Year 1: Boobs, The Wind, Baseball, Lederhosen, Eels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year 2: Hotel Lobby Oysters, Condoms, Spinning Around and Around, 街・町, The Town and Its Uncertain Wall, A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year 3: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and Weirs, The Library, Old Dreams, Saying Goodbye, Lastly
Year 4: More Drawers, Phone Calls, Metaphors, Eight-year-olds, dude, Ushikawa, Last Line
Year 5: Jurassic Sapporo, Gerry Mulligan, All Growns Up, Dance, Mountain Climbing
Year 6: Sex With Fat Women, Coffee With the Colonel, The Librarian, Old Man, Watermelons
Year 7: Warmth, Rebirth, Wasteland, Hard-ons, Seventeen, Embrace
Year 8: Pigeon, Edits, Magazines, Awkwardness, Back Issues
Year 9: Water, Snæfellsnes, Cannonball, Distant Drumming
Year 10: Vermonters, Wandering and Belonging, Peter 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.

Year 1: Boobs, The Wind, Baseball, Lederhosen, Eels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year 2: Hotel Lobby Oysters, Condoms, Spinning Around and Around, 街・町, The Town and Its Uncertain Wall, A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year 3: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and Weirs, The Library, Old Dreams, Saying Goodbye, Lastly
Year 4: More Drawers, Phone Calls, Metaphors, Eight-year-olds, dude, Ushikawa, Last Line
Year 5: Jurassic Sapporo, Gerry Mulligan, All Growns Up, Dance, Mountain Climbing
Year 6: Sex With Fat Women, Coffee With the Colonel, The Librarian, Old Man, Watermelons
Year 7: Warmth, Rebirth, Wasteland, Hard-ons, Seventeen, Embrace
Year 8: Pigeon, Edits, Magazines, Awkwardness, Back Issues
Year 9: Water, Snæfellsnes, Cannonball, Distant Drumming
Year 10: Vermonters, Wandering and Belonging, Peter 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!

Year 1: Boobs, The Wind, Baseball, Lederhosen, Eels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year 2: Hotel Lobby Oysters, Condoms, Spinning Around and Around, 街・町, The Town and Its Uncertain Wall, A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year 3: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and Weirs, The Library, Old Dreams, Saying Goodbye, Lastly
Year 4: More Drawers, Phone Calls, Metaphors, Eight-year-olds, dude, Ushikawa, Last Line
Year 5: Jurassic Sapporo, Gerry Mulligan, All Growns Up, Dance, Mountain Climbing
Year 6: Sex With Fat Women, Coffee With the Colonel, The Librarian, Old Man, Watermelons
Year 7: Warmth, Rebirth, Wasteland, Hard-ons, Seventeen, Embrace
Year 8: Pigeon, Edits, Magazines, Awkwardness, Back Issues
Year 9: Water, Snæfellsnes, Cannonball, Distant Drumming
Year 10: Vermonters, Wandering and Belonging, Peter 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.

Year 1: Boobs, The Wind, Baseball, Lederhosen, Eels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year 2: Hotel Lobby Oysters, Condoms, Spinning Around and Around, 街・町, The Town and Its Uncertain Wall, A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year 3: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and Weirs, The Library, Old Dreams, Saying Goodbye, Lastly
Year 4: More Drawers, Phone Calls, Metaphors, Eight-year-olds, dude, Ushikawa, Last Line
Year 5: Jurassic Sapporo, Gerry Mulligan, All Growns Up, Dance, Mountain Climbing
Year 6: Sex With Fat Women, Coffee With the Colonel, The Librarian, Old Man, Watermelons
Year 7: Warmth, Rebirth, Wasteland, Hard-ons, Seventeen, Embrace
Year 8: Pigeon, Edits, Magazines, Awkwardness, Back Issues
Year 9: Water, Snæfellsnes, Cannonball, Distant Drumming
Year 10: Vermonters, Wandering and Belonging, Peter 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.

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: Boobs, The Wind, Baseball, Lederhosen, Eels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year 2: Hotel Lobby Oysters, Condoms, Spinning Around and Around, 街・町, The Town and Its Uncertain Wall, A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year 3: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and Weirs, The Library, Old Dreams, Saying Goodbye, Lastly
Year 4: More Drawers, Phone Calls, Metaphors, Eight-year-olds, dude, Ushikawa, Last Line
Year 5: Jurassic Sapporo, Gerry Mulligan, All Growns Up, Dance, Mountain Climbing
Year 6: Sex With Fat Women, Coffee With the Colonel, The Librarian, Old Man, Watermelons
Year 7: Warmth, Rebirth, Wasteland, Hard-ons, Seventeen, Embrace
Year 8: Pigeon, Edits, Magazines, Awkwardness, Back Issues
Year 9: Water, Snæfellsnes, Cannonball, Distant Drumming
Year 10: Vermonters, Wandering and Belonging, Peter 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.

