Petra

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 CatSushi CounterMurakami Fucks First
Year 11: EmbersEscapeWindow SeatsThe End of the World
Year 12: Distant DrumsExhaustionKissLack of PretenseRotemburo
Year 13: Murakami PreparednessPacing Norwegian WoodCharacter Studies and Murakami’s Financial SituationMental RetreatWriting is Hard
Year 14: Prostitutes and NovelistsVilla Tre Colli and Norwegian WoodSurge of DeathOn the Road to MetaUnbelievable
Year 15: Baseball on TVKindnessMurakami in the Asahi Shimbun – 日記から – 1982The Mythology of 1981Winning and Losing
Year 16: The Closet MassacreBooze BusOld ShoesEditing Norwegian WoodProphecy
Year 17: Athens Marathon 1987, Infinite Appetites, Black Monday, Vibes-cation

Image of cows in a field in Petra near a monastery.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

The final week of Murakami Fest 2024.

This next chapter, ペトラ (Petra), is a bit of a return to form. It’s a few pages longer than the previous chapters and Murakami hits the ennui notes that he’s been going for over most of the book, painting a subtle, muted portrait of offseason travelers taking things as they come in Europe.

After exhausting the sights in Mitilini, they take a bus to Petra where they take a room with a family through what may be the Women’s Cooperative of Petra. Murakami refers to it as 農業婦人会 (Nōgyō fujin kai, women’s agricultural association). They have lunch at a restaurant, see an uzo distillery, buy postcards, have coffee, watch the sunset, and then return to their hotel room where Murakami drinks brandy and reads Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Not a bad way to spend the vacation.

It’s a nice chapter, with a few delicate portraits of the people they run into. Here’s how he ends things:

“You’re Japanese?” she said. “I met a lot of Japanese in Australia. They’re a clever people.” She shook her head sadly. Then she gazed out past the fields, almost like she could make out Australia just past the horizon. “Visit again sometime,” she said. “It’s quiet here. Next time you can take it easy.”

We will, I said. We want to visit during the summer next time.

“You don’t have children?” she asked, like she’d suddenly remembered.

We don’t, I responded.

She looked at us and then smiled. “But you’re still young.”

We packed our things and paid the bill. She seemed very embarrassed to take the money. I don’t know why. Maybe she hadn’t yet adjusted to working with customers like that. I gave her some coins from Japan and told her it was for the girl who had shown us the way. She thanked me and stared at the coins in her palm. “Sayonara,” we said. Then we left her behind in her silent, puddle of sadness.

That’s everything that happened in Petra.

「日本の方ですね。オーストラリアで沢山日本の人見ました。クレヴァーな人達」そして彼女は哀しげに首を振る。それから畑の向こうの方に目をやる。そのむこうにオーストラリアが見えるかしら、という風に。「また来て下さい」と彼女は言う。「ここは静かでいいところです。今度はゆっくりと来てくださいね」

そうする、と僕らは言った。今度は夏に来たいものですね。

「お子さんはいらっしゃらないの?」とふと思いついたように彼女は尋ねる。

いない、と僕らは答える。

彼女は僕らの様子を見て、それからにっこりと笑う。「でもまだお若いですものね」

僕らは荷物をまとめ、勘定を払う。お金を受け取る時、彼女はとても恥ずかしそうにする。どうしてかはよくわからない。まだそういう客を相手にする仕事に慣れていないのだろうか。僕は案内してくれた女の子にと言って日本から持ってきた小銭をあげる。彼女は礼を言って、手のひらに乗せたその小銭をじっと見る。「さよなら」と僕らは言った。そして彼女をその物静かなみずたまりのような哀しみのなかにそっと置き去りにした。

それがペトラの町で起こったことの全てである。 (310)

It’s starting to become more apparent that this is Bubble Era Japan. Obviously, the whole book is premised on this fact. Murakami, a mid-tier writer with a small but dedicated readership, could afford to close up shop in Japan, giving up many if not all of his regular writing gigs (one of the main points of the trip), and move to the Mediterranean for three years, living on a restricted budget. Room and board is 1,800 yen for the night and 500 yen for breakfast for two. Dinner for two is 1,300 yen and includes fish, salad, and wine. This only works if the yen is super strong. I’m sure that Norwegian Wood’s runaway success changed the equation a little, but it doesn’t seem to have hit yet. Something to watch for in coming chapters.

