Prophecy

Year 1: BoobsThe WindBaseballLederhosenEels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year 2: Hotel Lobby OystersCondomsSpinning Around and Around街・町The Town and Its Uncertain WallA Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year 3: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and WeirsThe LibraryOld DreamsSaying GoodbyeLastly
Year 4: More DrawersPhone CallsMetaphorsEight-year-olds, dudeUshikawaLast Line
Year 5: Jurassic SapporoGerry MulliganAll Growns UpDanceMountain Climbing
Year 6: Sex With Fat WomenCoffee With the ColonelThe LibrarianOld ManWatermelons
Year 7: WarmthRebirthWastelandHard-onsSeventeenEmbrace
Year 8: PigeonEditsMagazinesAwkwardnessBack Issues
Year 9: WaterSnæfellsnesCannonballDistant Drumming
Year 10: VermontersWandering and BelongingPeter Cat, Sushi Counter, Murakami Fucks First
Year 11: Embers, Escape, Window Seats, The End of the World
Year 12: Distant Drums, Exhaustion, Kiss, Lack of Pretense, Rotemburo
Year 13: Murakami Preparedness, Pacing Norwegian Wood, Character Studies and Murakami’s Financial Situation, Mental Retreat, Writing is Hard
Year 14: Prostitutes and Novelists, Villa Tre Colli and Norwegian Wood, Surge of Death, On the Road to Meta, Unbelievable
Year 15: Baseball on TV, Kindness, Murakami in the Asahi Shimbun – 日記から – 1982, The Mythology of 1981, Winning and Losing
Year 16: The Closet Massacre, Booze Bus, Old Shoes, Editing Norwegian Wood

The final post in Murakami Fest 2023 is about the very short chapter “Marone’s Apartment” (マローネさんの家).

The Murakamis are back in Rome and only manage to find an apartment thanks to Uvi’s connections. The apartment is in a private neighborhood in the suburbs outside of Rome surrounded by a wall. It’s owned by a woman from Naples named Marone. She’s married to an Englishman, works in the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and owns three apartments in the neighborhood.

Murakami gives a quick description of Marone, the neighborhood, her daughters, and their dogs before talking about how miserable the apartment itself was: It’s cold, moldy, and it leaks when it rains. They try to find a new place, but it’s hopeless and they end up staying there for 10 months.

I have just a short little passage to share, the last little bit, the only section dealing with Murakami’s work:

“Nothing ever good will come while we’re living somewhere like this,” my wife foretold. And her prophecy was, in a certain sense, exactly right.

While living here, I did a few translations and managed to write the novel Dance Dance Dance. In terms of work, things proceeded smoothly. Facing the prospect of turning 40, I did work I was somewhat pleased with. But in other terms, there were a lot of painful challenges.

「こんなところにいるとろくなことないわよ」と女房は予言したのだが、その予言はある意味ではたしかに当たっていた。

僕はここにいる間にいくつか翻訳の仕事をしたし、『ダンス・ダンス・ダンス』という長編小説を書きあげることもできた。仕事の面では順調にことは捗ったと思う。四十歳を前にして、まずまず満足できる仕事ができたと思う。でもそれ以外の面ではいろいろときついことが多かった。 (281)

That’s a nice way to wrap up this year. We’ll have to wait and see what these challenges are.

This is Murakami at his most productive. Living in less than ideal conditions in Europe, carting around dozens of handwritten notebooks with his most famous writing, somehow passing them off to editors and publishers or flying them back to Japan himself so that he can go over the galleys, only to get back on the plane and isolate himself in Europe. I wonder if he would do anything differently knowing how his career would turn out.

At any rate, I’m already looking forward to reading more and have had to resist the urge to speed ahead. Although, perhaps I will turn this site into a more dedicated analysis of the book at some point, if I ever am badly in need of writing material.

How to Japanese Podcast – Episode 43 – それが

Ahoy! Here’s the podcast, kanjilubbers!

This month I’m talking about the message behind the message, inspired in part by my high school calculus teacher, Dr. Collins. Check out the newsletter for more detailed content about the excellent conjunction それが, which is a very efficient way to express the subversion of expectations.

And here are the tweets from Yuta that I mentioned in the podcast. Pretty interesting food for thought!

