Peter Cat

Which author does Haruki Murakami drop everything to read? The answer is Kazuo Ishiguro. By Murakami's own account, when a new Ishiguro novel comes out, he heads straight to the bookstore and puts aside whatever else he was reading. It is high praise from a writer who admits he rarely gets close to other working novelists. A fan, a friend, and a shared love of jazz Murakami has said, roughly, that every time Ishiguro publishes a new novel he runs to buy it and sets his other books aside. He says there are only a few authors for whom he does this, and Ishiguro is one of them. According to our notes, the two were introduced in the early 2000s by the head of a publishing company. They have shared meals when they have had the chance to meet, and swapped favourite jazz CDs when they parted. Murakami tends to avoid befriending contemporary Japanese novelists, so this friendship stands out. Ishiguro, born in Nagasaki and raised in Britain, writes in English, and Murakami has read ne...

Looking for every song from the Murakami Radio Stay Home Special? Here is the complete 19-track list, in order, from Haruki Murakami's programme of comforting, sunny music made for staying indoors. If you have not seen the show yet, our Stay At Home Corona Special with English subtitles has the full episode. The Stay Home Special tracklist Titles and artists are tidied up from our notes, with standard spellings. Look for the Silver Lining – The Modern Quartet Waitin' on a Sunny Day – Bruce Springsteen Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head – Ronald Isley & Burt Bacharach Here Comes the Sun – Nina Simone You've Got a Friend – Carole King Over the Rainbow – Ella Fitzgerald Sun Is Shining – Bob Marley & The Wailers What a Wonderful World – Louis Armstrong Happy Birthday Sweet Darling – Kate Taylor Smile – Eric Clapton My Favorite Things (feat. Kathleen Battle) – Al Jarreau She Wore a Yellow Ribbon – Risa Ono Happy Talk – Nancy Wilson They Can't ...

Here is the full tracklist for the Oldies episode of Murakami Radio, Haruki Murakami's own radio programme, in which the novelist plays the records he grew up loving. If you have watched our Murakami Radio Oldies full show with English subtitles and wanted to find a song again, this page is for you. Murakami Radio Oldies: the songs The programme leans into the sound of early rock and roll, doo-wop-era pop and surf music, the kind of records that were on the airwaves when Murakami was a teenager. We have cleaned up the spellings of titles and artists as best we can. Every Breath I Take – Gene Pitney I Will Go On Loving You – Jamie Coe Lonely Soldier Boy – Johnny Deerfield What Am I Gonna Do – Jimmy Clanton Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans – Ricky Nelson One Sided Love Affair – Elvis Presley A Boy Like Me, a Girl Like You – Elvis Presley The Phoenix Love Theme – The T-Bones Tell 'Em I'm Surfin' – Jan & Dean Wonderful World – Sam Cooke Te...

"Before I turn forty..." is how Haruki Murakami looked ahead in 1979, when he won the Gunzo New Writers Prize for his debut, Hear the Wind Sing . His remarks on that occasion hold a surprisingly practical lesson about setting goals, and it is one we have been thinking about ever since. Murakami's acceptance remarks in 1979 In the June 1979 issue of the literary magazine Gunzo , the new winner wrote a short piece about his beginnings. After finishing school he had hardly picked up a pen, so writing was slow going at first. He leaned on a line from F. Scott Fitzgerald, roughly that if you want to speak to others you have to use words of your own, but he admitted it never worked as simply as that. He ended on a modest, hopeful note: perhaps when he reached forty he would be able to write a little better, and he still felt that way. At thirty, he was already thinking about the long game. He talked about wanting to write a "true" novel in about ten years. A t...

Where does Haruki Murakami live? Not in the middle of Tokyo, as you might guess for Japan's most famous novelist, but in Oiso, a quiet seaside town in Kanagawa Prefecture. His choice of home says a lot about how he works, and it is a small piece of the larger puzzle of his novelist lifestyle. A writer who keeps his distance Murakami has never been easy with the media. He has long preferred to keep his attention on his work rather than on interviews and public commentary, and he seems to have understood early that too much noise would not be good for his writing. For years he deliberately stayed away, and even after returning to Japan he continued to keep a polite distance from the press. That attitude shapes where he lives. Instead of settling in Tokyo, he chose Oiso, a place where mountains and sea meet, much like the landscape of his childhood. Why not Tokyo? By his own account, Murakami does not love Tokyo. He has described it as too flat, too wide and too vast, and has...