Vibes-cation

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 CatSushi CounterMurakami Fucks First
Year 11: EmbersEscapeWindow SeatsThe End of the World
Year 12: Distant DrumsExhaustionKissLack of PretenseRotemburo
Year 13: Murakami PreparednessPacing Norwegian WoodCharacter Studies and Murakami’s Financial SituationMental RetreatWriting is Hard
Year 14: Prostitutes and NovelistsVilla Tre Colli and Norwegian WoodSurge of DeathOn the Road to MetaUnbelievable
Year 15: Baseball on TVKindnessMurakami in the Asahi Shimbun – 日記から – 1982The Mythology of 1981Winning and Losing
Year 16: The Closet MassacreBooze BusOld ShoesEditing Norwegian WoodProphecy
Year 17: Athens Marathon 1987, Infinite Appetites, Black Monday

A view of Mitilini, Greece, from the south.

Mitilini in 2010, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the next chapter, レスボス (Lesbos), Murakami continues his vibes-cation. He’s on Lesbos, as the title suggests, and there isn’t much to do. So they take a taxi outside the main town to see the Museum of Theophilus, a museum dedicated to the Greek folk artist.

Murakami seems impressed with the amateurish paintings and the way Theophilus is able to capture the awkward and frightening and suggestive, but part of the appeal is the moment in which he’s viewing the works. The Murakamis are the only people in the museum on a warm October day during the offseason.

They go to another museum right next door, which seems to be the Museum-Library Stratis Eleftheriadis-Tériade. Murakami describes it as containing works of Picasso, Matisse and others collected by a publisher who lived in Paris, which seems to correspond to Tériade.

They take their time, and when they finish, they head up the hill for a beer. Murakami ends the chapter in a nice way.

We go outside and up the hill a bit, go into the first kafenio we see, and order a cold beer. The beer is so cold it makes my eye sockets rattle. The afternoon is quiet, the light is warm. A tourist pamphlet notes, “Lesbos is known for having the most clear days in all of Greece.” I see a patrol boat heading into the port. A blue and white Greek flag flutters in the wind. Today feels like one of life’s sunny patches.

I wonder if someone could paint our picture. A 38-year-old writer and his wife, far from home. Beer on the table. Life is pretty good. And occasionally there are patches of sun in the afternoon.

外に出て少し丘を上がり、最初にみかけたカフェニオンに入って、冷たいビールを注文する。目の奥が痛くなるくらいよく冷えたビールである。静かな午後、暖かい光。「レスボス島はギリシャでいちばん晴天日の多いことで知られています」と観光パンフレットにはある。パトロール・ボートが港に入ってくるのが見える。青と白のギリシャの旗が風に揺れる。まるで人生の日だまりのような一日。

誰かが僕らの絵を描いてくれないかな、と思う。故郷から遠く離れた三十八歳の作家とその妻。テーブルの上のビール。そこそこの人生。そしてときには午後の日だまり。 (302)

It doesn’t feel as substantive as some of the other writing in the book, but it’s a nice little chapter. I do feel like the chapters have gotten shorter as we pass the midpoint of the book, which makes me wonder whether Murakami was writing these contemporaneously. We know that he kept a journal, so he very well could have written these out after the fact; the book wasn’t published until 1990. If he was writing them contemporaneously, however, it might make sense that we get these short, sparse vignettes rather than the extended travel writing at the beginning of the trip. These are maintenance pieces. Written after he finished literal and figurative marathons.

I think it again highlights exactly how quickly Murakami works. He left on the trip without having started Norwegian Wood, and finished it in less than a year. While traveling and writing (or at least journaling/taking notes) about everything he did while abroad. Say what you will about Murakami, but he’s not a slacker. These chapters, however, do feel a bit vibey and muted, but perhaps that’s what Murakami was going for.

