Week 3 in Murakami Fest 2026! See the other entries here.

The next chapter is “The Roman Parking Situation” (ローマ駐車事情), a mostly filler chapter that Murakami uses, as the title suggests, to describe the parking situation in Rome.

He goes over how and why the parking is so difficult (historic buildings that can’t be torn down) and why cars are still necessary (public transportation isn’t as good as other major cities). He then gets into how Italian cars fit the Italian cityscape (smaller cars for smaller roads), and the importance of sidewalks and parallel parking skills (many drivers end up parking on the sidewalk, double- and even triple-parking happens regularly).

I imagine this must be interesting to anyone in Japan and potentially anyone who didn’t grow up in an older city, but being from New Orleans originally, I was totally familiar with this scene that he describes:

ぎりぎりに車が一台入るか入らないかというくらいのスペースがあれば、これはもう見物として言うことない。そのうちに車がやってくる。ドライヴァーがスピードを緩める。「入るかなあ？」と目測する。「やってみるか」と思う。少し前で停めて、ハザード・ランプをつけて、ゆつくりバックを始める。そのあたりで見物人が出てくる。だいたいは暇そうなおじさんである。僕のように妻が買い物しているあいだ、ぼんやり時間潰しをしているという人間もいる。日本でよく工事現場なんかを腕組みしてぼおおっと見物しているお暇おじさんがいるけれど、なんとなくあの雰囲気に似ている。ドライヴァーはアウトビアンキY10に乗って商店街に買い物に来た普通のシニョーラ（奥さん）だったりするわけだが、これがまた上手い。慣れた手付きですっとお尻をつっこんで、きゅっきゅっと素早く何度か切りかえす。そしてぎりぎりにすぽっと収めてしまう。こういうのは「ブラーヴァ！」である。ものすごく上手いと、ぱちぱちと手を叩く人もいる。みんな肯いたり、「ベルフェット（最高）」と声をかけたりする。イタリア・オペラのアリアと同じである。シニョーラもにこっとして、賞賛に素直に答える。おかしい国である。 (374-375)

There’s no spectacle greater than a space that’s just large enough to be uncertain whether or not a car will fit. Soon enough, a car comes along. The driver slows down. They eyeball the spot: “Wonder if I’ll fit.” And then decide: “Let’s give it a shot.” They stop slightly ahead of the space, turn on their hazards, and start to slowly back up. This is around the point at which spectators start to appear. Usually they are old men who seem to have too much time on their hands. And others like me who are just killing time while their wife shops. In Japan, there are these bored old men who spend all day watching construction sites with their arms crossed. That’s kind of what this resembles. It’s even better when the driver is someone like a regular signora who’s come to shop on the market in her Autobianchi Y10. She points the rear of the car into the spot with an experienced handle and nimbly cuts the wheel back and forth a couple times. And then just barely slides the car in. “Brava!” is what you’d say here. Some people even clap out of admiration. Everyone nods, and someone shouts out “Perfetto!” Just like with an aria at the Italian opera. The signora smiles, a modest response to the praise. It’s a funny country.

My mother drove an El Camino for many years in New Orleans and was able to impress people with her parking skills in the French Quarter. Murakami cites 5.1m as the length of a Mercedes 560 (2.1m longer than the Italian Fiat 500), and an El Camino is just over 5.3 meters. European and Japanese minds cannot conceive of parallel parking a beast like this.

This chapter is a nice transition to the next chapter, in which Murakami will buy a car of his own to cruise around Europe.

Week 2 of Murakami Fest 2026. See previous entries here.

The next section of the book is called “1988, Year of Recovery” (1988年、回復の年), and the first essay is “Canali’s Apartment” (カナーリさんのアパートメント). After living in an inconvenient location in Rome previously, the Murakamis are determined to live somewhere more convenient and end up in a basement apartment of a man named Canali, mostly because they like the guy. He’s a tall Italian in his mid-70s who rides around on a Vespa wearing a “funky” green jacket. He’s also extremely nice, so when they meet him after stumbling upon the apartment and calling to see if there are any availabilities, they take the half basement unit.

Canali does have a first floor unit, but it’s currently occupied by an American businessman who is in the process of moving back to Torino, a process that seems to be interminable. So the Murakamis rent a Mitsubishi Pajero (the same one that Murakami drove to Turkey) and drive around Italy rather than put up with the cold, wet apartment (which Canali is quick to repair for them whenever something goes wrong). It seems like the worst part of their setup is having to do laundry by hand.

They do go back to Japan temporarily during this part of their trip, during which Murakami turns 40 and the Showa Emperor dies (January 7, 1989).

The first floor apartment eventually opens up, and they are able return to a refreshing location with a view of the street below and a lot more light. Murakami puts together a makeshift office and seems to be in a much better position to write. He ends the section writing about how cars can have “expressions,” and how Italian cars have expressions that can change based on circumstances, as opposed to Mercedes Benz and BMW, which only have set expressions.

