Murakami’s latest novel—The Tale of Kaho—comes out tomorrow in Japan, and he did me the biggest favor in the world by publishing it as a series of stories and novellas over the past three years. I’ve had a chance to read and digest these (even if I had to scramble because I didn’t realize he’d published the third of the series or that he revised the first story!), and I put my thoughts up on Medium.
I’m planning to put out a podcast soon, hopefully this weekend, so I’ll probably update this post with that link. I don’t think I’ll have finished the book yet, but I’ll have a good idea of what if any revisions or additions he made even with a pretty quick glance.
I hope that he adds something because as it currently stands, Kaho’s story is not very good.
The next chapter (and the final post for this year’s Murakami Fest) is titled “London” (ロンドン), and it’s one of the most interesting chapters in the book so far. The past few chapters have all been relatively short and somewhat focused, so it’s interesting that this longer chapter covers a month-long period that Murakami spends alone in London writing Dance Dance Dance while his wife is back in Japan. Perhaps this makes sense. Just as Murakami devotes long sections of his novels to protagonists spending time by themselves, he also goes into great detail about his own time alone in his memoir:
I just kind of ended up in London, as it were. My wife had something to attend and went back to Japan for a while via London, so I went to see her off. Which is how I ended up staying there for around a month from the start of March until the end, and during that period I was cooped up in my room working and hardly spoke with anyone. Whenever I’m writing a full-length novel, that’s almost always the case, but this time I didn’t ever feel a particular need to talk with anyone. So for me, London is a quiet, taciturn city. It left that impression deep within me.
He looks at three apartments and ends up in a small studio right on Abbey Road, which seems extremely fitting for someone who’d just published a bestseller titled Norwegian Wood:
I finished writing the novel Dance Dance Dance in this room. Day after day I typed away at word processor while listening to music on my tape player and looking out the window at Abbey Road. The heater in this apartment worked incredibly well; everyone outside was still wearing coats, but inside I was sweating in a T-shirt and shorts. Sometimes I had to stick my head out the window into the air above Abbey Road to cool myself down.
Part of the reason he spends so much time alone is because he struggles with the language. He notes that the accent is frequently tough to understand and that Brits, unlike Americans, don’t offer to repeat themselves and slow down. After he writes all day, he runs in Regent’s Park for an hour, cooks himself dinner, and then reads Jack London or goes to see movies and concerts.
He notes the movies: A Time to Die (which Murakami mistakenly calls A Time for Dying), Withnail and I, Killing Time (Poussière d’ange), the six-hour epic Little Doritt.
He also spends this long chapter providing detailed commentary on the concerts and operas. The Royal Philharmonic with Icelandic composer Vladimir Ashkenazy and his son Vovka: meh. (Murakami notes he previously saw Vovka in Athens.) A piano concerto by Stephen Kovacevich at Queen Elizabeth Hall: Schubert, good; Beethoven, boring. Sir Neville Marinner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields: impressive if a little clean and refined. Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, and Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd: both excellent. And one jazz concert by Blossom Dearie at the now defunct Pizza on the Park: charming.
After finishing the novel, he takes one short trip to Bath where he rents a bike and cycles the 10 miles to Castle Combe. The hotels there are full, so he’s forced to head to the next village, where it looks like he may have stayed at The White Hart in Ford on Palm Sunday. The bike is in poor condition, and on the way back he’s forced to walk it the last five kilometers.
At the end of the chapter, we get a very small closing section about submitting the novel, which feels very different from his submission of Norwegian Wood:
I went to the post office and sent a printed copy of my novel manuscript to Tokyo (avoiding the Italian postal system was another reason I came to London) before returning to Rome alone at the end of March.
So between Norwegian Wood and Dance Dance Dance, Murakami shifts from handwritten manuscript submissions to printed copies. Remember, he rewrote a second draft of Norwegian Wood completely by hand before delivering it in person in Bologna.