Black Monday

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 CatSushi CounterMurakami Fucks First
Year 11: EmbersEscapeWindow SeatsThe End of the World
Year 12: Distant DrumsExhaustionKissLack of PretenseRotemburo
Year 13: Murakami PreparednessPacing Norwegian WoodCharacter Studies and Murakami’s Financial SituationMental RetreatWriting is Hard
Year 14: Prostitutes and NovelistsVilla Tre Colli and Norwegian WoodSurge of DeathOn the Road to MetaUnbelievable
Year 15: Baseball on TVKindnessMurakami in the Asahi Shimbun – 日記から – 1982The Mythology of 1981Winning and Losing
Year 16: The Closet MassacreBooze BusOld ShoesEditing Norwegian WoodProphecy
Year 17: Athens Marathon 1987, Infinite Appetites

A ferry leaves from Kavala.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

In the next chapter, カヴァラからのフェリーボート (The Ferry from Kavala), Murakami rides the ferry from Kavala to Lesbos. It’s notable for the point of view which really focuses in on Murakami himself, and not his wife. He’s on the ferry and notices a group of young Greek soldiers. They’re always riding ferries, although he doesn’t have a good idea of where they’re going.

There’s a nice scene describing the young soldiers laughing and smoking cigarettes. Murakami writes them sympathetically because he’s been thinking about fighting ever since the Evros River incident, which happened the December of 1986 (the year prior).

He goes on a little aside about the futility of war before being brought back to his senses by a Greek man who points at the television:

The middle-aged Greek man seated at the table next to me says, Hey, look at the TV, it’s Japan. The news on the TV in the first-class lobby is showing the Tokyo Stock Exchange in Kabutocho. People with rigid looks on their faces are shouting something. They’re pointing. Their sleeves are rolled up, and they’re yelling into phones. But I’m unable to figure out what’s going on. “It’s money,” the Greek man says in broken English, “Money.” He pantomimes counting out money. I take it that stocks have crashed. But I can’t explain the details with my level of English. (* I realized this later, but this was Black Monday. When I think about it, I’m reminded of F. Scott Fitzgerald. In 1929, Fitzgerald learned of the Great Crash when he was traveling in Tunisia. He describes it “like distant thunder.” Of course, Black Monday wasn’t anywhere close to the scale of the 1929 crash, but I still remember feeling a sort of sense of unease. I might’ve been thinking about war just at that moment, so the stock crash and everyone’s paralyzed faces on TV may have felt more darkly ominous than usual to me.)

隣のテーブルに座っている中年のギリシャ人が僕に向かってほら、テレビを見てごらんよ、日本だよ、と言う。一等船室のロビーのテレビのニュースが東京兜町の証券取引所の光景を映し出している。こわばった顔つきをした人々が何かを叫んでいる。指を上げている。シャツの袖をまくりあげて、電話に向かって何か怒鳴っている。でも何のことだか僕には理解できない。「moneyだよ、money」とギリシャ人が片言の英語で言う。そして金を勘定する仕種をする。どうやら株が暴落したらしい。でも詳しいことは僕の英語力では説明できない。(*あとになってわかったことだが、それが例のブラック・マンデーだった。僕はこのときのことを思い出すたびに、スコット・フィッツジェラルドのことを考える。スコット・フィッツジェラルドは1929年の大暴落をチュニジアを旅行している時に知った。「まるで遠い電鳴のように」と彼は描写している。もちろん、ブラック・マンデーは規模として1929年の暴落とは比べ物にならなかったけれど、その時のなにかしら不安定な空気のことを僕はまだ記憶している。たぶんちょうどそのとき戦争のことを考えているので、株の暴落とテレビの画面に映る人々のひきつった顔が、僕には余計に暗く不吉に思えたのだろう) (296)

That’s essentially the end of the chapter. There’s a brief news segment on the TV about Prime Minister Nakasone stepping down for Prime Minister Takeshita. Red Dawn starts to play after the news. And Murakami returns to his cabin after eating a pear and crackers and drinking some brandy. He awakes in Lesbos.

