Vintage Murakami

At roughly half of the schools that I teach at, I’m usually asked to eat my lunch in one of the classrooms with the students. The idea is that this will give them a casual atmosphere in which to converse with me in English and ask questions about America. The reality is that I usually sit and silently munch on my kyushoku while the entire class makes fun of me in Japanese. Well, I was eating lunch at Momoishi Middle School last week when one of the teachers, Nakamura Sensei, decided to strike up a conversation with me. “I hear that you’re interested in Murakami Haruki,” she said. We ended up having a rather long discussion on the topic and agreed that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World are by far his best novels. Anyway, at the end of lunch she asked me when I would be coming to the school next and promised that she would show me a rare piece of Murakami memorabilia when I returned.

Well, when I sat at my desk in the teacher’s office today, she came by with a magazine. Despite the fact that Murakami is generally a very reclusive character (he spends a lot of time outside of the country and unlike many contemporary Japanese authors, he generally shies away from interviews and does not appear on television shows), he had apparently allowed a small literary-type zine by the name of “Arne” (アルネ) to interview him and publish photographs of the interior of his house. Anyway, this issue is apparently now out of print and fairly hard to track down, so being able to page through it was quite a rare privilege indeed.

I’m generally of the mindset that artists should have the same right to privacy as anyone else, despite the loud assertions of “MTV Cribs” and People Magazine that anyone producing art for public consumption should have to make their personal lives similarly public. However, I must admit that in the case of the enigmatic Murakami, curiosity got the better of me, especially since I know that many of you are avid fans of his work. I didn’t have a camera with me, so I was unfortunately unable to take any photos and what you see above is the best image I could find of the article online. However, if you’d like to join me in killing the cat, I’ll do my best to describe the article to you below.

While he has historically spent a great deal of time overseas, Murakami (村上春樹) currently lives in a rather modest house in Yokohama-essentially a suburb of Tokyo. While I didn’t waste time trying to decode the full-text of the article (most of which I probably wouldn’t have been able to read anyway), I tried to glean as much information as possible from the photos, captions and sidebars. As one might expect, his house has a very clean, minimalist look and seems almost entirely Western-style, at least from what was shown (for example, there were no tatami rooms in any of the photos). I’m proud to report that he’s a Mac user, as his G4 imac and ibook suggested. His personal library seems extensive and a snapshot of one shelf revealed many supposedly “postmodern” forbears and contemporaries such as John Updike and Tim O’Brien. He also had a number of books on rock history and criticism on display, including titles on the Doors and B.B. King as well as a booklet from The Pet Sounds Sessions boxed set. These were literally book ended by a framed picture of Murakami completing the New York marathon (his finishing time was apparently 3 hours and 13 minutes).

Perhaps the most interesting photos were of his office, where he does the bulk of his writing. At the head of the room sits a solid, wooden desk with the aforementioned G4 imac perched atop. The walls of the room are lined with record shelves that house thousands of vinyl LPs-he estimates the collection consists of around 40,000 pieces (this should come as no surprise as he once owned and operated the jazz club “Peter Cat” in Kokobunji, later Sendagaya). He also has an extensive collection of CDs stashed away in pullout shelves, admittedly so that “they can’t be seen,” as he prefers displaying the full-size artwork of the LP jacket (the first defense of the true scenester). At the end of the room sit two large cabinet speakers, two very-expensive looking turntables and a leather sofa.

There were also photographs of his bicycle (he’s reportedly very athletic, especially for an author) but since I’m not very knowledgeable about bikes I couldn’t tell you anything about it aside from the fact that it was obviously a fixed-gear bike with a Panasonic frame.

Finally, there was a photomontage of different editions of his books from around the world-he keeps a complete collection in his home. It was interesting to see that many of the Japanese editions often feature the English titles on their covers as well, which supports his claim that he often comes up with the English title first.

In completely unrelated news, while being driven back from the school by Okubo-San, I observed an old man standing in the middle of the street and urinating into the snow. He briefly looked up to make eye contact with me and then returned his attention to the business at hand.