Editing Norwegian Wood

Year 1: BoobsThe WindBaseballLederhosenEels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year 2: Hotel Lobby OystersCondomsSpinning Around and Around街・町The Town and Its Uncertain WallA Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year 3: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and WeirsThe LibraryOld DreamsSaying GoodbyeLastly
Year 4: More DrawersPhone CallsMetaphorsEight-year-olds, dudeUshikawaLast Line
Year 5: Jurassic SapporoGerry MulliganAll Growns UpDanceMountain Climbing
Year 6: Sex With Fat WomenCoffee With the ColonelThe LibrarianOld ManWatermelons
Year 7: WarmthRebirthWastelandHard-onsSeventeenEmbrace
Year 8: PigeonEditsMagazinesAwkwardnessBack Issues
Year 9: WaterSnæfellsnesCannonballDistant Drumming
Year 10: VermontersWandering and BelongingPeter Cat, Sushi Counter, Murakami Fucks First
Year 11: Embers, Escape, Window Seats, The End of the World
Year 12: Distant Drums, Exhaustion, Kiss, Lack of Pretense, Rotemburo
Year 13: Murakami Preparedness, Pacing Norwegian Wood, Character Studies and Murakami’s Financial Situation, Mental Retreat, Writing is Hard
Year 14: Prostitutes and Novelists, Villa Tre Colli and Norwegian Wood, Surge of Death, On the Road to Meta, Unbelievable
Year 15: Baseball on TV, Kindness, Murakami in the Asahi Shimbun – 日記から – 1982, The Mythology of 1981, Winning and Losing
Year 16: The Closet Massacre, Booze Bus, Old Shoes

Helsinki in 1968, right around when Murakami would have been at Waseda.

Week 4 in Murakami Fest 2023. We’re looking at his travel memoir Distant Drums (遠い太鼓).

Murakami divides the book into another section here titled “1987, Summer to Fall” (1987年、夏から秋), and the first subsection is “Helsinki” (ヘルシンキ). The Murakamis spend five nights in Helsinki en route back to Rome. It’s a chilly September, 8C when they land, equivalent to the end of November in Tokyo.

Murakami notes that the food is plentiful but limited in the winter when the selection drops off. He decides to skip a Bob Dylan-Tom Petty concert because of the weather (which I bet he regrets now!) and makes the funny comment “that guy’s already pretty old” (あの人ももうけっこうな歳だし) (276) when he notes that he’s worried about Bob being out in the weather. Instead he attends the symphony and gives his thoughts on the music choices.

The most interesting part of this section, however, is the very beginning. The Murakamis head back to Tokyo for the summer, returning to Japan for the first time in a year. I thought that he noted they were there for three months, but now I can’t find that passage. He notes that they return in 初夏 (early summer) and then are off to Helsinki in early September. While in Japan, he’s taking care of all the writing and translation work he’s done. Here’s what he has to say:

In early summer 1987, we returned to Japan for the first time in almost a year. I had to go for the galleys of Norwegian Wood. Even the very doubtful Yoko Kinoshita at Kodansha (although she herself insists she isn’t) said, “The book was really interesting.” Well, that’s good to hear. I’d been worried they’d say something like, “What the hell is this? This is just long.” I also checked the translations of Paul Theroux’s World’s End and [C.D.B.] Bryant’s The Great Dethriffe I did while I was on the Continent (which feels like a very old phrase). Essentially I was handling a year’s worth of publications. Although it’s my job, it was tough with all the things I had do. It ended up eating up the whole summer.

We set the design for three books, I went back and forth at meetings with editors over small details, and once we’d arranged everything so that all that remained was to print them, I left Japan again. I felt like a housewife who cooks and freezes a week’s worth of food in one go. It was a brief trip home, but there was a lot that wore me out. My brain got all wrapped up around itself getting together with people and with the endless, unrelenting appearance of various administrative work. It’s tough that we won’t be able to have good Japanese food for a while, but I guess there’s nothing we can do about it.

一九八七年の初夏にほぼ一年振りに日本に戻った。『ノルウェイの森』のゲラに手を入れるためだ。猜疑心の強い講談社の木下陽子さん(本人はそんなことないと主張するけれど)も「うん、とても面白かった」と言ってくれた。まあ良かった。「何ですかこれ、ただ単に長いだけじゃないですか」なんて言われたらどうしようと思って心配していたのだ。それから滞欧中(というのもなんとなく古い言葉だけど)に仕上げたポール・ゼローの『ワールズ・エンド』とブラインの『偉大なるデスリフ』の翻訳ゲラもチェックする。一年ぶんの出版物の仕込みをまとめてやっちゃうわけである。これが仕事とはいえ、やることがいっぱいあって大変である。夏がまるまる潰れてしまった。

三冊ぶんの本の装幀を決め、編集者とあれこれいろんな細かい打ち合わせをして、これでもうあとは印刷するだけというところまできちんと手筈を整えてから、また日本を出る。なんだか一週間ぶんの料理を一度に作って冷凍する主婦みたいである。日本を出たのは九月始め。短い帰国だったけれど、結構疲れることが多かった。人とのつきあいとか、いもづる式にあとからあとから出てくる事務的な雑用とか、いろいろと頭の中がもつれてくる。美味しい日本料理がしばらく食べられないのは辛いけれど、まあ仕方ない。 (273-274)

And that’s it. That’s the peek we get at what publishing life was like for Murakami pre-Norwegian Wood. No wonder he was exhausted! He knocks out the edits for two translations and his most famous novel over the course of a hot, humid Japanese summer.

