Haruki Murakami's Humble Abode: Why He Lives in Oiso, Not Tokyo

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 said that what he likes about living outside it is that people do not recognize him on the street. He has compared the freedom of that anonymity to the feeling he had in New York, where he could simply ride the train like anyone else. (We are paraphrasing here, since the original wording in our notes was not reliable.)

Anyone who has read his books will recognize the pull of the quiet suburb and the commuter train. It is no accident that so many of his characters live in ordinary, slightly lonely corners of the city.

Mountains, sea and the Kobe connection

Murakami grew up in the Kobe area and attended Kobe High School, which sits on a hillside. From the classroom windows, the sea spread out in the distance. It is easy to see why a home between mountains and water would feel natural to him.

In Oiso he has said that on a clear day you can watch ships at anchor from the house, and open a window on the other side to see the ridge of the hills. Murakami is famous for his daily running habit, and he has mentioned jogging and cycling along the beach. He has also joked, gently, that living on a hill makes those routines harder than they sound.

Distance as a creative method

There is a pattern in Murakami's life. He left Japan for several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and wrote major works abroad, including Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Living outside Japan, and later at the edge of Tokyo rather than inside it, gave him room to observe.

That may be the real secret of his home. The distance is not only geographical. It is a way of looking, with a slightly detached but endlessly curious eye, at people and things. It might also help explain how a writer so rooted in Japan became so widely loved elsewhere.

If you could pick a home for your own writing, would it be a busy city, a seaside town, or somewhere in between? Tell us in the comments, and read more in our Novelist Lifestyle posts.