Publisher’s paperback marketing campaign leaflet on 40 years anniversary of Murakami’s debut features a special message from the author. These days in the train, most of everybody have kamaboko-board* like mobile phone and gaze the screen without expression. I would not say it is good or bad, but found that we are unconsciously used to […]
Thanks to my friend who lent me the book, I had a chance to read “The Wild Movie Chase,” an out-of-print movie review anthology written by Murakami and Saburo Kawamoto, a movie critic, in 1985. Murakami wrote 154 reviews out of 264 and the preface starting as; A long time ago in a galaxy far, […]
Today’s lunchtime read is Murakami’s new short story “Carnaval,” published last week on the Bungakukai magazine. I assume it would be welcomed by not all the current readers, but I like it and support his challenge. Anyway, as usual, I believe English translation will come up soon. Wishing you a happy Friday.
“And so now you’re crushed, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, and that’s why you went down in the well.” (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Ch.10) Just happened to think about whether a well is common for the use in the city in other countries. Here, the old part of Tokyo, the old wells are kept working in preparation […]
Rereading Murakami’s essay on Sydney 2000. He wrote “The Olympic Games is like a typhoon eye. If we are in the middle of that, it is not easy to see the whole picture. The longer we stay there, the less we do catch the subject. Of course, more details are visible; for example, a hockey […]
Mieko Kawakami is an Akutagawa Prize-winning novelist. When she was 19, she worked at a bookshop and attended Murakami’s charity public reading for the quake victims in Kobe; after some years, she became an author. In 2017, she interviewed Murakami on Killing Commendatore, his creativeness, memories, fame, daily life, and the next world. Some of […]
Today’s lunchtime reading is a Japanese short stories collection curated by Jay Rubin and introduced by Haruki Murakami. My situation is a bit twisted; this book was originally published in English and I am reading the original texts of those short stories which had been translated to English in the original edition of this book. […]
Theatrical adoption of After the Quake is starting end of this month in Tokyo. Katsumi Kiba plays Mr Frog this time several years after he had performed Nakata in KoS. I wonder if both characters have a similar mission to save the world to some extent.
Lunchtime reads of Murakami’s new short stories released this week: With the Beatles; Yakult Swallows Poems. It is sometimes difficult for a 70 years old man to write his young days’ memories without annoying nostalgia for younger readers. However, Murakami did a good job (as always) by writing it with tracing the edge of fictional/true […]
Frog amulet for “come-back-safe” can be purchased at Kanda Myojin, the shrine for the tutelary deity of Tokyo. “You said before that you have come here to save Tokyo from destruction?” “That is what I said.” “What kind of destruction?” “Earthquake,” Frog said with the utmost gravity. (Super-Frog Saves Tokyo, 1999) As both toads and […]