It’s interesting that the only little anecdote we get is the small phrase from Yoko Kinoshita. (She came up previously in one other Murakami Fest post and during the Murakami podcast I did; she worked on Hear the Wind Sing and wrote a blog post about that experience. See the links in the translation above.) I guess this book is a travel memoir at its core and any incidents during that trip home necessarily need to be skipped over (I wonder if he wrote about them somewhere else), but it does feel a little surprising that he doesn’t narrate any other stories in Japan. I wonder if it was a choice or if his vision was in a different place. Maybe because he was back in Japan, he turned off that constant state of awareness that’s natural when you’re traveling. I’ll have to look through his bibliography and see what I can find.

Last Murakami Fest post next week!

Old Shoes

Year 1: BoobsThe WindBaseballLederhosenEels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year 2: Hotel Lobby OystersCondomsSpinning Around and Around街・町The Town and Its Uncertain WallA Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year 3: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and WeirsThe LibraryOld DreamsSaying GoodbyeLastly
Year 4: More DrawersPhone CallsMetaphorsEight-year-olds, dudeUshikawaLast Line
Year 5: Jurassic SapporoGerry MulliganAll Growns UpDanceMountain Climbing
Year 6: Sex With Fat WomenCoffee With the ColonelThe LibrarianOld ManWatermelons
Year 7: WarmthRebirthWastelandHard-onsSeventeenEmbrace
Year 8: PigeonEditsMagazinesAwkwardnessBack Issues
Year 9: WaterSnæfellsnesCannonballDistant Drumming
Year 10: VermontersWandering and BelongingPeter Cat, Sushi Counter, Murakami Fucks First
Year 11: Embers, Escape, Window Seats, The End of the World
Year 12: Distant Drums, Exhaustion, Kiss, Lack of Pretense, Rotemburo
Year 13: Murakami Preparedness, Pacing Norwegian Wood, Character Studies and Murakami’s Financial Situation, Mental Retreat, Writing is Hard
Year 14: Prostitutes and Novelists, Villa Tre Colli and Norwegian Wood, Surge of Death, On the Road to Meta, Unbelievable
Year 15: Baseball on TV, Kindness, Murakami in the Asahi Shimbun – 日記から – 1982, The Mythology of 1981, Winning and Losing
Year 16: The Closet Massacre, Booze Bus

Nida Plateau, Crete – via Wikimedia Commons

Murakami Fest 2023 Week 3!

The chapter we’re looking at this week is “A Small Hotel in a Small Village on Crete” (クレタ島の小さな村と小さなホテル).

This is a very short five-page chapter with the Murakamis having a quick overnight at an unnamed small town on Crete with one hotel, two restaurants, and one supermarket. This is a great example of how economical Murakami can be when he wants to be. The chapter is six pages and is made up of a handful of anecdotes loosely tied together and cleanly penned.

Murakami notes that the hotel has a library of books in dozens of languages that have been abandoned by travelers. He picks up a copy of Honkytonk Gelato: Travels Through Texas by Stephen Brook, which he pans by calling it “a boring book with an interesting title” (題材が面白くて内容のつまらない本) (265).

The town is so small that there are no locks on the doors, and the door actually opens and closes with the wind, making noise and generating a bizarre dream about Beethoven. After dinner, which includes more delicious local wine, a group of local kids asks him to show them kung fu, which he dutifully performs for them based on his viewings of Bruce Lee.

He then ends the chapter with this great little anecdote, which I think will be familiar to anyone who’s lived in a foreign country where the rules for throwing out garbage are different from their home country:

The next day we waited for the bus to Rethimno while eating lunch at Ioannis Taverna. In the seat next to me, a solo Englishman who looked like a tired, aged David Bowie (so basically, David Bowie these days) ate a gross looking bowl of beef stew atop which floated a thick covering of grease. We had just wine and salad. The bus came, so I paid the bill, quietly placed a worn out pair of Nikes that I’d been unsuccessfully trying to throw out for a week (for some reason, whenever I tried, someone brought them back to me) under the table in a paper bag, and got on the bus. The bus drove off. Finally, I had managed to throw them out. However, it was no good. Ioannis went out of his way to stop the bus. “Kyrios (you), you forgot this. There were my worn out Nike jogging shoes. They clung to me stubbornly like a small mistake I’d made in the past that no one would forget. “Thanks,” I said and took the paper bag.

What else could I have said?

Thus we left the small mountain town in Crete. That town we’d likely never visit again.

When we got to Rethimno, I of course pretended not to notice that I’d shoved the bag with my Nikes under my seat. But I still worried the whole night. That someone would knock on my hotel room door with my shoes. That they’d say, “Kyrios, you forgot this.” But of course no one did. That took long enough.

