Peter Cat

Have you ever felt a sudden urge to write? If so, you are in good company, because that is exactly how Haruki Murakami says his own writing life began. So, how to write a novel according to Murakami? His answer is surprisingly down to earth, and today we pull it together from what he has said and written. Almost anyone can write a novel One idea fans often pass around is that Murakami believes almost anyone can write a novel if they want to. The logic goes like this: to become a pianist, you need long, tough training from childhood, but if you can write a sentence and have a pen and notebook, you can start without any professional training. We are working from a translated paraphrase, so we will not put exact quotation marks on it, but it matches the spirit of his well-known story. That story goes back to 1978, when Murakami, then running a jazz bar in Tokyo, was watching a baseball game and suddenly thought he could write a novel. He bought pen and paper, wrote at the kitchen table...

Fans of Haruki Murakami know that his world is full of music, but it is not only jazz and the Beatles. Classical music turns up too, and one name appears more than most: the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, and his recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations. This post is about that connection, and about how different recordings of the same piece can suit different moods. Glenn Gould in Murakami's study Readers who have seen photos of Murakami's workspace may have noticed a framed picture on the wall of his study. According to our notes, it is connected to Glenn Gould. We would rather not describe the image more precisely than we can verify, but it fits what we know: Murakami has mentioned Gould in his writing, and the pianist's taste, discipline and eccentricity are exactly the kind of thing he admires. Gould also shows up in Murakami's very first novel, Hear the Wind Sing (1979), where the references hint at the author's refined, slightly private musical taste. ...

Some songs sound like a late night with a glass of wine, and Chet Baker's I Fall in Love Too Easily is surely one of them. Today in the Music Room we are playing it, and talking about why Chet Baker sits so comfortably inside Haruki Murakami's world. A song that falls in love for you The title does half the work. I Fall in Love Too Easily is a ballad written for the 1944 film Anchors Aweigh , with music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Sammy Cahn, and it later became a Chet Baker signature. Baker's version, with his soft, almost whispering vocal and a muted trumpet that never pushes, is romantic, sad and a little bit hopeless all at once. It is the sound of someone who knows better and does it anyway. We find it addictive in the best sense. You put it on once, and suddenly it is an hour later and you are still sitting in the dark. What Murakami said about Chet Baker Murakami, who ran a jazz bar in Tokyo before he became a novelist, has written about jazz at length, and Ch...

Among the many literary friendships in Haruki Murakami's life, the bond with the American short story writer Raymond Carver is the one Harukists love to talk about. And one of its most curious artifacts is a poem: Raymond Carver's poem for Haruki Murakami, titled The Projectile and dedicated "For Haruki Murakami". We recently came across the text again, and we wanted to talk about what makes it so quietly moving. We are not going to reproduce the poem here, since it is Carver's work and deserves to be read in a proper collection of his poetry. Instead, let's walk around it: where it comes from, what it describes, and why it still matters to people who love both writers. Who were Carver and Murakami to each other? Murakami is, famously, Carver's Japanese translator. He spent years bringing Carver's stories into Japanese, and he has often said how much the American writer's plain, aching style mattered to him. The two men met in person when Carve...

Tony Takitani is one of Murakami's quietest and saddest short stories, and it also became one of the most beautiful films made from his work. We recently revisited both, and wanted to share our thoughts on this tale of loneliness. The story of Tony Takitani The story, from the early 1990s, follows a man who has been alone since birth. His mother died shortly after he was born, and his father, a wandering jazz musician, was almost never around. The father gave him the name Tony, a Western first name attached to a Japanese surname, Takitani. In the era of the story, that combination made a child stand out, and Tony grows up feeling like an outsider. As one of our notes says, the name may have been not just a name but loneliness itself. Tony becomes a quiet, skilled illustrator. Then he meets a woman and, for the first time, feels happiness. He marries her. But one thing troubles him a little: she is unable to stop buying clothes. They fill an emptiness in her that neither of the...

