Murakami, Ray Bradbury, and the Inherent Horror of Ferris Wheels

In Sputnik Sweetheart, the major action occurs on a Ferris Wheel. When the character Miu is locked into the Ferris Wheel overnight, she comes down a different person. A split person. Somehow, this Ferris Wheel has irreparably changed her.

This theme of an amusement park doused in otherworldly spookiness is certainly an evocative image, and has been for quite a long time. In popular culture carnivals seem to hold some widely acknowledged inherent horror. After all, how many times have we seen a horror film utilize the tinkling carnival music to enhance the atmospheric pressure? How many children (and adults, for that matter) have admitted to a longstanding fear of clowns? This belief of carnival’s creepiness has also been a longstanding feature of fiction. Sputnik Sweetheart in particular draws from Tender is the Night, but there are a handful of other haunted romps set in amusement parks. The one I’d especially like to mention is Ray Bradbury’s short story, “The Black Ferris,” which he published in 1948 and then later adapted into Something Wicked This Way Comes in 1962.

“The Black Ferris” follows two young boys as they attempt to discover the secret of an old Ferris Wheel at a local carnival. Every night, the 35-year-old man who runs the carnival gets into the Ferris Wheel and has his decrepit, hunchbacked attendant lock him in the car and run the wheel backwards exactly 25 times. He then steps out of the wheel as a 10-year-old boy. Over the course of the story, it is implied that the man is using his youthful form to pose as an orphan and con a lonely local woman. He steals from her, and then goes back around in the Ferris Wheel the right way around and comes out his normal age. Once the boys discover this, they chase him into the Ferris Wheel and knock out the attendant. The man keeps going round and round in the Ferris Wheel, until eventually he becomes so old he withers away into a skeleton.

The Ferris Wheel here reminds me a lot of Murakami’s. Both seem to have some power to irrevocably change the rider, removing or adding some essential park of themselves. In both stories, a character is locked into the wheel and suffers the worst of the wheel’s affects, mostly due to the issues of an old and decrepit wheel attendant. And in both stories, the amusement park itself takes on a somewhat mystical quality, as if untethered by the boundaries of the normal world. Bradbury’s carnival is sort of an echo of the other world found so often in Murakami’s novels.

While I think it is clear that Murakami’s major influence for this section of Sputnik Sweetheart is the Fitzgerald story, it’s fun to think that perhaps he might have been influenced in some way by Bradbury’s work too. Especially because I checked, and there was a translation into Japanese done in 1972 by Norio Itō called 黒い観覧車 (or 黒いカーニバル) which won some awards and was apparently pretty well received. Hey, anything’s possible, right?

Amanda