What’s a book or movie that genuinely scared you?
I’ve read enough books and watched enough films over the years to have encountered just about every variety of horror imaginable. From H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids to the psychological disturbances of Nabokov, the grotesqueries of history and the darker recesses of human sexuality, I’ve rarely been frightened by fiction. Disturbed, certainly. Fascinated, frequently. But genuinely frightened?
One passage has stayed with me more than almost anything else I’ve read.
It’s in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95), originally published in Japanese as Nejimaki-dori Kuronikuru.
The novel is a strange, mesmerising mixture of the everyday and the surreal. A missing cat, a missing wife, mysterious telephone calls, abandoned wells, dreams and memories. Murakami has this extraordinary ability to move between the familiar and the deeply unsettling without apparently changing gear.
Then, quite unexpectedly, he takes us into one of the darkest episodes I’ve encountered in literature.
Lieutenant Mamiya recounts his experiences as a Japanese soldier on the Manchurian–Mongolian border in the years before the Second World War. He describes the capture of a fellow Japanese officer, Yamamoto, by Soviet and Mongolian forces.
What follows is almost unbearable.
Under the orders of a Russian officer later identified as Boris the Manskinner, a Mongolian soldier methodically skins Yamamoto alive.
Murakami doesn’t simply tell us what happened. He makes us witness it through Mamiya, who is forced to watch. The terrible deliberation of the act, the skill of the executioner, the helplessness of the victim and the clinical indifference of those responsible combine to create something profoundly disturbing.
I remember being horrified, physically uncomfortable, almost unwilling to continue reading. Yet I couldn’t look away.
And that, for me, is the extraordinary power of literature.
I read voraciously, sometimes two hundred pages a day, moving between novels, memoirs, history and literary criticism. I am fascinated by the machinery of storytelling: how an author controls time, establishes a character, manipulates our expectations and makes a scene live in the imagination.
Recently I’ve been reading and rereading Nabokov, Knausgård, Borges and other writers whose command of memory, narrative voice and psychological observation fascinates me.
I read Lolita again after thirty years, this time consciously as a writer, examining how Nabokov constructs his narrator’s monstrous self-justifications. I’ve admired Knausgård’s ability to make apparently insignificant moments of childhood compelling through the accumulation of detail. And I’ve been studying how stories are structured, not simply for what happens, but for how the telling changes our experience of what happens.
Meanwhile, I spend several hours most mornings reconstructing my teenage diaries from the 1970s, turning brief contemporary observations into fuller narratives fifty years later.
The challenge is remarkably similar. How do I recover an experience convincingly? Which details matter? How much should I reveal? What should I leave to the reader’s imagination?
Murakami’s account of Yamamoto’s death demonstrates something I find increasingly important in my own writing: the power of making the reader experience an event rather than merely learn that it happened.
There is another dimension to the horror. It is embedded within history.
I’ve studied and written about the First World War, and I know that human beings have perpetrated cruelties quite as dreadful as anything a novelist might invent. What makes Murakami’s passage so disturbing is its plausibility. It belongs to a recognisable world of military occupation, interrogation, brutality and the casual exercise of absolute power.
And yet it is fiction, which allows Murakami to place us inside another person’s experience with an intimacy that a historical account may struggle to achieve.
There is no reassuring distance between the reader and the scene. The imagination supplies everything.
I wonder whether that is why the passage has remained lodged in my memory.
I can recall frightening films, but the images belong to somebody else: the director, cinematographer, actors and special-effects team. In a novel, the images are partly my own creation. The author supplies the words, but I furnish the scene, its sounds, its movements and its horrors.
Perhaps that makes the experience harder to forget.
I certainly haven’t forgotten Yamamoto.
And the curious thing is that, despite the hundreds of books I’ve read since, I can summon that passage almost at will.
That, I think, is the difference between something that merely shocks us and something that genuinely frightens us.
The shock passes.
The horror becomes a memory.
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