翌日、イヤニスのタヴェルナで昼食を食べながらレシムノン行きのバスを待つ。隣のテーブルではデヴィッド・ボウイが疲れて年老いたような(要するに最近のデヴィッド・ボウイのような)顔つきの一人旅のイギリス人が、脂がべっとりと浮いた牛肉の煮込みをいかにも不味そうに食べている。我々はワインとサラダだけを食べる。バスが来たので僕は勘定を払い、一週間から捨てようと思いつつ果たせなかったぼろぼろのナイキ・シューズを(僕がそれを捨てるたびに、どういうわけか誰かが届けてくれるのだ)紙袋にくるんでそっとテーブルの下に置き、バスに乗り込む。バスが発車する。やれやれ、やっと捨てることができた。しかし駄目だ。イヤニスがわざわざバスを呼び止めている。「キリオス(あんた)、これ忘れてる」僕のぼろぼろのナイキ・ジョギング・シューズ。それは誰も忘れてくれないちょっとした過去の過ちのように、僕にしつこくまつわりついている。「ありがとう」と僕は言って、その紙包みを受け取る。

他になんて言えばいいのだ?

そのようにして我々はそのクレタ島の山あいの小さな村をあとにした。もうこの先二度と訪れないであろうその村を。

レシムノンに着いたとき、もちろん僕はそしらぬ顔をしてバスの座席の下にナイキ・シューズの包みをつっこんでいった。でも夜が明けるまで僕はずっと心配だった。誰かがホテルの部屋のドアをノックして、その靴を届けにくるじゃないかと。「キリオス、忘れ物のだ」と。でももちろん誰も来なかった。やれやれ。 (268-269)

I just recently bought a new pair of shoes here in Japan. I wear size 13, but strangely enough, this corresponds to 30.5 cm, and there are no half sizes here, so I will occasionally end up buying size 14 shoes. This last time I did, I was relieved that the store took my old pair for me. I don’t think it hurt that I’d bought the last pair from the same store. I definitely worried about leaving the shoes in the trash only to find them sitting by the side of my apartment when I returned home from work. Osaka is forgiving about trash, but I did see two bags marked with “We were unable to collect this” stamps the other day for the first time.

I’m sure Murakami struggled because this was the countryside. Funny to see how universal these things are.

Booze Bus

Year 1: BoobsThe WindBaseballLederhosenEels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year 2: Hotel Lobby OystersCondomsSpinning Around and Around街・町The Town and Its Uncertain WallA Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year 3: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and WeirsThe LibraryOld DreamsSaying GoodbyeLastly
Year 4: More DrawersPhone CallsMetaphorsEight-year-olds, dudeUshikawaLast Line
Year 5: Jurassic SapporoGerry MulliganAll Growns UpDanceMountain Climbing
Year 6: Sex With Fat WomenCoffee With the ColonelThe LibrarianOld ManWatermelons
Year 7: WarmthRebirthWastelandHard-onsSeventeenEmbrace
Year 8: PigeonEditsMagazinesAwkwardnessBack Issues
Year 9: WaterSnæfellsnesCannonballDistant Drumming
Year 10: VermontersWandering and BelongingPeter Cat, Sushi Counter, Murakami Fucks First
Year 11: Embers, Escape, Window Seats, The End of the World
Year 12: Distant Drums, Exhaustion, Kiss, Lack of Pretense, Rotemburo
Year 13: Murakami Preparedness, Pacing Norwegian Wood, Character Studies and Murakami’s Financial Situation, Mental Retreat, Writing is Hard
Year 14: Prostitutes and Novelists, Villa Tre Colli and Norwegian Wood, Surge of Death, On the Road to Meta, Unbelievable
Year 15: Baseball on TV, Kindness, Murakami in the Asahi Shimbun – 日記から – 1982, The Mythology of 1981, Winning and Losing
Year 16: The Closet Massacre

Week Two in Murakami Fest 2023. The next chapter is a bit more substantial, as suggested by the longer title “Going to Crete from Mykonos / The Bathtub Battle / The Light and Dark of the Route 101 Booze Bus” (ミコノスからクレタ島に行く・バスタブをめぐる攻防・酒盛りバス101号の光と影).

It’s just after Easter in Athens. Prime Minister Nakasone is meeting with Reagan. There’s 137 yen to the dollar. Murakami watches Platoon in a movie theater. They head back to Mykonos and stay with Vangelis again, who is glad to see the Murakamis and thrilled that they brought shoes for his grandchild.

Unfortunately, the weather, which was beautiful and perhaps unseasonably warm in Athens, has gotten cold, so they can’t take advantage of the beaches. They are even unable to escape to Crete: The wind grounds planes for the next few days, necessitating a frustrating back and forth between the airport and the hotel due to the lack of information readily available about when the next flight will leave. On the fourth day they finally make it out.

