Haruki Murakami and Modern Japan

• Born in January 12, 1949 in Kobe
• Father was a Buddhist Priest- also fought in China during college years
• Mother was the daughter of an Osaka merchant
• Both parents were teachers  of Japanese literature
• Murakami was as a youngster a voracious reader (mostly of Western literature)
• Remembers little about jr. high and high school other than the fact that his teachers used to beat him a lot
• didn't study
• played mahjongg
• girls
• jazz cafes
• cinemas
• smoking
• He had a "remarkably unremarkable" upbringing

Formative Years

• Heard Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers in 1964 and was forever hooked on jazz
• Failed his first set of entrance exams for college
• became a "ronin"
• spent 1967 studying/napping in Ashiya public library
• decided, after reading Truman Capote's The Headless Hawk that he would change from Law to Literature
• Went to Waseda University and joined the drama department
• lived in a private dorm with other university students
• attended few classes ("When I was high school I didn't study.  But when I got to college, I REALLY didn't study."
• Spent most of his time reading screenplays in the Waseda library, going to Jazz clubs and drinking beer.
• Was more or less in the middle of the turbulent 60's protests
• 1968 Anti-War Day Protests
• 1969 Waseda student strike that put an end to classes for 5 months - riot police were finally brought in to resolve the deadlock
• Married his college sweetheart in 1971 against his parents' wishes
• She was a Kanto-ite
• He hadn't graduated yet
• He was going out of the correct order of things (job, wife, home, child)
• They moved in with Yoko's father
• Opened a jazz bar ("Peter Cat") in Kokobunji, Tokyo in 1974
• Parents again worried, this time about going into the water trade (mizu-shobai)
• Took HM 7 years to get his undergraduate degree

Murakami the Writer

• Inspired to write his first novel (Hear the Wind Sing) while watching a baseball game.
• Wrote nights after the bar closed and submitted the novel to an emerging writers contest (1979) in Gunzo magazine
• He has a certain short, declarative style that came about
• He had little time to work on writing at that point
• He wrote first in (simple) English and then translated to Japanese

Q: Your heroes don't conform to the hard-working Japanese ethos that you observe was so powerful after the war. What do you like about characters like Toru in "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles," who is unemployed and stays home a lot?

A: I myself have been on my own and utterly independent since I graduated. I haven't belonged to any company or any system. It isn't easy to live like this in Japan. You are estimated by which company or which system you belong to. That is very important to us. In that sense, I've been an outsider all the time. It's been kind of hard, but I like that way of living. These days, young people are looking for this kind of living style. They don't trust any company. Ten years ago, Mitsubishi or other big companies were very solid, unshakable. But not anymore. Especially right now. Young people these days don't trust anything at all. They want to be free. This system, our society, they won't accept such people. So these people have to be outsiders, if they graduate from school and don't go to any company. These people are becoming a big group in our society these days. I can understand their feelings very well. I am 48, and they are in their 20s or 30s, but I have a Web page and we're corresponding with each other and they're sending me so many e-mails saying that they appreciate my books. It's very strange. We are so different, but we can understand each other very naturally. I like that naturalness. I feel that our society is changing.

We were talking about my heroes. Maybe my readers are feeling some kind of empathy or sympathy with those heroes. I believe so. My stories appeal to some sense of liberty or freedom in my readers.

Your heroes live a little bit like writers because they work on their own. Is it hard to be a writer in Japan?

It's not that hard. I'm the exception. Even the writers in Japan have made a society, but not me. That's one reason why I keep escaping from Japan. That's my privilege. I can go anywhere. In Japan the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan's writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way. It's ridiculous, I guess. If you're a writer, an author, you're free to do anything, go anywhere, and that's the most important thing to me. So, naturally, they mostly don't like me. I don't like elitism. I am not missed when I'm gone.

Success

With a change of premises in 1977, when they moved to a downtown location, Peter Cat lasted seven years. Murakami credits the long hours and the need for financial prudence with providing a solid platform upon which to establish his independence from the template of the Japanese "salaryman", wedded to the same paternalistic company from graduation to the grave. "I had to work hard to survive," he says. "It was tough, but I found something very precious there."

Echoing the adventures of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, the Murakamis spent the last weeks of 1986 wandering the shores of the Mediterranean. "I didn't like Japanese society so much when I lived in Japan and I wanted to get out," he says. "I'm a writer, so I'm free to go anywhere. We have no children, it's just my wife and me. So we got out. I just wanted to be an individual, to be independent, which was not easy in Japan. In Europe or America it's a natural situation. But for a while I was kind of lost. What am I? What am I going to do? What's the purpose of my life? What does it mean to be Japanese, to be a Japanese writer?" Early in 1987 they settled first in Palermo and then in Rome, where he wrote Norwegian Wood and a very different author emerged. "I had never written that kind of straight, simple, rather sentimental story," he says, "and I wanted to test myself." And, as the novel caught the attention of a generation of young women in their teens and 20s, a different audience appeared

• Called the first post-postwar writer in Japan
• completely at home with elements of American pop culture
• His works make up a psychological history of post-postwar Japan
• 60's student movements
• 70's Big Chill
• 80's moneymaking
• 90's re-emergence of idealism
• He leaves Japan in 1986 and lives in Greece and the US.
• Norwegian Wood becomes a bestseller in Japan in 1987.
• HM’s work is translated into several languages.
• He teaches at Princeton and Tufts.
• He returns to Japan as a home and a writing subject
• Writes about AUM
• A book of fiction about the great Hanshin Earthquake

"The victims were hard-working people who served their companies," he says. "For a long time I was not interested in that kind of person, but after those interviews I sympathised with them. I could understand what they are and how they live. That recognition changed me somehow." The interviews with the cult members were similarly enlightening, particularly since they represented a diseased extension of the desire for individuality with which he has always been identified. "I could understand what they were feeling and what they were looking for. They are outsiders. They took off from the system. But they went too far."

Outside Links:

My Dinner with Murakami (youtube)

Haruki Murakami Website from China

Haruki Murakami Website from UK

Interview with Haruki Murakami in Salon

Interview about HM's running and writing

Interview with HM in Dalkey Archive Press

An early interview

Jazz Bar

His 60's Experience

Inspired to write his first novel ("Hear the Wind Sing") while watching a baseball game

His writing is deemed “pop” by the Japanese literary establishment

Hanshin Earthquake Page