Given Murakami’s immediate moonshot into celebrity-level success after Norwegian Wood, perhaps it’s a fitting shift, from small, cold apartments across the Mediterranean while writing that novel, to a toasty London flat where he spent his evenings at concerts and operas.
This book has its ups and downs, but it’s fascinating throughout, and I can’t wait to read more. That’s it for Murakami Fest 2025. I may be posting other pieces throughout the year, but definitely check back in 2026 for more.
Week 4 of Murakami Fest 2025. See past posts here.
In the last chapter, we got an episodic look at a few days before Christmas in Rome. Next Murakami gives us an overall view of the whole winter in this chapter titled “Winter Deepens” (冬が深まる). He starts writing Dance Dance Dance on December 17 and spends all winter writing as he battles off multiple colds. But the writing goes pretty well.
As the year drew to a close, I began writing a novel titled Dance Dance Dance on December 17.
Whenever I write a novel, it’s the same pattern. The feeling that “I want to write” gradually builds somewhere within me, and then one day, I decide, “All right, today we start to write.” For me, being able to discern this critical point is more important than having a detailed structure or a plot.
Unlike Norwegian Wood, with Dance Dance Dance, I chose the title before I started writing. Many believe I took this title from the Beach Boys song, but the actual source was an old song by the African-American band The Dells (although it doesn’t matter much which of the two it was).
Before I left Japan, I made some homemade oldies tapes from old records I scratched together around the house, and that song was on one of them. It’s an old school R&B song through and through. It’s relaxed and kind of rough, which gives it a strange darkness. I just kind of had that song on in the background every day when I was in Rome, and I started writing inspired by the title. Of course I knew that the Beach Boys had a song with the same title (I listened to it when I was in high school), but the direct beginning was this Dells song.
From start to finish, writing this novel was a smooth, pleasant experience. Norwegian Wood was a kind of writing I’d never done before, so while I was writing, I kept wondering, “What the heck are people going to think of this?” but with Dance Dance Dance, that never entered my mind and I wrote without any worries exactly the way I wanted to write. Every last sentence is my own style, and the characters are the same as in Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973, and A Wild Sheep Chase. So it felt like returning to a garden I’d kept after a long while. It was a lot of fun. I guess even for me it’s rare to enjoy the act of writing in such a straightforward way.
Such an interesting, rich passage. Murakami’s experience strikes me as both very modern and at the same time ancient. Music had become more portable than it would have been 20 and maybe even just 10 years prior (the Walkman came out in 1979) when he would have had to bring all his records, but it still requires Murakami to do some work. These days we have access to our entire collections—and basically the entirety of all human musical output—in a single pocketable device. Music conversion concerns are extinct when it comes to international moves, except for very niche and marginal exceptions.
The idea of Murakami wandering around Europe hooked up to a constant cycle of jazz, classical, and R&B, on the other hand, is an idea that feels very familiar and is basically identical to my experience living in Japan from 2003-2010, more or less. From around 2008 or so onward, I did start to include podcasts in my regular rotation, but I had a Discman when I studied abroad and rented CDs from Tsutaya. On JET, I was still collecting CDs (and went notably deep into Thelonious Monk) but had iPods I could stock with songs.
I wonder about distraction. Murakami must’ve been distracting himself with music to a certain extent, just as I was/am. It makes me want to seek boredom, in a very Craig Mod-inspired way. Maybe that would be best.
The rest of the chapter is about the miserable winter. They end up catching a cold after standing in line for four hours to get tickets to see Maurizio Pollini, who ends up being underwhelming. Murakami mentions a superlative Tokyo performance by Sviatoslav Richter as a contrast.
He notes that writing in the cold is the opposite of what writing Norwegian Wood was like, and mentions he’s writing on a word processor:
I was so cold that I wore an overcoat at my desk as I punched away at the keys on the word processor. It was the polar opposite of writing Norwegian Wood in Sicily. It was so, so hot then that I found my mind wandering off while sitting there. This time it was so cold that I thought I might break the keyboard.