The hotel in Crete is under construction, so unfortunately the bathtub they went out of their way to ensure they would have is rendered useless: There’s no hot water until their final day at the hotel. Murakami goes through a long description of his conversation with the hotel worker and the delays.

While there, they take a bus to the beach where backpackers are kind of wandering around since it’s too cold to actually swim. The bus ride back, however, is eventful. The driver and conductor make a stops at two small villages, acquiring a large bottle of wine and a wheel of cheese. A Greek woman asks the driver if he’s been drinking. He laughs and says he’s been drinking water before encouraging the woman to try some wine. It isn’t long before the conductor is wielding a sharp knife on the bumpy road, distributing cheese and wine to the passengers. Murakami says it’s the best wine and cheese he’s had on the trip, and fortunately they make it to their destination without any issue.

But this isn’t the only encounter with Bus 101. They happen to ride with the same driver, different conductor, a couple days later:

So, the premonition I’d had at the time about the Route 101 party bus ended up being right on the money. While the bus was running, the luggage compartment opened—the conductor hadn’t shut it securely—and two pieces of passenger luggage inside tumbled out onto the road. The bus was going around 100 km/h, and neither the driver nor the conductor realized they’d fallen out, but luckily a backpacker sitting in the back row noticed and yelled out and the bus managed to stop. Then we backed up to collect the fallen luggage. This is probably when I should write “Well that’s nice” or something, but it actually wasn’t nice at all. That’s because those two pieces of luggage were both our luggage. One was a large Millet backpack I carried and the other was my wife’s nylon bag. We got out of the bus to inspect the damage, and the Millet had a hole in it from where it had hit the ground. Of course, I complained to the conductor, but would my complaints result in anything? Of course not. Language would just fruitlessly move the air around. They could barely understand English. There wasn’t anything I could do, so I showed the conductor the hole in the backpack. And then using my body language, here’s what I told him: What the hell are you going to do about this? Look at this hole. The conductor shrugged and spread out his hands. Then he pointed to the door. Look, the door opened up. Come on, man, you don’t have to tell me that. It’s your fault that it opened. You do understand that it’s your fault, I yelled in English and French and Japanese. (When I get angry people can understand my Japanese.) But no matter what I did it was a waste of time. It was like asking an Irish elk I’d run into on the road for directions in Spanish. “Excuse me, Mr. Elk. Where’s the entrance to the forest?” Everything I did and said would be useless. Asking the elk for directions in the first place was a mistake. I wanted to say something but just inhaled and let it out the breath. I shook my head in vain. The conductor shook his head in the same way. Then he patted me on the shoulder as if to say, what a disaster.

さて宴会バス101号についてのそのときの僕の不吉な予感も、また見事に的中した。バスが走っている最中にバスの荷物室の蓋が開いて―車掌が蓋をきちんと閉めなかったのだ―中に入れてあった乗客の荷物がふたつ道路にころげ落ちてしまった。バスは百キロくらいのスピードを出していて、荷物が落ちたことには運転手も車掌も気が付かなかったのだが、幸いなことに一番後ろの席に座っていたバックパッカーがそれに気づいて大声を上げ、なんんとかバスは停車した。そしてバックして落ちた荷物を回収した。まあ、良かった……というべきところだが、実はあまり良くない。何故ならその二つの荷物というのは二つとも我々の荷物だったからだ。ひとつは僕がかついでいるミレの大型のバックパック、もう一つは女房の持っているナイロンのバッグ。バスから降りて調べてみると、ミレのバックパックの方は路面に叩きつけられて見事に穴があいている。もちろん僕は車掌に文句を言うけれど、文句を言ってそれで何かの結論に到達するだろうか?もちろんしない。言語が虚しく空間を行き来するだけである。英語は殆ど通じない。しかたないから僕は車掌にバックパックに開いた穴を見せる。そしてボディー・ランゲージでこう言う。どうするんだよ、穴開いたんだぞ。車掌は肩をすくめ、両手を広げる。そして扉を指差す。ここ、開いてたんだ。おいおい、そんなこと言われなくったってわかってんだよ、だから、それお前のせいだろうが。わかるか、それお前のせいなんだ、と僕は英語とフランス語と日本語で叫ぶ(はらがたっているときには結構日本語が通じるのだ)。でも何をしたところで時間の無駄なのだ。道で出会ったオオツノジカに向かってスペイン語で道を尋ねているのと同じなのだ。「すみませんが、オオツノジカさん、森の出口はどちらでしょうか?」何をしても何を言っても無駄なのだ。オオツノジカに道を訊くほうが間違っているのだ。僕は何かを言おうと思って吸い込んだ息をそのまま吐き出す。そして虚しく頭を振る。車掌も同じように頭を振る。そして僕の肩をとんとんと叩く。まったく災難だったね、というように。
(262-263)

This is the “shadow” from the title of the chapter. A bit of a long and winding chapter but very entertaining. It’s always a pleasure to be on the road with Murakami.

