Note sull'episodio
On a spring day in 1978 at Jingu Stadium, a 29-year-old jazz bar owner heard the crack of a bat during a Yakult Swallows game and felt a sudden certainty that he could write a novel. This episode traces Haruki Murakami from his 1949 birth in Kyoto to parents who both taught Japanese literature, through a teenage rebellion of Western novels and jazz records, to the seven years he and his wife Yoko ran the Peter Cat coffee house and jazz bar in Tokyo before he wrote a word of fiction.
We look at how jazz structure shaped his prose, the kitchen-table debut Hear the Wind Sing, the 1987 phenomenon of Norwegian Wood and the fame that drove him into self-imposed exile at Princeton, Tufts, and Harvard, and the 1995 Kobe earthquake and Tokyo subway sarin attack that pulled him home and shifted his philosophy from detachment to commitment. We also cover the nonfiction book Underground, his militant daily routine of 4 a.m. writing and ultramarathon running, the egg-and-wall speech in Jerusalem, his calls for Japanese wartime apologies and criticism of nuclear power after Fukushima, and the Orange Cat cafe inside the Waseda library that now houses his archives.
- Why seven years of pouring coffee were incubation rather than wasted time
- Norwegian Wood as a melancholic antidote to bubble-era Japan
- Fleeing fame to preserve the outsider's vantage point
- 1995 as the turning point from observer to engaged citizen
- Running 100 kilometers as the tether that keeps a surreal imagination grounded