The Murakamis spend the winter dreaming of onsen and life in Hawaii, which is actually the reason that Dance Dance Dance features scenes in Hawaii; Murakami was trying to mentally stave off the cold. But he notes that he cannot return to Japan until the novel is complete. Once he starts, he has to keep going: 日本に帰ったら、またペースが乱されてしまう (337). (If I went back to Japan, my pace would be totally thrown off.)
A couple other very minor notes. Murakami mentions the bombing of Korean Air 858 and the dollar weakening to 123 yen. They were keeping their cash in dollars, so this affects their day to day to a certain extent, although I assume most of Murakami’s earnings were in yen, which would have been to his benefit. This is the period of time when the dollar-yen exchange rate dropped into the range that we’re currently familiar with after spending decades in the 200-360 yen/dollar range.
Week 3 of Murakami Fest 2025. Check out the previous entries here.
The next chapter is a very short essay titled ポンテ・ミルヴィオの市場 (Ponte Milvio Market). It’s December 22, and the Murakamis are doing some pre-Christmas shopping because all the stores in Rome close on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, much like New Year’s in Japan, Murakami notes.
This is still the case in 2025 in Japan. Both of the major supermarkets near my old apartment closed from January 1-3 a few years ago. This site from Nagoya provides an interesting grid breakdown for the city’s supermarkets, and I think this is probably representative of Japan more widely.
This is all to say, I wonder if things in Rome are still like this or if more and more stores have started to remain open during the holidays as in the United States.
So the Murakamis head to Ponte Milvio and stock up on salmon (2,500 yen for just under a kilogram), sardines and squid (7 and 5 respectively for 1,400 yen altogether), and a ton of vegetables. Murakami highlights the restaurants in the area, of which there are a number with varying service but all pretty tasty. After shopping, they have a quick standing coffee before heading home on the bus.
At home, they start to put away/prep the food, and there’s a definite sense that they’re missing the flavors from home:
When we get home, we immediately began the prep work.
I tear off the ends of the green beans and boil them. My wife cleans the salmon with a knife (one that we brought from Japan). The resulting toro is extremely good, so we stand around the kitchen and eat it with wasabi and soy sauce. Stuffing ourselves like this makes us want some rice. We happen to have leftover rice from yesterday, so we eat the salmon toro and umeboshi as sides. Might as well cut into the squid, we think, so we have squid sashimi as well. The squid is truly melt-in-your-mouth delicious. We munch on the boiled green beans in place of tsukemono. And as we’re standing there in the kitchen…we decide to mix up some instant miso soup, too. We finish our simple meal. Things like this are pretty delicious.
Murakami goes on to note that they eat more sushi, grilled sardines, and tsukemono for dinner, which is an exception. They mostly live off of pasta.
It’s a nice visual. The two of them standing around their apartment in Rome, devouring this fresh seafood. I do wonder about eating it raw. I’m not sure I’d be bold enough to eat sashimi prepared from a random outdoor market. Although I guess I probably have without realizing it. Most of the raw fish I’ve eaten in Japan probably traveled through any number of markets, and I did see what Tsukiji was like before it moved, as far back as 2003 when it was truly a Wild West and you risked your life to get a glimpse of the giant frozen maguro. So maybe this isn’t quite as much of a gastronomic risk as I initially thought.
It does look like the Ponte Milvio Market is still alive and kicking, with both produce and antiques.
Week 2 of Murakami Fest 2025. Check out previous entries here.
The next chapter is “What exactly is the end of the year in Rome?” (ローマの歳末とはいかなるものか), and Murakami spends it discussing exactly what the title suggests. Italy, like Japan, exchanges a lot of presents at the end of the year and gets very crowded with shoppers, but mercifully there is no Christmas music. Murakami buys bottles of wine for the doormen at his apartment and sees immediate effects when they are extremely courteous for the next week.