The Closet Massacre

Welcome to Year 16 of Murakami Fest! This year, as hinted in last month’s newsletter and podcast, I’ll be continuing my look at 遠い太鼓 (Distant Drums), Murakami’s travel memoir from his years living in Europe.

Patras Station, 1981. A bus is brought in to replace the broken down Patras-Athens train. Via Wikimedia.

Year 1: BoobsThe WindBaseballLederhosenEels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year 2: Hotel Lobby OystersCondomsSpinning Around and Around街・町The Town and Its Uncertain WallA Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year 3: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and WeirsThe LibraryOld DreamsSaying GoodbyeLastly
Year 4: More DrawersPhone CallsMetaphorsEight-year-olds, dudeUshikawaLast Line
Year 5: Jurassic SapporoGerry MulliganAll Growns UpDanceMountain Climbing
Year 6: Sex With Fat WomenCoffee With the ColonelThe LibrarianOld ManWatermelons
Year 7: WarmthRebirthWastelandHard-onsSeventeenEmbrace
Year 8: PigeonEditsMagazinesAwkwardnessBack Issues
Year 9: WaterSnæfellsnesCannonballDistant Drumming
Year 10: VermontersWandering and BelongingPeter Cat, Sushi Counter, Murakami Fucks First
Year 11: Embers, Escape, Window Seats, The End of the World
Year 12: Distant Drums, Exhaustion, Kiss, Lack of Pretense, Rotemburo
Year 13: Murakami Preparedness, Pacing Norwegian Wood, Character Studies and Murakami’s Financial Situation, Mental Retreat, Writing is Hard
Year 14: Prostitutes and Novelists, Villa Tre Colli and Norwegian Wood, Surge of Death, On the Road to Meta, Unbelievable
Year 15: Baseball on TV, Kindness, Murakami in the Asahi Shimbun – 日記から – 1982, The Mythology of 1981, Winning and Losing

The next chapter is “Easter Weekend in Patras and the Closet Massacre – April 1987” (パトラスにおける復活祭の週末とクローゼットの虐殺 1987年4月).

The Murakamis are returning to Greece from Italy, relieved to be going back to a familiar place. Murakami begins by noticing the different variety of backpackers, their appearances, and their travel styles. The northern Europeans in particular are looking to suffer while traveling during their youth—staying in the cheapest hotels, avoiding restaurants, barely spending money. There are few Italians who backpack. He notices a few on the ferry, and they’re loud and rowdy, and he eventually watches them board a group bus.

They spend the night at the port town of Patras rather than kill themselves trying to make it all the way to Athens in one day. The rest of the chapter is a really nice little story of staying the night there and then finally making it to Athens.

Murakami begins this section ominously: パトラスでは幾つかの出来事があった (There were a number of incidents in Patras) (245).

The first is the titular “closet massacre.” Murakami got into the habit of locking his camera in the closet while in Italy, and when they return to the room, the key snaps off in the lock. A woman from the hotel comes and first tries pulling, kicking, and slamming into it to no avail (and to the unease of Murakamis). She says she’ll go get a “tool” and returns with a grapefruit-sized rock that she pounds on the closet handle.

“I think things are worse than when we started,” my wife said.

“I was thinking the same thing,” I said.

“Maybe they should call a locksmith?”

“There’s no way they could get someone like that on Easter weekend,” I said. There was zero chance they’d be able to ring up a locksmith and have them bolt over here on Easter weekend. It’d even be unlikely on a weekday with nothing going on.

As we were saying all this, the woman came back with a new rock. This time she had a solid block of marble. It looked powerful. She showed it to us with a proud smile. We couldn’t help but smile back. What else were we supposed to do?

Then the woman energetically began the closet massacre. She slammed the marble like the graphic text on the “Batman” TV show: CRASH! BOOM! BLITZ! Pieces of wood flew in the air. A giant hole opened in the door, and we finally got our camera back. It was very simple. But I wondered what the people who stayed in this room after us would think happened here when they looked at the closet door and saw this massive hole. That said, I thought further, come to think of it, I had seen holes like that in other hotel rooms before.

「事態は前より悪くなってるんじゃないかしら?」と女房は言う。

「そんな気もするけど」と僕は言う。

「専門家を呼んでもらった方がいいんじゃない?」

「復活祭の週末にそんなもの来ない」と僕は言う。復活祭の週末に、鍵の専門家が電話一本で飛んで来てくれるわけがないじゃないか。何もない平日だって相当疑わしいというのに。

とかなんとか言っているうちにおばさんが新たな石を手に戻ってくる。今度のはがっちりとした大理石のブロックである。見るからに強力そうだ。おばさんはそれをぼくらに見せて得意げににっこりする。僕らも仕方なくにっこりする。他にどうすればいい?

