movies set in different countries

Maybe this will be a controversial one, but here's the movies ranked from most to least liked by me: The Aristocats (1970) - Paris, Before Sunrise (1995) - Vienna, Wicked (2024) - Oz. Yeah. Writing a newsletter is really fun.

I enjoyed The Aristocats so much, there’s not a lot to get into there. Unfortunately it also suffered from a racist Asian caricature, so that’s not so good. It also surprised me how sexy they could make animated milf cats in the 70s. Overall a mostly beautiful and delightful time. (Note from Grey: The Aristocats was one of my all-time favorites when I was a baby, and I was surprised by just how well it still held up (besides the aforementioned racism… this keeps popping up, and even when I expect it as I did here, the cruelty of these stereotypes is always astounding). I used to watch it religiously and was always obsessed with the idea of dipping a cracker in the sleeping-pill-laced cream like the mouse. It’s just a bowl of milk, but it always looked so sumptuous…)

Here’s where I feel evil, because I wanted to enjoy Before Sunrise so much. I think it got too hyped up in my head by literally everyone, so I think it’s more of a me thing than the film's fault. I just found Ethan Hawke's character just a bit too annoying. And maybe my life is sort of too crazy to be in awe of the love story. I don’t know. Maybe I need something more psychosexually fucked up than two people who like each other?

I had to rewatch Wicked with my mother and I felt equally apathetic towards it as the first time. I want to like it so much but I can’t. What I really liked was closing my eyes and lying down on the couch for the last 30 minutes, drifting half asleep to the soothing sounds of “Defying Gravity”. I had forgotten how good it feels to fall asleep in front of the TV, I recommend it to anyone.

France + Spain

No matter how many French movies we watch, there’s always more. I don’t know if they were my least favorites, I’ve sort of lost control over my own list. Here are two French movies we watched: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) dir. Luis Buñuel and The Swimming Pool (1969) dir. Jacques Deray. We also watched the Spanish-French-Italian film Tristana (1970) also by Buñuel, so I sort of had to group these all together out of convenience. Catherine Deneuve was captivatingly beautiful as ever in Tristana, but I think ultimately I like Belle de Jour the most out of the three Buñuels I’ve now seen. The Swimming Pool was a great thriller for lovers of The Talented Mr Ripley, but sort of dragged in the end. Just like my now too long newsletter.

TV

We watched one season of Married at First Sight Sweden and we got really really really scared. Thumbs up. (Short note from Grey: this was some of the scariest television I’ve ever seen in my life. This was TV for people who are sick in the head. It was like watching Saw to me. It had true doomed love, true undoomed love, evil people, toilet homophobia, giggling, mind games, pies, and a wolf hotel. I thought I understood what evil TV was, but I was like a little baby.)

Music

I went and saw a performance of the classic ballet Giselle at the Swedish Royal Opera this month, and it was beautiful and true. Ballet is the most psychosexual art form there is, so bodily imbued with symbolism, sensuality and violence. I loved spacing out on two glasses of wine watching the deadly sisterhood of the Wilis do their thing. It did piss me off that Albrecht made it out of the story alive, but there’s not much we can do about that now. If I had infinite money I would go watch this every week of my life. I think ballet is more effective than cognitive behavioral therapy.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve listened to any beautiful songs this month, here’s my top five:

1. Simple Twist Of Fate - Joan Baez

2. Peace Frog - The Doors

3. Walking In The Rain - Grace Jones

4. Memories - Leonard Cohen

5. Kata rokkar - Björk Guðmundsdóttir & tríó Guðmundar Ingólfssonar

1. von Franz, M.-L. Man and His Symbols (1964), p. 186.

2. von Franz, M.-L. Man and His Symbols (1964), p. 191.

3. Dil, J.P. Murakami Haruki and the Search for Self-Therapy (2007), p. 56.

4. Homan in Dil, J.P. Murakami Haruki and the Search for Self-Therapy (2007), p. 20.

5. Murakami, Haruki, Norwegian Wood (1987), p. 276.

6. von Franz, M.-L. Man and His Symbols (1964), p. 195.