The rest of the chapter, other than a short section at the end, is about the beggars in Italy that seem to increase greatly in number at the end of the year. Murakami highlights the different varieties of beggars (mothers with small children, old women, those who pretend to be hurt, and people who play instruments). It’s difficult to tell exactly what tone Murakami is taking here. Clearly this is something he notices because of how distinct it is from the situation in Japan, where you rarely see anyone begging on the streets. However, he does seem to make light of them in several places, asking what they do the rest of the year, noting that all the mothers with children look alike, and passing on a story from a friend that suggests they “rent” children to help with begging.
Murakami ends the chapter with a very short profile of his landlady Lynne, an Englishwoman who has married a man from Naples and is living in Rome. He brings her up after an aside noting how exhausting it is to go out in the city—just as it is in Tokyo. And then the chapter ends in a very abrupt fashion. This could be Murakami poking fun at himself, but I doubt it. Lynne is a caricature of sorts of the disaffected expat. Someone who’s been away from home forever yet is miserable in their chosen home.
The chapter isn’t really Murakami complaining in the same sense. I think instead he sees himself in a reporting mode and just happened to encounter his landlady, who is then subject to his gaze.
At any rate, here’s Murakami discussing this view that he seems to be taking:
There are countless pragmatic philosophies out there. Look hard enough at a city and you’ll learn something. If you come to a stop in Tokyo and stare at something, you get a lot of strange looks, but that’s not the case here in Rome. Everyone stops and stares at things. While my wife looks longingly at the items in the windows of Max Mara or Pollini, I turn toward the street and closely observe the beggars. Everyone has their own direction in life.
Less than stellar material, but there will be more interesting sections in the coming weeks.
Year 18 of Murakami Fest. Murakami Fest can legally vote. Wild. See the previous entries in Murakami fest here. This year, I’m continuing my look at his travel memoir Distant Drums.
The Murakamis are back in Rome for the winter, and the first thing on the to-do list is buying a television in this chapter titled “TV, Gnocchi, Prêtre” (テレビ、ニョッキ、プレートル). Murakami says he needs a more active source of news, particularly for the transportation information (there are lots of strikes) and the weather. In Japan he could just dial a number on the phone to get access to the information.
Strangely enough, it looks like this service may have just ended. NTT, at least, ended their 177 service on March 31 of this year after being in service for 70 years. An NHK news article notes that the usage of this service peaked in 1988 (the last year of Murakami’s trip to Europe) at over 300 million calls and fell to 5.56 million by 2023 (which still seems like a lot!). Thus, our bizarre look at Japan’s history through Murakami’s travel memoir continues.
Murakami spends some time describing Italian public TV and the newscasters who are all quite animated and colorful (which he claims to be able to detect despite the fact that he buys a black and white TV).
He then shifts into a trip to Bologna for gnocchi. He highlights how pleasant it is to travel there because there are fewer tourists and because he’s found some decent restaurants. He ends the chapter with two music anecdotes. After watching The Sicilian in Bologna, he walks through town and stumbles on a Lee Konitz concert in the basement of a random osteria. Unfortunately it’s sold out. Later, back in Rome, he and his wife go to see Georges Prêtre conducting the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia.
This chapter is only OK. The sections on Italian TV—in particular the dramatic, aging weatherman—are probably the most interesting, but they border on caricature. The Bologna trip is mostly told in exposition. But taken together, there are two interesting stories that speak to the buying power of the yen, the economic mindset that Murakami was in at the time, and the (universal-ish?) experience of having life in a foreign country influence your perception of costs.
First, Murakami talks about buying a TV, and he’s operating on a particularly Japanese mindset:
But it would also be ridiculous to buy an expensive television, so first I checked out the local used electronics store. At the big box stores in Japan, you could pick up a small TV for about 20,000 yen, so that’s what I had in mind when I went, but they were much more expensive than I thought. A TV much larger than I needed with a dim, faded screen ran 30,000 yen. The picture was a little warped as well. If this was Japan, it would’ve been on the scrapheap. A long time ago, I managed to go home with a TV with much clearer picture that I picked up at a garbage drop off near Kokubunji Station. Now I didn’t have a choice, so I decided to but the cheapest new black and white model. All I needed it for was the news and weather report, so it made no difference if it was color or not.