This is an interesting chapter because of the F. Scott Fitzgerald connection and because Black Monday happens to be my birthday. So when I turned 6, Murakami was asleep on a ferry in the Aegean Sea.

I’m unable to track down the Fitzgerald quote, so that’s my translation of Murakami’s Japanese. If anyone knows where I might find that Fitzgerald writing (it seems to be his journal/diary rather than a piece of published writing), let me know!

Infinite Appetites

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, Prophecy
Year 17: Athens Marathon 1987

Week 2 in Murakami Fest 2024. Murakami creates a pitch perfect Murakami mood in the chapter 雨のカヴァラ (Rainy Kavala).

Kavala and the coastline viewed from the harbor.

Kavala in 1982, via Wikimedia Commons.

He and his wife take a three hour bus ride from Thessaloniki and arrive at the harbor town Kavala, descending from the mountains into the town. Murakami is instantly at home: The town reminds him of Kobe with the harbor nearby and the mountains dropping down into the town. 海と山の間の距離は狭ければ狭いほどいい (The narrower the space between the water and the mountains the better), he notes.

He gives some historical background on the city, its role as the first place in Europe where St. Paul performed missionary work and as a sort of overrun middle point in conflicts between Europe and the Middle East. He arrives on October 18, the town’s independence day from Turkey after World War I.

He has a funny anecdote about eating breakfast at a Communist cafe (or at least one near a Communist headquarters) for the equivalent of 100 yen because the hotel breakfast was 500 yen.

They don’t really do much at all, which is kind of the point. Murakami has run his marathon both figuratively and literally. He finished the Athens Marathon, and he’s published Norwegian Wood. It’s time to take some time off. Yet he seems to be at a loose end, kind of itching for something to do.

Here are the final three paragraphs in the very short chapter:

We stayed in the port town for four days because I liked it quite a bit. For four days, we did almost nothing. We just kind of shuffled between the movie theater (We saw Brazil there, which was good), going on walks, admiring the view of the harbor from our hotel veranda, checking out the fish market, eating at the cheap, delicious psari taverna (seafood restaurant) near the market, and going on more walks. When it rained, we stocked up on wine and Papadopoulos biscuits at the neighborhood market and hunkered down in our room with a book.

It did rain a number of times. On rainy days, we would watch the rain from the taverna terrace and I’d get this…sense of exactly how far we’d come. I wonder why. All sounds were muffled, the overchilled bottle of white wine was sweating, and fishermen wearing yellow, rubber raincoats lined up to untangle a brightly colored fishing net. A black dog trotted around aimlessly like an attendant at a funeral. The waiter listlessly gazed at the newspaper. He was thin, with an odd beard that made him look like a magician. As I ate grilled mackerel, I sketched a man wearing a nylon windbreaker sitting two tables over. He was drinking a half liter of wine, eating squid, and tearing off pieces of bread which he stuffed into his mouth in an incredibly tedious manner. He kept doing it in that order. He would drink some wine, eat a piece of squid, and then stuff bread in his mouth. A cat stared up at him as he ate. I sketched this man for no reason in particular. We just literally had nothing to do on this rainy afternoon.

But it didn’t bother me. We had the harbor before us. The mountains behind us. Wine and biscuits awaiting us in the hotel room. And there was hardly anything about which I needed to concern myself. I’d run my marathon and gotten my airplane ticket refunded. I’d written my novel, and I still had a little time before the next one.