This is a great chapter and a return to form, so there are a lot of things I could quote from, but I think the death of the Emperor and its effect on Japan is probably the most interesting, so I’ll share this passage:

日本に帰ると、日本のマスコミは天皇報道で埋めつくされていた。大喪の礼というのがあって、日本中の警官が東京に集まって、マンホールの蓋を開けてはそれに封印を貼っていた。たぶん過激派のテロ封じのためなのだろうけれど、イタリアから帰ってきてすぐにそういうのを目にすると、なんだか神経の具合がおかしくなってしまう。我々は日本に帰ったときはずっと渋谷区のアパートに住んでいたのだが、東京で繰り広げられているその手の気違い沙汰にうんざりしたし、しょっちゅう警官が訪ねてくるのがうっとうしかったし、新幹線に乗って九州に行って、騒ぎがおさまるまでのんびり由布院の温泉につかっていることにした。こう言っては語弊があるかもしれないけれど、九州の普通の人たちは大喪の礼のことなんてとくに気にせずに生きていたみたいだった。東京にいると、世界がそれ一色に染まってしまっているみたいに見える。誰に会ってもその話になるし、みんなそれぞれに何のかんのと意見を言う。いろんな意見やら感想やらが細かい塵のように空中を舞って、ぴりぴりと震えている。そういう話をしているだけでなんだかうんざりしてくる。でもありがたいことに、九州ではそういうことはなかった。天皇のお葬式も日常生活とはあまり関係のない「遠くの話」という感じだった。 (364-365)

When we returned to Japan, the mass media was completely saturated with coverage of the emperor. There was his funeral service, and police officers from across Japan had gathered in Tokyo and were opening manhole covers and then affixing seals to them. This was likely to close them off from extremist terrorists, but seeing this right after returning from Italy put me in a bizarre state of mind. We were living in an apartment in Shibuya after returning to Japan, and I got fed up with seeing this madness unfold in Tokyo, plus it was depressing having the police around all the time, so we decided to get on the shinkansen, go to Kyushu, and take it easy at an onsen in Yufuin until everything died down. This might not be completely accurate, but your average person in Kyushu didn’t seem to be fussed about the emperor’s funeral procession. In Tokyo, the entire world was dominated by that single event. Anyone you ran into would end up talking about it and had this or that opinion about it. All these opinions and thoughts and whatnot danced around like a fine dust shimmering in the air. Even just talking about it started to frustrate me. But thankfully there was none of that in Kyushu. The emperor’s funeral felt like “something from afar” without anything to do with daily life.

I don’t think I’d realized that the funeral was taken this seriously (notably before the 1995 subway attacks). Also, very cool that Murakami decided to go down to Yufuin to relax. I mentioned this as one of my favorite spots in Japan on a recent podcast.

It’s interesting that Murakami uses the word うんざり (unzari, tedious/boring/be fed up with) so frequently. This is a word I called out as important in his second novel, Pinball, 1973, when I did my podcast series about his books back in 2023 ahead of The City and Its Uncertain Walls. Just as Murakami was likely sick of the politics of Japan after the end of the student movement, I can see that he was sick of the politics of the emperor’s funeral, describing them both with this word.

Year 19 of Murakami Fest! Unbelievable. See previous entries on this page. This year I’m continuing my read through Murakami’s travel memoir Distant Drums. I would really like to be getting through it at a faster pace, but there’s so much else to do, so this yearly activity might be the only way I do.

The next chapter is titled “1988, A Blank Year” (1988年、空白の年), and Murakami explains that the year is blank because he’s drained after writing Dance Dance Dance. He stops writing the travel sketches that he’s been gradually accumulating over the course of his trip to recover, but because the book is a chronological account of his travels in Europe, he summarizes the period from April to October 1988.

It’s a really interesting period! He’s become a celebrity in Japan and is putting out his next big novel. He’s gone from selling 10,000 copies of his books to selling hundreds of thousands, and several million in the case of Norwegian Wood.

He returns to Japan to go over the proofs for DDD, to work on a book about F. Scott Fitzgerald, and to get his driver’s license because he’s planning to drive in Turkey that fall. While in Japan, Murakami feels isolated. Norwegian Wood is on the bestseller lists, and Kodansha headquarters is draped in green and red, inspired by the covers of the book. It’s impossible for him to gauge his readers, and he feels isolated and even hated, despite the fact that everything is coming up Murakami. He can’t even write, so he translates. He calls translation a 治療行為 (chiryō kōi, a therapeutic act).

He and his wife go to Hawaii to warm up for a month, and he later goes on a writing trip with a photographer and editor to Mt. Athos and to Turkey, but he notes that it isn’t until he translates Tim O’Brien’s The Nuclear Age that he is really able to kick the chill from the Roman winter. He’s so inspired from the book, his translation of which doesn’t sell quite as well as he expects.

The whole chapter is pretty interesting. It’s not as scene-driven as the rest of the book, which is what makes it such strong writing, but it’s so interesting to get inside his mind at that point in time, so I think the piece that I’ll quote from is at the end that ties together translation with how he felt about being a writer:

この作品を訳したあとで、僕はもう一度小説を書きたいという気持ちになっていた。僕という人間の存在証明はおそらく生きながらえ、書きつづけるという行為そのものの中にあるのだと僕は思った。それが何かを失いつづけ、世界に憎まれつづけることを意味するとしても、僕はやはりそのようにして生きていくしかないのだ。それが僕という人間であり、それが僕の場所なのだ。 (355)

After I finished translating this book (The Nuclear Age), I felt like writing a novel again. I started to believe that my proof of existence might be located within the act of living and writing as long as I can. That’s the only way for me to live in the end, even if it means I’ll go on losing things and being hated. That is me as a person, and that is my place.

Murakami refers back to feeling lost on return to Japan. Of not having a “place” after returning from the road. He’s able to find himself in the work, and this is really just the beginning. I’d have to go through and count, but from this point in time onward, he does spend long periods of time outside of Japan. He goes to the U.S. a number of times, including when he was writing Wind-up Bird and some of his essay collections in the 90s, and then he’s back again in the 2000s.