Peter Cat

What happens when a novelist who has spent forty years hiding behind narrators finally writes about his own father? In the second half of a July 2020 interview with the Japanese newspaper Mainichi , Haruki Murakami talks about exactly that, and about the story collection First Person Singular . This Murakami First Person Singular interview summary covers what he said, in our own words, with a few short quotes. If you missed the first half, where he discusses the radio show, you can read July Interview Part 1: Murakami Radio first. This part is the more personal one. Context: two books, one big year In 2020, Murakami published two very different books. One was the essay Abandoning a Cat ( Neko o Suteru ), a memoir about his father that circles around a childhood memory of a cat and grows into a portrait of a man shaped by war. The other was First Person Singular , his first short story collection in about six years, with eight stories. The interviewer treats them as a pair: on...

In July 2020, while recording a new episode in a Tokyo studio, Haruki Murakami sat down with Japan's Mainichi Shimbun to talk about Murakami Radio , the Tokyo FM programme he has hosted since 2018. What he said about hosting Murakami Radio is a small treasure for fans: it connects his childhood transistor radio, his record obsession, his old jazz bar, and the way he thinks about talking to an audience. Here is our summary and what we took from it. Context: Why a Novelist Became a DJ Murakami Radio first aired in August 2018. By the time of this interview he had done around fifteen broadcasts. During the coronavirus lockdown, he recorded two Stay Home specials at his own house, and this session marked his return to the studio with the usual small team. If you want to hear the shows themselves, we have posted several with English subtitles, such as the first show and the Stay Home special . Growing Up With a Radio Murakami says he feels he grew up with radio. TV was a sh...

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 ...