それからおばさんは元気いっぱいクローゼットの虐殺にとりかかる。テレビの『バットマン』の吹き出しみたいにCRASH! BOOM! BLITZ! と石を叩きつける。木片が飛び散る。戸に大きな穴が開き、我々はやっとカメラを取り戻す。とてもシンプルである。でも僕は思う、これから先この部屋に泊まる人々はこのクローゼットの戸に開いた大きな穴を見ていったい何を考えるのだろうか、と。でも、と僕は更に思う。そういえばこういうタイプの穴を、どこか別のホテルで前にも見たことあるな、と。 (246-247)

The woman later knocks on the door in the middle of the night, this time to give them Greek Easter bread (which must be tsoureki).

Murakami ends the chapter really nicely. They end up eating the bread during a break in their bus ride the next day. The weather is perfect; spring has arrived in Greece, and everyone is grilling sheep to celebrate. He relays a conversation with a young English woman on holiday, and when the bus eventually breaks down, she and the Murakamis hail a cab while the drivers are just staring at the dead bus:

A wide variety of things died on Easter weekend, 1987.

Tens of thousands of sheep, a closet at the Adonis Hotel, and the engine of a bus to Athens. None of it was my fault.

一九八七年の復活祭の週末には、けっこういろんな物が死んだ。

数万頭の羊たちと、アドニス・ホテルのクローゼットと、アテネ行きのバスのエンジン。僕のせいじゃない。 (249)

Check back next week to see where the Murakamis are off to next.

How to Japanese Podcast – Episode 42 – のだ

I remember vividly learning how to use んだ in Japanese. My third year teacher did a section on storytelling/explaining, and she had us tell different stories over and over again using んだ as a sort of emphasis/explanation when we were setting up some of the details of the story.

This んだ is actually のだ and it has its own dictionary definition. I wrote about it in the newsletter this month and discussed it on the podcast. I found some examples from Murakami (more of which I’ll be looking at during Murakami Fest next month).

These aren’t the best examples. I need to track down some examples from more argumentative/formal writing where the のだ really helps clearly present a conclusion based on a set of reasoning, but I think these examples will help get you into using this pattern both in written and spoken Japanese.

If you’re not already using んだ in your spoken Japanese, I think it’s one of the easier ways to sound natural, but knowing exactly when to deploy it and what exactly does can be very subtle at times. Let me know if this helps!

How to Japanese Podcast – Episode 41 – Kanji


I have such good memories of the Fourth of July 2021. It was a perfect day in Chicago. Clear and warm but not hot, and when the sun went down there was a crisp breeze off the lake. For dinner, I walked over to The Bar on Buena, a local restaurant with a mix of American food and Mexican food, a solid selection of local taps, and a surprisingly deep bourbon list for a neighborhood spot. I ordered a BLT and a Surly Helles, a seriously bitter Pilsner. Beer memories are always illusive, but for whatever reason I remember Surly Helles so clearly.

After the sun went down, I biked over to Montrose Harbor and then north along the lake, watching families grill and set off fireworks. I stopped around Foster, lay my bike in the grass, and sat down to watch the end of the big fireworks display someone was firing off.

Then I called it a day and biked home.

I didn’t really push it. I remember wanting to wake up refreshed the next day so I could start working on the new materials for the Japanese program I was starting. It was the start of the last school year I’ll ever have, and I had that same giddy excitement that I’ve had almost every year. So much potential. So much new. So much to learn.

This giddy energy is a helpful way to start projects like a new course of study, but they generally take more to sustain. Somehow I managed to keep this particular project going for nearly two years. I wrote about this in my newsletter this month, and talked about it on the podcast, which I’ll be trying to keep up monthly as an audio accompaniment (not a direct transcript of) that newsletter.

Give it a listen, like, and subscribe!

How to Japanese Podcast – S03E10 – Review of The City and Its Uncertain Walls

It took me two months, but I finally got through my review of The City and Its Uncertain Walls. Here are my thoughts. The review itself is online over at Medium. And I added a few more additional nuggets over at Substack, so give that a read as well.

To give the old TL;DR, it is not a good book, unfortunately.

The Stakes in “Tears of the Kingdom”

This year has been a bit of a wash so far in terms of my own productivity. I caught COVID in early January, fell into a Murakami hole from February to May, and am now fully immersed in Hyrule. I can’t recommend Tears of the Kingdom (TotK) highly enough. I probably need to take a break from it (as of May 30, I’m about 50 hours in), but it is…unparalleled in terms of breadth.