Year 1: Boobs, The Wind, Baseball, Lederhosen, Eels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year 2: Hotel Lobby Oysters, Condoms, Spinning Around and Around, 街・町, The Town and Its Uncertain Wall, A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year 3: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and Weirs, The Library, Old Dreams, Saying Goodbye, Lastly
Year 4: More Drawers, Phone Calls, Metaphors, Eight-year-olds, dude, Ushikawa, Last Line
Year 5: Jurassic Sapporo, Gerry Mulligan, All Growns Up, Dance, Mountain Climbing
Year 6: Sex With Fat Women, Coffee With the Colonel, The Librarian, Old Man, Watermelons
Year 7: Warmth, Rebirth, Wasteland, Hard-ons, Seventeen, Embrace
Year 8: Pigeon, Edits, Magazines, Awkwardness, Back Issues
Year 9: Water, Snæfellsnes, Cannonball, Distant Drumming
Year 10: Vermonters, Wandering and Belonging, Peter 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

I’ll finish up Murakami Fest this year by returning to where I started: Murakami’s 1978 baseball revelation. I’ve looked at a number of his early accounts but only his 2007 What I Talk About When I Talk About Running when it comes to more recent accounts.

At the Diet Library, I tracked down a 2001 Mainichi Shimbun article Murakami wrote on October 12 ahead of the Japan Series that year. The Swallows played the Kintetsu Buffaloes starting a week later, and Murakami wrote an article on the Culture page about how he became a Swallows fan. He says he doesn’t really know, that he basically realized he was a Swallows fan the day he first walked into Jingu Stadium, but that whenever people ask him about it, he always mentions the few benefits of being a Swallows fan: Jingu is never full, so it’s easy to get a ticket. Beer is 100 yen cheaper than at the Tokyo Dome. And they don’t do the traditional 7th inning balloon release at Jingu, of which Murakami notes “I can’t think of a more meaningless thing to do.”

Here’s what he has to say about the day of his revelation:

I’ve written about this before, but the outfield seats at Jingu Stadium are where I suddenly realized I wanted to write a novel. It was opening day 23 years ago. I think Yasuda [Takeshi] was starting. On October 4 that year, the Swallows won the championship. Matsuoka [Hiromu] was starting and pitched a complete game. I was in the stadium that day as well. It was the first championship for the Swallows, 29 years after being founded, and I happened to be 29 years old. I won the new author’s prize for the novel I wrote that year.

23 years later (so this year), I was in the outfield seats at Jingu on October 4 again, watching Yakult against Hanshin. If they won the game, they would’ve won the series, but they lost. Even though they lost, I wasn’t all that mad. In life, sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. Somethings things go well, and sometimes they don’t. There wasn’t anything I could do, I realized. It made me happy to see Inaba [Atsunori] sprint at full speed out to his spot like a shrewd black cat (not a black panther), [Roberto] Petagine spin the bat behind his head, and Takatsu [Shingo] flare his nostrils widely on the mound (which you could even see from the outfield). That’s what baseball is all about. It’s not just about winning and losing. That’s something else I learned at Jingu Stadium.

前にも書いたことがあるが、僕が小説を書こうと唐突に思いついたのは神宮球場の外野席だ。23年前のシーズンの開幕ゲームだった。たしか安田が先発していたと思う。その年の10月4日にヤクルトは優勝を決めた。松岡が先発して完投した。そのときも僕は球場にいた。スワローズ球団創設以来29年目にして初めて手にした優勝で、僕もたまたま29歳だった。そのとき書いた小説で僕は文芸誌の新人賞をとった。

その23年後（つまり今年）同じ10月4日に、神宮の外野席でヤクルト・阪神戦を見ていた。勝てば優勝決定という試合だったけど、負けた。でも負けてもとくに腹も立たなかった。人生ってい勝つときもあれば負けるときもある。うまく行くときもあれば行かないときもある。しょうがないじゃないか、と思った。稲葉が機敏な黒猫（黒豹じゃなく）のように全力疾走をして守備位置につき、ペタジーニが頭のうしろでバットをぐるぐる振り回し、高津がマウンドの上で鼻の穴を思いきりふくらませているのを見るだけで（外野からでも見える）、いつもどおり幸福だった。野球というのはそういうものだろう。勝ち負けだけがすべてじゃない。それも僕が神宮球場で学んだことのひとつだ。

Not noted here is that the Swallows did end up clinching, advancing to the Japan Series, and then going on to win after the publication of this article.

So we have all these accounts, and in only one of them does Murakami claim he was watching on TV. I’m willing to attribute it to the journalist doing the interview, especially given that it wasn’t formatted as a clean transcript. And given that a year earlier in the 対談 with Murakami Ryu, he’d given a very detailed account of the basic story that he’s stuck to over the years. It would have to have been a fairly significant slip up for Murakami to relax enough to deviate from a constructed story, if indeed it was false.

That said, it’s definitely an interesting wrinkle.