四日間我々はこの港町に滞在した。この町がけっこう気に入ったからだ。四日間、我々は殆どなにもしなかった。ただぼんやりとして、映画館に行き(『未来世紀ブラジル』もここで見た。面白かった)、散歩をし、ホテルのヴェランダに座って港を眺め、魚市場をのぞき、市場の近くの美味しくて安いプサリ・タヴェルナ(魚介レストラン)で食事をし、また散歩をした。雨が降ると近所のマーケットでワインとパパドプロス・クラッカーをたっぷりと買い込み、部屋に籠って本を読んだ。

時々雨が降った。雨の日に、タヴェルナのテラスで雨を眺めながら魚料理を食べていると、なんだか遠くまで来たんだなあ、という気がふとする。どうしてだろう?音がこもり、冷えすぎた白ワインの瓶が汗をかき、漁師たちは黄色いゴムの合羽を着込みみんなで一列に並んで鮮やかな色合いの漁綱のもつれをほぐしている。黒い犬が葬式の雑用糸みたいな格好で小走りにいずこへともなく走っていく。ウェイターは退屈そうにちらちらと新聞にめをやっている。痩せて、奇術師のような不思議な髭をはやしたウェイターだ。僕は鯵のグリルをを食べながら二つ向こうのテーブルに座ったナイロンのジャンパーを着たおじさんの姿をノートにスケッチしている。彼はすごくつまらなさそうにワインを半リットル飲み、イカを食べ、パンをちぎって口の中に詰め込む。それを順番通りにやる。ワインを飲み、イカを食べ、パンを口に詰め込む。猫が一匹それをじっと見上げている。僕はそのおじさんを特にいみもなくボールペンでスケッチしている。雨の午後に本当に何もやることがないのだ。

でも悪いきはしない。前には港がある。後ろには山がある。ホテルの部屋に帰れば、ワインとパパドプロスのクラッカーがある。そして僕には今のところ考えなくてはならないことが殆ど何もないのだ。マラソンは走り終えたし、航空券は払い戻してもらった。小説はもう書いてしまったし、次の小説までにはまだ少し間がある。 (291-292)

Ah, now that feels like a vacation. The man stuffing his face with bread and squid and wine feels like such a telling image. Like there’s no escape from want, from need, from desire. We must move forward with our infinite appetites. This isn’t high writing, but it’s Murakami at his strongest.

Athens Marathon 1987

Welcome back to Murakami Fest. This is our 17th year doing this activity, and this year I’ll continue to look at Distant Drums (遠い太鼓), Murakami’s travel memoir written when he lived in Greece and Italy from 1986 to 1989. I’ve added a page to the blog to organize all of the posts for this Distant Drums project. I’ve realized there are some chapters that I skipped. I may go back and fill those in later, but for now we carry on.

Previous Murakami Fest Posts:

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, Prophecy

We’re back with the Murakamis in Greece. This chapter is titled “The Athens Marathon and My Ticket Refund Went Well, I Guess” (アテネ・マラソンと切符の払い戻しがまあうまくいったこと). It’s October 1987, a month after the publication of Norwegian Wood. Murakami was back in Japan that summer to look at the galleys and take care of other publication-related details, and then he flew back to Rome via Helsinki. Now he’s heading to Athens for the Athens Marathon.

Runners running in the 1980 Athens Marathon.

Photo from 1980 Athens Marathon via Wikimedia Commons.

He spends this chapter talking about his doubts about the legitimacy of the original Marathon story. What about horses? he wonders. And would the runners really have died? Wouldn’t they easily have run the distance? He debunks this second conspiracy by noting that the runners had run to and from Sparta the day before, 250 kilometers.

Then Murakami provides some background about the Athens race itself, which is dedicated to Grigoris Lambrakis, a member of Parliament who was assassinated by right wingers in 1963.

Murakami mentions that he ran the opposite direction, from Athens to Marathon, six years previously, and notes that he’s meeting with a Japanese running organization at the start of the race. But he doesn’t see any other Japanese (or Asian) runners during the race:

Yet while running I didn’t come across a single Japanese. I was completely surrounded by Europeans. No matter how long I travel, I rarely feel lonely, but on this occasion I felt it keenly. I was permeated with these feelings: Ahh, I am an other, I am alone! Runners from many other countries were running around me. Greeks, of course. And Italians. And you can’t forget Canadians, who may be the people with the most free time in the world. And then Germans (Is there anywhere in the world where you can’t find a German?), French having a great time in matching uniforms, Northern Europeans and their exuberant friendliness, and English running silently with serious expressions on their faces. As for Asians, I was the only one, as far as I could see. During my travels, I’ve been to villages where I was the first Japanese they’d seen, of course, but as I ran this marathon for three plus hours surrounded entirely by foreigners, I started to to feel suffocated. I wonder why.