If you haven’t played it yet and are trying to avoid spoilers (which I’d recommend if possible), it’s probably best not to read on. I won’t be saying much, but I’ll be saying something.

I’ve been consuming a ton of media about Tears of the Kingdom as well. Polygon’s article “Tears of the Kingdom is saving me from my checklist obsession” captures an aspect of the game that I also felt about Breath of the Wild, which I played and then set aside before eventually picking back up and finishing. I liked it enough to start a second game last fall (which was also derailed by Murakami). I think I enjoyed it even more the second time. I had the right state of mindfulness to enjoy the game for what it was whenever I happened to be playing it. I didn’t force it along the path. I tried to take it as it came. Whether that was doing a quick shrine puzzle at lunch, exploring a landscape and hunting down Koroks in an area I’d never been before, or advancing the story. BotW is mindfulness condensed into game form. (I also played it English. I’ve realized that I need to play games in English first to understand mechanics so that they don’t feel like study.)

TotK feels denser, and some have argued that it doesn’t have the same open, empty, almost lonely “vibes” as BotW. One of these is The Bad End podcast episode about TotK.

I’d agree with that statement for the most part. BotW feels much more, for lack of a better word, wild. The same sense of mindfulness is, I think, critical to enjoying TotK, but the game perhaps doesn’t distill it as purely as BotW.

That said, I do think TotK does have vibes. It’s just that all of the TotK vibes are stored in a single place: The Depths. This is what I hate to spoil for anyone (which is why I won’t post a screenshot). Essentially, Nintendo created an abstract almost blank wilderness in TotK and set it underneath Hyrule, totally confounding all expectations they created for the game; nearly every trailer and promo for the game heavily emphasized the sky islands, and in a true miracle, most everyone writing about and reporting on the game seems to have maintained an embargo for content about the Depths. While the sky islands do play an important part of the game and have their own unique atmosphere (I love the Philip Glass-inspired minimalist brass soundtrack), I think the Depths captures that sense of the unknown, the expansive, the surprising, and the dangerous that BotW offered us for the first time. It doesn’t hurt that the music for the Depths is hands down the best in the game.

I do think that the next Zelda game will have to reboot the series entirely: I don’t know if the center will hold for much longer. I’m sure there’s something that Nintendo could add to expand the game, maybe even to the degree that TotK expands BotW (?!), but I wonder whether that’s the best idea.

The Bad End podcast is one of the very few complex critical voices I’ve seen discuss TotK, and some aspects they are slightly down on are the story (I laughed out loud when they asked why Zelda hadn’t looked in the basement before) and the mechanics (I think asking whether missiles and homing devices and Minecraft dynamics belong in Zelda is a fair question, but the game is still great for these additions).

But I’m not sure I understand the “Permaweird” angle they take. The podcast uses Venkatesh Rao’s article “The Permaweird” to discuss Hyrule as an encapsulation of the (need for a?) permanent state of crisis in the world.

(The theory itself to me feels like an extremely complicated form of bothsidesism, to be honest. It feels like a true crisis when Republicans are actively disenfranchising minority voters, attempting to make it illegal to be part of the LTBTQ community, and continuing to support the gun lobby, so I can’t help feeling gaslit whenever someone tries to criticize the need for collective urgency. The Bad End is using the theory in a different sense, I think, although I’ll admit I may not fully understand their approach.)

I prefer to use “One Punch Man” as a metaphor for TotK. If you haven’t seen the anime, you should drop what you’re doing and watch it immediately (between sessions of TotK, of course), but basically it’s a send up of “Dragon Ball Z” and other famous anime combined with the satirization of trade associations. The central element it criticizes is the relentless need to find a larger threat, a more evil villain, a more pressing disaster, a more intense voice actor.

To a certain extent, the stakes in Zelda—as in superhero movies—will always be 0 or 100. The world will either end or it won’t. Evil will triumph or it won’t. Otherwise, what’s the point, really?

This is why superhero franchises reboot constantly. A reboot allows them to start fresh without needing to one up (One Punch, as it were) the stakes.

For now, however, TotK has miraculously managed to one up the stakes. Nintendo made a shrewd decision when they used Calamity Ganon as the BotW villain. Calamity Ganon is more abstract and cloud-like than Ganon has been in many Zelda entries. TotK seems to surpass this, ironically, by making Ganon more of a human threat.

Maybe there’s another angle they can take, something that would make me want to spend another 100+ hours in a Hyrule that looks and feels very similar to BotW and TotK, but I’m starting to get the sinking feeling that if they did, I might not be pulled back into the world in quite the same way.

Apologies for the lack of Japanese content this month. I can say that TotK enables you to easily select the Japanese language voice track in the settings so that the cutscenes play almost like an anime. And don’t forget that playing the game in Japanese (and “cheating” in Japanese) is a perfectly good way to study.