Will Haruki Murakami ever win the Nobel Prize in Literature? Every autumn, as the announcement approaches, his name rises to the top of the speculation lists, and every year the prize goes to someone else. As of 2020, when we first wrote this piece, he had not won, and we want to explore why the question follows him around, and why it may matter less than the fuss suggests. The perennial favourite For years, Murakami has been named among the strongest candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy does not publish its shortlist for decades, so all of this is speculation by bookmakers, critics and fans. Still, the pattern is hard to miss: a huge international readership, translations into dozens of languages, and a place on nearly every year's list of favourites. What the Nobel tends to reward Looking at past winners, a few themes come up often: reflection on the times a writer lives in, compassion for the vulnerable, and an ambition to explore something u...

Every Murakami reader has a favourite record from his books, but one of the most haunting is an album that nobody, not even the narrator, can name. In South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992), a boy listens to a Liszt piano concerto record at the home of a girl called Shimamoto, and decades later he admits he has forgotten who played it. We have been wondering about that record ever since, so today we go looking for clues. The Liszt record in South of the Border, West of the Sun The scene is a small, quiet one. Hajime, the narrator, spends afternoons at Shimamoto's house, where her father's record collection waits. Of all those records, he loves one best: a recording of the Liszt piano concertos, one concerto on each side. He gives two reasons. The jacket is beautiful, and nobody else around him listens to Liszt, which makes the music feel like a secret garden that only he (and Shimamoto) can enter. The music itself does not win him over right away. At first it strike...

Behind many of Haruki Murakami's books stands someone readers rarely hear about: his wife, Yoko. Their marriage has lasted nearly half a century, and Murakami once summed it up in a line we love: "But when it's good, it's very good." Today we want to tell the story of Yoko Murakami, and why she is no ordinary writer's wife. How Haruki met Yoko During his university years, when Murakami found it hard to be interested in anything, he gained one thing that would matter for the rest of his life: his future wife, Yoko Takahashi. At first, her family had reservations, partly because of the cultural gap between Kanto and Kansai, the two regions their families came from. Eventually Murakami got to meet Yoko's father, who asked him one simple question: "Do you love Yoko?" Murakami and Yoko married when he was twenty-two. They later opened the jazz bar Peter Cat together, which is where the story of Murakami the novelist begins. You can read about it...

In Haruki Murakami's novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage , a man believes he is the one dull spot in a group of vivid friends. But is a colourless colour really nothing at all? That question has stayed with us, and we want to explore why Tsukuru Tazaki might be more colourful than he thinks. Five friends, four colours Black (Kuro), Blue (Ao), White (Shiro), Red (Aka), and Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki. As trivial and futile as it may seem, everyone in the group except Tsukuru has a name that holds a colour. Tsukuru treasures this circle as the most perfect set of companions he could have. Then he moves to Tokyo to study on his own, and soon after, the entire group cuts him off without a word of explanation. Hurt and abandoned, Tsukuru eventually sets out on a pilgrimage to find light, and closure, for what happened to him. Along the way, Murakami walks us through the work of accepting unresolved pain, whatever the reasons it was inflicted on us. It isn...

Haruki Murakami is not exactly a fashion icon, but Murakami's fashion sense is more consistent and more interesting than many people realize. He loves classic American basics, he collects T-shirts with real devotion, and the clothes his characters wear often tell us who they are. Let's look at all three. Brooks Brothers and the Ivy look Our notes include a lovely piece of writing in praise of Brooks Brothers, the old American clothier. The appeal is easy to understand. It is a trustworthy brand, faithful to the basics, not a luxury label with a luxury price. Its virtue is moderation: plain but stylish. The writer recommends it especially to men in their thirties who suddenly realize they do not know how to dress like a grown-up. The essay tells a charming story of a first visit to the Boston store, where an elegant older clerk with a gentle New England accent seemed more like a Harvard professor than a salesman. It also mentions that Miles Davis, according to his autobiog...

Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood and Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express have a lot in common, and it's a question we get curious about as fans: was one influenced by the other? The short answer is that we have found no evidence that either creator drew on the other. But if you love both, the echoes are impossible to ignore, and they say something about a certain kind of longing that crosses borders. Two young people, two anxious eras For some of us, there are periods in life when we are too immature, too full of reckless dreams, and unable to put into words what is stirring inside. In those years, when you feel the gap between what you want and what you can have, a few artists seem to speak directly to you. For us, those two were Murakami, discovered in a second-hand bookstore, and Wong Kar-wai, whose films we watched on VHS more times than we can count. Norwegian Wood (1987) is one of the defining works of Japanese urban sensibility, and Chungking Express (1994) is a...