Every Harukist dreams of a pilgrimage, and the Haruki Murakami Library at Waseda University in Tokyo might be the best destination of all. Officially named the Waseda International House of Literature, it opened in October 2021, and it is dedicated to the writer who once studied on the same campus. What the Murakami Library is The building is a cultural hub rather than a traditional library. It was designed by the well-known architect Kengo Kuma, and it is meant to be a place where visitors can study Murakami's work, explore the archive he donated to the university, and talk about literature more broadly. As we understand it, the collection centres on his manuscripts and books, along with translations of his novels in many languages. We do not have a full inventory, so we will stay general here. One thing we like is the intended mood. Kuma has described it as a welcoming place, not a hushed reading room. Picture people having coffee and chatting about books, perhaps even the au...

Some books are read once and shelved. Others get passed along a family like a favourite record. We love that three generations of Murakami readers now sit under some roofs, and it has made us think about what it really means to support a writer you love. Grandmother, mother, child Murakami has said that one of the things that makes him feel fortunate is that people of every age read his novels. He has described receiving letters from readers who say their household has been reading his books for three generations: a grandmother who perhaps read him when he was new, a mother, a son, a sister. When he hears such stories, he has said, he feels a real brightness. In his view, a book that several people in one house take turns reading is a book that is still alive. He has also said, in a thought we find charming, that a publisher would of course like five copies sold to five people, but as a writer he would be happier if five people read one copy carefully. We are paraphrasing from our ...

So, what are Haruki Murakami fans called? The most common answer is Harukists . You may also hear "Murakamians", and one of our notes even mentions "Murakami's children". Whatever the word, we think it points to something real: a worldwide community of readers who feel personally connected to one writer. Where the name Harukist comes from The word is simple. It takes his first name, Haruki, and adds the "-ist" ending, as in a follower of a way of thinking. We can't point to who first used it, so we won't claim that. But it caught on among fans online, and it is the name we use around here. Japanese readers often call him by his first name too, which says a lot about how close people feel to him. What Harukists love about him Murakami debuted in 1979 with Hear the Wind Sing , and more than forty years later he is still read all over the world. A few things keep drawing people in. The lifestyle. He is famous as a running novelist, and ha...

Read enough Haruki Murakami and you start to notice the holes in the ground. Going down the well is one of his most recognizable images: a character descends into a dark, narrow, quiet place, and something shifts. We have been thinking about why he keeps coming back to it, and we want to share our opinion. The well as a symbol of the inner self One of our recovered notes puts it simply: in Murakami's work, the well stands for the darkness inside the heart, and it is an entrance to the unconscious. We agree. A well is a vertical tunnel with water or emptiness at the bottom. It is private, it is silent, and it is hard to climb out of. That makes it a perfect stage for a character who needs to be alone with his own thoughts. The note adds a line we like: every hole has an entrance and an exit, and every exit is an entrance to somewhere else. If you go deep enough into your own heart, you may come out somewhere new. Wells across the books The motif goes back to the very start. I...

If you want to understand the music of Norwegian Wood , start with the Beatles. The 1987 novel is named after the song, it opens with the song, and its quietest, saddest scenes are scored by a guitar playing Beatles tunes. Here at Peter Cat we have always thought of this book as a record you can read, so let's put the needle down. Why Norwegian Wood is named after a Beatles song The title comes from "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)", the Beatles song from Rubber Soul (1965). In the novel, Toru Watanabe is in his late thirties, sitting on a plane, when the song begins to play over the speakers and sends him straight back to the late 1960s, to Naoko and to the years he has tried to hold at arm's length. The melody is the doorway into the whole story. Without it, there is no novel. Later, the song becomes something more intimate. Reiko, Naoko's older roommate at the sanatorium, plays guitar, and "Norwegian Wood" is the song Naoko asks her for agai...

