Peter Cat

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...

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...

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...

Some of the best Murakami writing is not in the novels at all. "My Poverty Shaped Like a Cheesecake" is a short autobiographical piece about the early days of his marriage, when he and his wife rented a strange little house on a sliver of land between two railway lines. This My Poverty Shaped Like a Cheesecake summary walks through the story in our own words and explains why it still sticks with readers. A note on the title: it circulates in a few translations, including "Cheesecake-Shaped Poverty." We think the image is the point either way. Poverty, here, has a literal shape: a long, sharp wedge of cake. My Poverty Shaped Like a Cheesecake: the story in brief Murakami sets the scene around 1972 or 1973. He and his wife, newly married and, as he puts it with a grin, poor enough to qualify for a record book, found a rental house on a triangular plot. He asks us to picture a round cheesecake sliced into twelve pieces: one narrow slice, with a thirty-degree p...

The late 1960s student movement in Japan, known as Zenkyōtō, is one of the keys to Haruki Murakami's writing, and Yukio Mishima is one of its most famous literary opponents. In this post we look at Mishima and Murakami against the backdrop of the University of Tokyo (Todai) riots, and what each writer made of that turbulent era. The Zenkyōtō years Zenkyōtō, short for the National Joint Struggle Committees, was a left-wing student movement that swept Japanese universities in 1968 and 1969. Murakami entered Waseda University's literature department in those years and spent seven years there, and it is hard to talk about his work without this background. In his early writing, he looks back at what he gained and lost in that time, and the experience of the student struggle is often the starting point of his literature. It left a lot of pain and loss, and it shaped not just his personality but his view of life. The most famous episode at Todai was the Yasuda Auditorium siege, wh...

Sex appears in nearly every Haruki Murakami novel, and readers and critics have argued about it for decades. In this post we take a thoughtful look at how sex works in Murakami's fiction: what it says about his lonely protagonists, how it changes from his early books to his later ones, and what Murakami himself has said about writing it. Loneliness behind the surface Murakami's male leads are often ordinary, educated professionals who are doing their best to fit into society. Yet in almost every case, there is an undertone of loneliness running through their minds. To understand Murakami, it helps to understand that emptiness and sense of loss, and one of the keys to it is the way he uses sex. On the surface, a sexual encounter in his novels may look like a brief relief from a character's emotional state. But it rarely heals anything. The characters come away with deeper wounds, because there is no salvation to be found there. Sex, for Murakami, is closer to a metapho...

"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...

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...

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'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...

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 ...