This reminds me of an anecdote from Matt Alt’s book Pure Invention of being able to score very lightly used electronics on trash day in Bubble-era Japan. Interesting to see Italy in a very different situation when it comes to the ubiquity of electronics and their costs.
It does seem like living in Italy has started to influence Murakami’s perception of costs a bit. He’s potentially started to anchor toward the cheaper cost of living, as shown when he goes to get tickets for the orchestra:
On Sunday, December 6, we went to hear Georges Prêtre conducting the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. The selection was Beethoven’s 5th and 6th Symphonies—which I guess you might qualify as staggering works, at any rate quite major—it was the end of the year, and hearing a number of Beethoven pieces at once sounded like it would be nice, so the day before we went to Saint Cecilia Hall in front of the Vatican to buy tickets. The prices were 5,500 yen, 3,900 yen, and 2,200 yen, but unfortunately only the most expensive were left. And those were on the edge of the front row. My wife and I had a lot of trouble making up our minds, but it was the end of the year so we thought it was fine (what was fine, I couldn’t say exactly), so we ended up buying them. I don’t know why, but when we’re living in a foreign country, our lifestyle gets increasingly frugal without even realizing it. Despite the fact that in Tokyo we’d shell out 10,000 yen for a ticket without a second thought.
So the cost of electronics is expensive in Italy, but the orchestra is relatively affordable. The opposite of in Japan. To provide some reference, in December 1987, the yen was around 130 JPY/USD.
The next chapter “Athens” (アテネ) is just a two-page interstitial section that establishes the narrative for Murakami’s trip: He’s arrived in Athens from Rome, not to see any of the sites but to meet with a real estate agent who will help him find a place to stay. Here’s the first sentence:
アテネに来るのはこれでもう三度目か四度目である。 (41)
This is my third or fourth time coming to Athens.
There’s not all that much interesting or compelling in this chapter, it’s just Murakami getting things set up, but it is interesting that Murakami had been to Athens at least twice, potentially three times previously by 1986.
There’s a jump between 1970-1977, and then the numbers are somewhat flat until around 1985 when the next big jump begins. So while it’s not that unusual that Murakami had been abroad, having visited Athens three times by 1986 is pretty remarkable.
Looking more closely at this chart, you can see a brief hiccup with the popping of the Bubble in 1992, but then Japanese just…kept on traveling. I didn’t notice the massive drop in 2004, which is due to SARS and the Iraq War. I’m curious what the numbers will look like for 2024, and I wonder when we’ll see the update.
The only other section worth commenting on is Murakami’s characterization of Athens, which is a small area of tourist sites centered on the Acropolis surrounded by unremarkable residential area, which of course people wouldn’t visit:
Say you were a foreign tourist visiting Tokyo, would you go to the trouble of checking out Hibarigaoka or Tama Plaza or Nishi-Kokubunji?
Not really being familiar with any of these areas but knowing vaguely of their reputations, I enjoyed the comparison. I’m sure these places are great these days, though. Am I wrong?
I’ve finally caught my breath after a crazy first third of the year, so I’ve had a moment to get back to my project of reading Murakami’s travel memoir. I now have an index page and am slowly going back through the chapters I didn’t take an excerpt from. So check out the previous entries to get some context. This post is from the beginning of the trip, so not too much context is needed.
When Murakami first arrives in Europe, he’s exhausted. When I wrote about the chapter after this, I mentioned that he personifies this exhaustion in the form of two bees buzzing around in his head, but I didn’t take a passage from this specific chapter, perhaps because the chapter, titled “Giorgio and Carlo, the Bees – October 4, 1986” (蜂のジョルジョと蜂のカルロ 1986年10月4日), is mostly Murakami spinning his wheels. He even tells readers directly that they should skip on to the next section if they aren’t interested in reading about his exhaustion:
…他人の疲弊になんかまったく興味ないという方は、とばして読んでいただきたいと思う。(28)
…for anyone with zero interest in someone’s exhaustion, I’d like you to skip and read ahead.