1Q84 is a vast novel, but two images stay with most readers long after the last page: the strange, quiet teenager Fuka-Eri , and a small playground beneath two moons. In this post we look at both. A light spoiler warning: we discuss the broad shape of the story, including the reunion of Tengo and Aomame. Who is Fuka-Eri? Fuka-Eri is a seventeen-year-old girl who arrives in the book as the author of a mysterious manuscript, Air Chrysalis . She is dyslexic, which means that reading and understanding written words is hard for her even though her intelligence, hearing and eyesight are perfectly normal. The book's editor Komatsu recruits Tengo to rewrite her story, and that sets the entire plot in motion. What makes her unforgettable is how she speaks. She talks in short, flat sentences, often without the rising tone of a question, and she says startling things in the same even voice. For many readers this is both charming and eerie. She feels like someone who sees past ordinary co...

Murakami's fiction is full of images that seem made for the screen: a well in a quiet backyard, a cat that vanishes, two moons in the night sky. And yet Murakami film adaptations are famously tricky. His stories live in tone, in the voice of a narrator thinking aloud, and that is hard to photograph. When it works, though, the results are remarkable. Here are the adaptations we think every Harukist should know. Drive My Car (2021) Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car took a short story from the collection Men Without Women and expanded it into a long, patient film about grief, theatre and the conversations that happen in a car. It won the Oscar for Best International Feature, which finally gave Murakami's world a big moment in global cinema. What we love is that it keeps the story's emotional core while building new material around it, including echoes of other stories in the same book. Burning (2018) Lee Chang-dong's Burning grew out of the short story "Bar...

One of the quiet joys of being a Harukist is picking up the same novel in a different country and barely recognizing it. Murakami's books have been translated into some fifty languages, and Murakami book covers around the world can look wildly different. Sometimes even the title changes. Here is a fan's tour of what we have noticed. Photographs, illustrations and everything between Our rough impression is that European editions lean toward photographic covers, while North American and Asian editions often use bold illustrations or graphic design. That is a generalization, and publishers within one country can differ a lot. Still, it tells you something about how each market imagines the Murakami reader: moody and cinematic in one place, playful and surreal in another. A good cover has a hard job. It must promise strangeness without spoiling it. Cats, wells, moons, lone figures and empty rooms all appear again and again, because they capture Murakami's mood in a single g...

When we think of Murakami and drinks, we usually picture beer, whisky or strong coffee. But if you read closely, white wine in Murakami's novels turns up almost as often as red, and one bottle stands out: Chablis . Crisp, dry, cold and perfect with seafood, it quietly follows his characters through some of their loneliest and most important evenings. Who drinks white wine in Murakami's books? Our notes observe that many of his women prefer their white wine very cold. Male characters drink it too, in books such as Sputnik Sweetheart , 1Q84 and Killing Commendatore . When the men do, two things tend to be true. The wine is relatively inexpensive, nothing fancy, and they drink it when they want to build a small atmosphere for themselves, alone. A cold glass becomes a way to hold the evening still. That fits the broader Murakami Kitchen mindset we love: simple things done with care. If you want to cook along, try our spaghetti recipe or the cucumber sandwich , and open someth...

Ask Harukists who taught Murakami how to write and you will hear the same names: Fitzgerald, Carver, Dostoevsky. But there is another teacher who deserves a place on that shelf. Raymond Chandler , the father of the hard-boiled detective novel, shaped Murakami's voice, his sense of mood, and even his daily routine. Who was Raymond Chandler? Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter, best known for The Big Sleep , Farewell, My Lovely and The Long Goodbye , all starring the private detective Philip Marlowe. He came to fiction late. He did not publish his first novel until he was in his fifties, after years in the oil business and after turning to pulp magazines to learn the craft. That late start is part of his appeal. It reminds us that Murakami himself began writing novels only after running a jazz bar, a story we told in our post on his jazz bar days . What made Chandler special was his prose. His sentences are lean, wry and full of sharp similes. His detective is lone...