もっとも走っている間は一人も日本の人には出会わなかった。まわりはとにかくもうヨーロッパ人だらけだった。僕は長く外国を旅行していても孤独感というようなものはあまり感じないのだけれど、このときだけはそれをひしひしと感じることになった。ああ俺はここで異邦人なんだ、孤独なんだと身に滲みて思った。僕の回りにはいろんな国のランナーが走っていた。もちろんギリシャ人がいる。それからイタリア人がいる。世界でおそらくいちばん暇なカナダ人がもちろんいる。それからドイツ人(この地球にドイツ人を見かけずにすむ場所が果たしてあるのだろうか?)揃いのユニフォームを着て楽しげなフランス人、やたらと友好的な北欧人たち、むずかしい顔をして黙々と走る英国人。東洋人なんて見渡す限り僕一人である。もちろん旅行していると生まれて初めて日本人を見たなんていう村にいったりもするわけだけれど、回りが全員外国人というマラソン・レースを三時間何十分も走っていると、時々胸が締めつけられるような気がしてくるのだ。どうしてだろう。 (285-286)

We get more of Murakami’s views of Europeans and also an interesting examination of his reaction to being the only Japanese in the crowd. This was still relatively early days in both the tourism boom. Yes, there was an initial boom in 70s, but 1987 represents the beginning of the next stage of the boom.

Screenshot

I imagine it was also early days for Japanese running and jogging. Interesting to see how Murakami felt.

How much did Norwegian Wood weigh?

In the newsletter this month I did a check-up on my kanji study. The prognosis? DOA.

I haven’t done a serious kanji repetition for over a year now. I don’t regret the two years I spent using an Anki deck to go through the 常用漢字 (jōyō kanji, ordinary use kanji), but I do wonder whether daily writing in a journal from the very beginning of my studies—23 years ago this summer—would have had a bigger benefit. Just write! Write every damn day! Write any kanji you know, not with the goal of learning more (which you’ll do naturally if you’re in a college course, or on your own separately through dedicated kanji study), but with the goal of creating your own, organic system of repetition.

One of the main motivations behind this practice, which I did for a few months last year before a trip home in November, was to buy some cool 原稿用紙 (genkō yōshi, manuscript paper) notebooks, the same kind that Murakami used when he was writing his early novels, including Norwegian Wood.

Thanks to his book 遠い太鼓 (Distant Drums) which I’ve been slowly reading through over the past few years, we know a lot of detailed information about Murakami’s process of drafting and editing Norwegian Wood. We know that it was 900 manuscript pages; that he finished a draft on March 7, 1987, in a marathon 17-hour writing session in Rome; that the next day he started writing out a second draft of the novel; and that he completed the revision/redrafting process on March 26. This means that on March 26, he was in Rome with at least 1,800 manuscript pages.

The notebooks I’ve been using have 50 pages each, which means that this would have been 36 notebooks if Murakami was using something similar. Each one of these notebooks weighs 153 g, which means that the 36 that Murakami was lugging around could potentially have weighed 5,508 g or 5.5 kg = 12.14 lbs, which the internet tells me is about the same weight as four human brains. In a more useful comparison, this is about the size of one slightly larger than average cat.

So Norwegian Wood doesn’t quite meet chonk status, especially when you divide the two drafts in two to get the 6.7 lbs that Murakami delivered personally to a Kodansha employee at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair.

Color me a little surprised. I never knew you could fit so much on a single manuscript page. Even The Wind-up Bird Chronicle was only 2,500 pages total, according to the internet, which means it would have weighed 7.65 kg = 16.87 lbs. A bit chonkier to be sure.