When Haruki Murakami spent time at Princeton University as a guest lecturer, he came away with a surprising lesson about beer. In one of his essays from that period, he describes how something as simple as choosing a Budweiser over a Heineken can say a lot about who you are, or at least who people think you are. It is a funny, observant piece about campus manners, and a reminder of how well Murakami reads everyday life. Imported beer and the academic crowd Murakami noticed that at Princeton, drinking imported beer such as Heineken or Guinness is seen as the "proper" thing to do. American beer is not a problem in itself. Craft names like Samuel Adams from Boston are perfectly acceptable. But order a Budweiser, Miller, or Schlitz, and you may well be met with some puzzled looks. Murakami admits he usually prefers European beer to the sweeter American kind, but Budweiser is his exception. He says he would like it a little drier, but objectively it goes well with food, incl...

Haruki Murakami does not have much of a sweet tooth, but there is one big exception: donuts. His affection for them runs through his essays and his fiction, and the more we look at it, the more it seems to be about something deeper than sugar. Today we are digging into the truth about Murakami's love for donuts, and why that circle with a hole in the middle keeps turning up in his work. Food as a language in fiction Many writers use food as a metaphor for happiness, desire, power, or even violence. Murakami is no different. In his novels, food carries the loneliness and sense of lack that his modern characters feel, and it tells us as much about them as the plot does. If you like this side of his writing, our Murakami Kitchen series, including the Coca-Cola pancakes , explores it further. Murakami has said that he sometimes wants to eat a donut for no reason at all, and he has a particular soft spot for Dunkin' Donuts. Donuts also appear in his writing, including a menti...

Some speeches are polite thank-yous. Murakami's Jerusalem Prize speech is not one of them. In February 2009, with a war raging in Gaza and friends back home telling him to stay away, Haruki Murakami stood in front of an Israeli audience and gave one of the most talked-about acceptance speeches of any modern novelist. Years later, people still search for it, and the line everyone remembers is the one about the egg and the wall. Here at Peter Cat we get asked about this speech more than almost anything else, so let's walk through it properly: what was happening, what he actually said, and what the egg and the wall really stand for. Why Murakami Almost Didn't Go The Jerusalem Prize is awarded to writers whose work explores the freedom of the individual in society. When Murakami was named the winner, Israel's military campaign in Gaza was under way, and the United Nations was reporting more than a thousand deaths, many of them civilians. In Japan, some people urged ...

Haruki Murakami's daily routine is famous for a reason: it is the quiet engine behind decades of novels. Running, early mornings, and long hours at the desk have shaped his life as a writer, and the story starts with a pack of cigarettes. Here is how the habits that built his career came about, and what we can borrow from them. From three packs a day to ten kilometres In his thirties, Murakami was a heavy smoker. He was throwing out around three packs a day, his nails and fingertips were stained yellow, and he smelled of smoke. He had picked up the habit to pass the time while running his jazz bar, Peter Cat (you can read how that chapter ended in our post on his jazz bar days ). Then he decided to write a novel, and he wanted to keep that ability going for the long haul. That meant paying attention to his health. Murakami describes himself as a mesomorph, someone who gains weight easily, and his goal was to lean up. So he quit smoking cold turkey and started running, quite r...

On an episode of Haruki Radio, Murakami was asked “If you had to choose between a world without music and a world without cats, which one would you choose to live in?” Murakami responded with a witty excuse, making apparent that the idea of a world robbed of both would be would lacking and wearisome as a zebra stripped of its stripes. Indeed, what would life be like without the melodious tune thumping in one’s head or the feline presence positioned by one’s chair? Surely, a world robbed of the two would be most bland. After all, it was Murakami’s love for jazz and search for a more fervent lifestyle that led to his opening of Peter Cat. Peter Cat was more that a business venture. It was a space that began with the simple operation of serving coffee during light hours and cocktails near dark that later went on to combine Murakami’s simple passions: great jazz, good drinks, and delicious food. Before Peter Cat’s establishment; however, Murakami left Waseda University and married h...

The friendship between Haruki Murakami and illustrator Anzai Mizumaru is one of the quieter treasures of Murakami's career. It lasted about thirty years, it left its fingerprints on the pages of his books, and it ended far too suddenly. Today we want to tell that story, because for many Harukists Mizumaru's loose, playful drawings are as much a part of Murakami's world as the cats and jazz records. How Murakami met Mizumaru Before they met, Mizumaru had worked as an art director at an advertising company and was building a name as an illustrator. In 1981 he was asked to illustrate a short piece by a still fairly new writer named Murakami. That one job grew into a collaboration, and a friendship, that carried on for the next three decades. Murakami later called their meeting "fate." It is easy to see why. The two had a surprising amount in common, from their taste in art to their outlook on life, and even their capacity for drinking. They were, in the words o...