I do wonder if this exhaustion is partially just because of his long trip from Japan:
With this and that, I feel like I’ve gotten incredibly old. Yesterday was my wife’s birthday. We left Japan on her birthday. Because of the time change, she was able to have a very long birthday. A very, very long thirty-eighth birthday. When I first met her, we were both still just eighteen. Eighteen, the age when you get fall-down drunk anytime you have a drink. Twenty years since that time.
But I don’t feel old because of those twenty years. I feel it because of Giorgio and Carlo.
Clearly he’s jet lagged here. And at the beginning of the chapter, he also notes that he’s on his fourth glass of red wine. Which is maybe why you see the lack of consistency with the kanji (we see both 歳を取る and 年をとる).
So while I’m sure that he’s tired from the writing work in Japan, I think maybe he just traveled half way around the world when air travel was much less convenient, hasn’t had a chance to decompress, is dehydrated, and has put back nearly a full bottle of wine. I’d wager that has something to do with it as well.
This month I wrote about のです (no desu) through an examination of some of Kakuta Mitsuyo’s writing that nicely captures two ideas that I wrote about previously in the newsletter. Check it out here. I also gave a few early impressions of the new Jay Rubin translation of Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which is appropriately re-titled End of the World and Hard-boiled Wonderland. And I also read a few passages from a great Japanese review of the Lawson drinkable mayonnaise:
We read some of Kakuta Mitsuyo for the USJETAA Japanese Reading Group in October this year. Curiously, she writes for a journal associated with Urban Renaissance, also known as UR賃貸 (UR chintai), which is a semi-governmental organization that provides housing in apartment blocks with fewer of the fees associated with renting in Japan.
It’s a bit like writing for an airline magazine…except they’re paying her to write what’s essentially narrative nonfiction. I’ll take it! (See her essay here.)
This reminds me that Derek Guy‘s thread on why Tokyo is so fashionable blew up this month. I’m not sure I’m 100% convinced by the argument. I do feel like the average Japanese (even the average Tokyoite) is about as fashionable as the average American (which is to say that we’re all schlubs, the most of us), but this is a very interesting statement:
A big reason why Tokyo is more fashionable has to do with the media environment. There are thousands of hobbyist magazines covering topics ranging from woodworking to whisky. In menswear, they can get very specific in terms of aesthetic: classic tailoring, workwear, streetwear, outdoorsy style, etc.
There’s something about the state of Japanese publishing and the state of Japanese attention to niche interests that makes it more economically feasible to have newsstands and bookstores teeming with magazines, not just in Tokyo but everywhere.
Looking at Murakami’s bibliography shows that the industry supported writers like him as he developed into a superstar, enabling him to sustain himself (even exhaust himself!) on regular writing projects, so much so that he decided to close up shop in Japan in 1986, after having been a writer for a mere seven years, and move to Europe and live on the road for three years.
To get anything comparable in the U.S., I think we’d have to look back at writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald who could sell a couple short stories and fly off to Europe
Obviously Murakami wasn’t earning this much, but there were enough outlets to write for back in the 1980s, and he was writing for enough of them, that he could afford to close up his day job and write full time. He stretched his yen by taking them to Greece. Pretty interesting to think about, and it makes me wonder if times have changed for Japanese writers. I’d be very curious to know about the readership for current Japanese periodicals and how much writers are paid for their work.
The English translation for Murakami Haruki’s latest novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls will be published on November 19, and reviews are starting to trickle out, so I thought I’d re-run the review episode of the podcast I put online after reading the Japanese version when it was published in 2023.
I added about 20 minutes of content as an introduction taking a look at two negative reviews (The Guardian and the Financial Times) and one positive review (The Telegraph) along with two interviews (The New Yorker and NPR). I’ll keep an eye on others as they come out and will probably do a quick look at some of them on the next episode of the podcast or in the newsletter this month, but I don’t think I’ll be reading the translation myself. I’ve spent enough time and money on that book.