Fortunately for Murakami, he switched to a word processor well before that novel, so he would not have needed to lug notebooks around the U.S. as he was writing.

Check out more on kanji and notebooks in the podcast this month:

Holy Rollers

The June newsletter is up over at Substack. I wrote about 聖地巡礼 (seichi junrei), a word that means “pilgrimage of holy sites” which has been largely taken over by anime fans visiting places used in various anime. So “holy” sites, as it were. I feel like this phrase along with the word 推し活 (oshikatsu) has entered the wider lexicon and can be seen just about anywhere, even on the side of a bag of potato chips:

A bag of potato chips with a label おかしな推し活 (snack oshikatsu) in the corner.

Other than my walk around Ashiya last month, which I wrote about in the newsletter, I haven’t done much Murakami 聖地巡礼. I’ve checked out the Murakami Library on Waseda’s campus, but I still haven’t seen Wakeijuku, the dorm that Murakami immortalized in Norwegian Wood. (In a past life, I had the opportunity to live there but didn’t know how to make it happen…alas. Although, from what I’ve heard, that might be for the best. I ended up in a quiet room to myself out in Edogawa-ku rather than a rowdy dorm.) This is the blog post I based my walk on. It’s much more thorough. I’m sure there are some similar posts for Tokyo out there!

I’d argue that the National Diet Library plays the same role as a 聖地 for me given how closely connected it is to Murakami’s works. It’s not featured in any of Murakami’s writing, nor has he ever written about going there himself, but it played the same role that I mention in the newsletter: It created movement and action, leading to Japanese study. Manufacturing some reason to go to the National Diet Library to research is, I’d argue, an excellent way to force yourself to do some research and study. I wouldn’t recommend it to someone spending two weeks in Japan, but if you’re here for a semester or two, or living in Tokyo for several years, then you must go visit. There’s so much you can access.

I talked more about this on the podcast. Give it a listen here:

The State of 文芸誌

The newsletter is online, which means so is the podcast:

This month I wrote about the 文壇 (bundan, literary world), which is most easily accessible in monthly literary journals. These journals have somehow survived in print, unlike just about every literary journal in the U.S. which are now mostly small-run projects other than the New Yorker. I looked but can’t seem to find any statistics about publishing numbers for 文芸誌 (bungeishi, literary journals). The eye test does suggest that if these magazines aren’t thriving, they at least aren’t going extinct; you can find massive volumes (several hundreds of pages each) with serious writers at every bookstore in the country, and volumes like the 120th anniversary edition of 新潮 (Shinchō) that I mention in the episode seem to be selling out online. I’d recommend running to a physical store if you’re still looking for a copy. (And it’s kind of a shame that these magazines aren’t digitized.)

This reminds me of when I was studying abroad in Tokyo. One night I was walking home from Shinjuku to the apartment where I was temporarily staying near Waseda. I came upon a stack of magazines illuminated by a street light. The one on top was a copy of 文藝春秋 (Bungeishunjū), the copy with the Akutagawa Prize-winning stories from Wataya Risa and Kanehara Hitomi that I’d just read that semester.

I took it home with me and eventually brought it back to the U.S., but sadly I threw it out while moving at some point between New Orleans, Chicago, Yokohama, and Osaka. It’s kind of nice to know that I could always get a new copy for 400 yen on Mercari if I wanted to, which seems to be the going rate.

The latest copies of Shinchō seem to be going for around 2,500 yen or so. Probably netting just a few hundred yen minus fees and shipping. I’m not sure why the 転売ヤー (tenbaiyaa, resellers) would even bother at that point. I imagine that prices will probably settle down at some point, so if you make it to a physical bookstore and they aren’t there, just give it a little time, and I’m sure you’ll get one for a reasonable price.

There are likely other magazines with 随筆 (zuihitsu, miscellaneous writing/essays) available, but even if you have to go to the library to peep some of these, it’s probably worth it.

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.

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!