John Lehman’s Journey Into the Well

Behind an abandoned house in a Tokyo suburb, there is a deep, dark well where a man spends many hours sitting and contemplating his life and marriage. 

The well is central to Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which high school English teacher turned art student John Lehman, AG26, has spent years exploring through visual art.

In doing so, he has gone down a rabbit hole of his own, unearthing hidden allusions and connections in the text and covering all its 607 pages in intricate, otherworldly, sometimes silly, often scary artwork.

Ranging from sketches and watercolors to etchings and woodblock prints, the collection became his dissertation for his doctorate in studio art and comparative literature, which is on display at Tisch Library. 

Through memories and tales within tales, Murakami delves deep into his protagonist’s psyche, and dark chapters of Japan’s history. Likewise, Lehman’s images portray not just Wind-Up Bird’s story of a man searching for his wife, but the truths about love, power, and violence that lie beneath—as well as his own journey as an artist, scholar, and reader.

How did you get started on this project?

I used to show my English students my copies of King Lear or Catcher in the Rye. The pages were torn and covered with notes, silly rhymes, and images. There’s a whole history to this kind of marginalia, which enacts the reader’s dialogue with the text and the author. Looking back, I realized I was trying to show reading in a visual form. 

At SMFA at Tufts, as I sought points of collision between studio art and literary scholarship, my advisor Ethan Murrow said, “Well, you do talk about Murakami quite a bit.” I decided to make large cover art for Murakami’s books. I found out Murakami spent time at Tufts in the early nineties, and signed up for his friend Hosea Hirata’s class at Tufts about his work. But then I got shingles and couldn’t do any large-scale work. 

So I’m sitting in Tisch Library before Hosea’s class, trying to pretend my body doesn’t hurt, making notes in Wind-Up Bird. Those notes turn into doodles, which become more and more editorial and invasive. They start to take over the text. And now we have this project.

This 2023 cyanotype by Lehman titled “<ZOO>, <SUB>” refers to two of many tales-within-a-tale in “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” which are mysteriously linked. In one, Japanese soldiers shoot and kill all the dangerous animals in a zoo in Manchukuo as the Soviet army invades. In the other, an American submarine is about to sink a Japanese transport ship, but is stopped by Japan's surrender and the end of the war. Photo: Alonso Nichols Photo: Alonso Nichols

What drew you to Wind-Up Bird?

I was in college in 2009, living on campus with friends for the summer. I happened to pull the novel off the shelf, and I was like, what is this?

The book made me mad. It excited me. It disgusted me. It was horrifying. It was delightful. It was sublime. And at the same time, we’re getting this excruciating detail about how to iron shirts. It was absurd and amazing, and I didn’t understand it.

Murakami makes everything feel incomplete, yet immensely rich. It’s like watching a great movie and you sense a much wider world and meaning that you don’t have access to. It’s not magical realism—it’s perfectly scientific. It’s just that things are happening that you don’t understand.

There’s a humility to the novel that’s simultaneously alarming and comforting. It allows you to take a deep breath and let go, to recognize that things aren’t always in your power to change.

What’s your theory of reading?

We’re the inheritors and victims of a history that gives too much authority to authors, critics, and teachers. Deferring to their genius is easier than accepting the terrible responsibility to do right by what’s in your hands.

But doing so closes down the possibility of having an experience of your own, of drawing your own meaning and purpose from the margins and the gutters, from between the letters and lines and pages. 

Reading is an escape into reality. You’re simultaneously alone and connected to everything else, which can be wonderful and terrifying—and freeing, especially for people who aren’t allowed to voice their opinions or emotions in society. We need that distance, like Odysseus or Gilgamesh going down to the underworld. And when we come up to the surface, we’re better off for our time in the belly of the beast.

When you read, you occupy your own imaginative space. It may be virtual or metaphysical, but it’s where you carve out what you need for yourself. It’s where you grow.

I see the author as not the sole creator, but a prime reader. Their reading is on the page, but once there, it’s just ink on paper—until someone else opens the book and creates the work anew.

“You can look at a text and think it means one thing—but if you so choose to be a bit generous with your reading, then it becomes kaleidoscopic. You have the opportunity to see a plurality of readings,” says Lehman, who created this 2020 chine collé woodcut titled “How Is the Cat Doing?” on two pages in the references section of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” Photo: Alonso Nichols

What’s the significance of the well?

Lots of Murakami’s characters go down deep into holes and caves where they don’t know what’s happening. Even Murakami has said he doesn’t know. 

And that’s the challenge he offers the reader: What are you going to do about this hole in the text? You could jump over it, or you could dive in. And it could be dangerous. Murakami has said when he goes down, he’s afraid he won’t come back up. 

But it’s in that darkness that subterranean connections are made between unconnected things. When Murakami writes, he’s said, he reaches out to every single reader. He may not have met them, but in this deep place, they’re having a conversation. 

And it’s not real. It operates in this space of imagination. But it undermines the other fictions that we use to structure our lives. It punctures the perceived reality of our day-to-day world, so that true meaning can grow.

Murakami is good at tearing down illusions, revealing facts as theories, replacing either-or with both-and. Rather than right or wrong, he drills down to more essential issues, like true impact. He traces the ways in which balance is violated and restored. 

Are you done with Wind-Up Bird?

I’m like Wile E. Coyote: The moment I look down, I realize this is all meaningless. The moment I stop, I probably just crumble. Turn to dust or something. 

But the more I keep going, the more I feel this purpose and momentum. The more I look, the more images come to mind, the more I find to be excited about, and the richer the text becomes. It’s an art that continuously gets deeper and has no end, a truly irrational project where you take an idea not to its logical conclusion, but way past it.

And I have shingles to thank for how this all started. It’s a Murakami-esque miracle. It only matters to the person who’s involved, but nevertheless, what are the odds?