The Year of the Hare - Arto Paasilinna [1]
In Zen practice, students are woken up by a sharp wooden stick cracked down on each shoulder, in the meditation hall. In Arto Paasilinna’s Year of the Hare, the unlikely catalyst to awakening is a hare running across a road and its violent meeting with a car.
I came upon Paasilinna’s novel, which was first published in 1975 and has been translated into everything from Hungarian to Japanese, much too recently. It is part of an oeuvre that has been delighting Finns for decades, and I could instantly see how an antic, amiable, harebrained kind of logic governed the Mad Hatter satire. The prose is brisk, even as it describes a life of ambling, and the story zigzags to and fro much as its vagabond hero does. But always it maintains its topsy-turvy, frolicsome pace, as if to suggest that every kind of order and ceremony must be turned on its head. Vatanen the journalist slips out of a hotel room—as if it were a prison—and starts inspecting a prison (as if it were a hotel). The police superintendent he meets turns out to be something of a delinquent, too, off with a retired colleague, fishing. Very soon, in fact, it appears that everywhere people are hungering to get away from society’s rules and find a life of ease and planlessness that can bring them closer to creatures of the wild.
As the novel goes on, it seems that one character after another is falling into a lake, getting stuck in the mud, needing somehow to be rescued (and Vatanen’s odd jobs all involve reclamation). A church becomes the setting for a crazy game of cross-species hide-and-seek, and a pastor turns into a gun-wielding maniac even as a bum becomes an unlikely Samaritan. When we meet a group of officials, they, too, are soon—quite literally—stripped of all their clothes, so that it becomes ever harder to tell the humans from the animals (the most simpatico creature in the book, after all, is four-legged). It sometimes feels—such is the runaway pace of the shaggy-hare subversion—that the whole novel is drunk, starting out relatively upright and conventional but soon keeling over, rubbing its forehead, and wondering what in the world is going to happen next.
My life—alas—has never been quite so slapstick, but I know a little about the impulse Paasilinna’s journalist discovers. When I was twenty-six I was securely nestled in an office in Rockefeller Center, in midtown Manhattan, writing international affairs articles for Time magazine, with not a seeming care in the world. I took my holidays in Bali and El Salvador, I headed off for weekends to New Orleans or Key West, I imagined myself at the center of the universe. Then, on a layover on one such trip, forced to spend a night near Narita Airport in Tokyo, I went into the little town near the airport hotel a few hours before my flight, and suddenly I was slapped awake.
No hare was scampering across the road, but something in the collected stillness of the scene, the chill sunshine of a late October day, the mix of familiarity and strangeness, the sense of possibility in the ringing emptiness felt like a home I’d been seeking without knowing it. Here was something none of my pension plans or glittery nights could buy. Here, in fact, was a wealth, a reality, a sense of spaciousness far beyond anything I could imagine in the time-bound life I’d reflexively fallen into. It was like waking from a dream I hadn’t known I’d slipped into, and when I flew back to New York that afternoon, a part