Assuming he did actually have the revelation at the stadium, what actually happened that day, on the other hand, is more up in the air, and there’s not much that can be done to definitively prove anything, short of someone finding Murakami in the background of a photograph in Jingu Stadium or in a photograph of Kinokuniya. Now that’s something I’d love to see happen.

Bizarrely enough, the Yakult Swallows are at the top of the standings this year behind the powerhouse hitting of Murakami Munetaka. They play the Hanshin Tigers at Koshien on Sunday. Maybe I’ll look into getting tickets…

Hope y’all have a great year. See you in 2023 for Murakami Fest 16!

Year 1: Boobs, The Wind, Baseball, Lederhosen, Eels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year 2: Hotel Lobby Oysters, Condoms, Spinning Around and Around, 街・町, The Town and Its Uncertain Wall, A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year 3: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and Weirs, The Library, Old Dreams, Saying Goodbye, Lastly
Year 4: More Drawers, Phone Calls, Metaphors, Eight-year-olds, dude, Ushikawa, Last Line
Year 5: Jurassic Sapporo, Gerry Mulligan, All Growns Up, Dance, Mountain Climbing
Year 6: Sex With Fat Women, Coffee With the Colonel, The Librarian, Old Man, Watermelons
Year 7: Warmth, Rebirth, Wasteland, Hard-ons, Seventeen, Embrace
Year 8: Pigeon, Edits, Magazines, Awkwardness, Back Issues
Year 9: Water, Snæfellsnes, Cannonball, Distant Drumming
Year 10: Vermonters, Wandering and Belonging, Peter 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

This week I’m looking at one of Murakami’s earliest appearances in the culture magazine Brutus. Murakami was featured in the February 1, 1981 issue, which had the title ブルータスの予言’81 (Brutus’ Predictions for ’81).

Murakami was one of several writers who contributed a page-long “prediction,” with his titled 1981年のミソロジー (The Mythology of 1981) which focuses on F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s kind of a strange way to play the assignment, but Murakami is a huge fan of Fitzgerald, so maybe it isn’t a surprise.

The piece starts by discussing all the odes to Fitzgerald in other works of art as well as writers who have admitted their admiration for him. Murakami then gives a short summary of Fitzgerald’s brief rise to the top and quick plummet, after which point he’s forgotten for several decades.

He ends the piece with these three paragraphs:

I’m not confident I can get you to appreciate Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction. To put it another way, I can’t predict whether the myth of Fitzgerald is symbolic or creatively compelling in Japan of the 1980s.

However, if you’re able to detect something (you might even call it a warm sense of understanding) in his works that’s been left out of contemporary fiction or if you’re able to sense something in Fitzgerald’s presence as a writer that’s so real it surpasses reality, to even the slightest degree, then the world around you will start to change.

To borrow a phrase from The Lovin’ Spoonful, “Do you believe in magic?”

あなたにスコット・フィッツジェラルドの小説を気に入っていただけるかどうか、僕にはあまり自信がない。言い換えれば、1980年代の日本においてフィッツジェラルドの神話がどれだけの象徴性と創造性を持ち得るものか、僕には予言することはできない。

しかしもしあなたが彼の作品の中に現代の小説がどこかに置き忘れてきた何か（温かい合意のようなもの、とでも言えばのだろうか）を見出すことができたとしたらあるいはスコット・フィッツジェラルドという一人の作家の息づかいを現実以上に現実的に身のうちに感じることができたとしたら、ほんの少しずつでも、あなたのまわりの状況は変わっていくはずだ。

ラヴィング・スプーンフル流に表現するなら、＜あなたは魔法を信じるだろうか？＞

It’s a bit of a filler piece, and the ending is basically just a hand wave, but overall it’s not poorly penned. Murakami is relatively early on the Fitzgerald bandwagon, although not the earliest. In the first half of the essays, one of the authors he mentions is C.D.B. Bryan:

Another great admirer of Scott Fitzgerald was the American author C.D.B. Bryan (Friendly Fire) who used Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as the model for his novel The Great Dethriffe, which was not a bad book at all.

同じくスコット・フィッツジェラルドに心酔したアメリカの作家C・D・B・ブライアン（『友軍の誤射』）はフィッツジェラルドの『グレート・ギャツビイ』を下敷にした『グレート・デスリフ』という決して悪くない小説を書いた。

Bryan came up in Murakami Fest 2020 in part of Distant Drums. Murakami was just finishing up his translation of The Great Dethriffe while in Europe. So this is an unexpected way to close the loop on that. The Great Dethriffe was published in 1970. Murakami somehow read it between then and 1981, and then translated it five years later while he was writing Norwegian Wood.

That’s pretty impressive. There’s a good chance Murakami read it well before he became a writer, sat on his admiration of the novel for years, and then once he became a writer, was finally in the position to translate it, 10 years after it was initially published. As I mentioned in the blog post two years ago, the book is pretty widely recognized as being not very good, despite Murakami’s opinion, but it shows impressive dedication on Murakami’s part.