Haruki Murakami and his Music

Famed Japanese author Haruki Murakami frequently uses music as a motif in his writing. From overt references such as in Norwegian Wood, where the main characters play a whole songbook of Beatles titles, through to his other novels where protagonists enjoy jazz, Murakami weaves usually Western music into his novels.

Popular music from Beach Boys to Led Zeppelin help set the period and mood of many pieces, and meanwhile Murakami makes extensive use of classic music - from Bach and Mozart through to the impressionists including Debussy and Ravel - mostly (but not always) to underscore scenes of intense sadness.

Jazz is where Murakami is most at home. In fact from age 25 he ran a Jazz bar called "Peter Cat" from 1974-1982 and through his passion for Jazz amassed a huge collection of recordings. Visit his website where he discusses his current musical tastes - for example Radiohead, which he listened to extensively while writing Kafka on the Shore.

The website also lists the music referred to by Murakami. Clearly he uses music to capture and reference particular eras. Jazz also features strongly in Murakami’s writing: Nat King Cole’s South of the Border, West of the Sun inspired Murakami’s book.  Jazz greats Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, John Coltrane and Miles Davis get frequent mentions. Murakami clearly loves their music, and loves the way jazz can say as much with its silent spaces as with its riffs. He clearly appreciates the pared-down style of cool jazz (see below) and this provides as good an illustration as any of the essential Murakami style.

-  Norwegian Wood Apart from the Beatles we also get Laura Nyro, Creedence Clearwater Revivial, Cream, Rolling Stones, The Doors and the Japanese singer Kyu Sakamoto whose pop single Ue o Muite Aruku, known in the west as "Sukiyaki" was a global hit. Sakamoto was a victim of the August 1985 plane crash of JAL 123 which killed more than 500 passengers and crew. (Very Best of Kyu Sakamoto.) This sad novel also includes music by Bach, Brahms (2nd Piano Concerto) and the sweet, evocative Claire de Lune by Debussy and, equally late in the novel,  Pavane for a Dying Princess (Pavane pour une Infante défunte) by Ravel.

-  Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Here Murakami employs music by Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Woody Herman, Johnny Mathis, Charlie Parker. Meanwhile in one riff, Bob Dylan gets multiple mentions with mostly early songs including Like a Rolling Stone and Positively 4th Street. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: A Novel (Vintage International)

-  The Elephant Vanishes. Murakami cites Herbie Hancock, Charlie Parker, Glen Miller, Sinatra and Ravi Shankar.

-  South of the Border, West of the Sun tells of the reunion between two childhood sweethearts, Hajime and Shimamoto, the former having found success, with the ownership of two jazz clubs: a subject with which Murakami writes with expertise. Here Jobim, Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby and Duke Ellington lend a nostalgic mood. South of the Border, West of the Sun : A Novel (Vintage International)

-  Kafka on the Shore is named after a fictional single, but the novel also works out musically between the pop of Beach Boys, Beatles, Cream, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Prince and Radiohead’s Kid A and the Jazz of Duke Ellington and Stan Getz. Kafka on the Shore

Murakami Talks about Music.

Below we bring together a number of quotes from the author.

1) It Don’t Mean a Thing, If It Ain’t Got that Swing: An Interview with Haruki Murakami

Sinda Gregory, Toshifumi Miyawaki, and Larry McCaffery

http://www.centerforbookculture.org/review/02 _2_inter/interview_Murakami.html

"Larry McCaffery: Most of your biographical statements mention that you owned a jazz bar for a number of years. And of course references to jazz appear frequently in your works. Did jazz have any influence on your writing in any way?

Haruki Murakami: Not consciously. Jazz is just my hobby. It is true that I was listening to jazz for ten hours a day for several years, so maybe I was deeply influenced by this kind of music--the rhythm, the improvisation, the sound, the style. Managing that jazz club did have some direct effect on my decision to write, though. One night looking down the bar of the club I saw some black American soldiers crying because they missed America so much. Up until that point, I had been so immersed in Western culture ever since I was about ten or twelve--not just jazz but also Elvis and Vonnegut. I think that my interest in these things was partly due to wanting to rebel against my father (he was a teacher of Japanese literature) and against other Japanese orthodoxies. So when I was sixteen I stopped reading Japanese novels and began reading Russian and French novelists, such as Dostoyevsky, Stendhal, and Balzac, in translation. After studying English for four years in high school, I began reading American books at used-bookstores. By reading American novels I could escape out of my loneliness into a different world. It felt like visiting Mars at first, but gradually I began to feel comfortable there. But that night I saw those American black men crying I realized that, no matter how much I loved this Western culture, it meant more to these soldiers than it ever could for me. That was really why I began to write."

2) From Runner World magazine. Article by Yishane Lee

http://www.runnersworld.com/article/0,5033,s6 -197-198-0-8908,00.html

HM "Before I became a writer, I was running a jazz bar in the center of Tokyo, which means that I worked in filthy air all the time late into the night. I was very excited when I started making a living out of my writing, and I decided, "I will live in nothing but an absolutely healthy way." Getting up at 5 a.m. every morning, doing some work first, then going off running. It was very refreshing for me."

Do you listen to jazz or any other kind of music?

HM "I normally listen to rock while running. I found that the simpler the rhythm, the better. For example, Creedence Clearwater Revival, John Mellencamp or The Beach Boys. I record this music on MD disks so I can listen to them with my Walkman on my run. There was this one time when I tried a 100K ultramarathon, I was tempted to listen to Mozart’s Magic Flute from the beginning to the end, but I gave up on it in the middle of the course. It was exhausting. Since then I found opera not to be a good fit for running."

3) The Guardian - Haruki Murakami - Marathon man. Richard Williams
Saturday May 17, 2003
 
"Of course when I was a kid I got a transistor radio. There was music - Elvis, the Beach Boys, the Beatles. That was exciting. And they became a part of my life."

In 1963, at the age of 14, there was another moment of revelation when he attended a concert by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. "I was so impressed," he says of the night he became hooked on the music’s spon-taneous warmth and the musicians’ cool stance. "Since then I have been a very enthusiastic jazz listener."

So enthusiastic, in fact, that jazz was to provide an unorthodox route into his professional life. In 1971, shortly after marrying Yoko Takahashi, a fellow student whom he had met three years earlier, he suspended his studies at Waseda University in Tokyo. Together they worked in a record shop by day and a coffee bar by night to save the money - about £5,000 - which, augmented by loans from a bank and Yoko’s father, would allow the two 22-year-olds to open a jazz club in a Tokyo suburb. Called Peter Cat after Murakami’s beloved pet, it was a basement room that functioned as a coffee bar by day and a jazz club at night, with live bands at the weekends. Murakami served drinks, washed the dishes, changed the records and booked the musicians. In between and when business was slow, he read voraciously and studied for his degree, which he received in 1975 (Yoko had graduated three years earlier).

With a change of premises in 1977, when they moved to a downtown location, Peter Cat lasted seven years. Murakami credits the long hours and the need for financial prudence with providing a solid platform upon which to establish his independence from the template of the Japanese "salaryman", wedded to the same paternalistic company from graduation to the grave. "I had to work hard to survive," he says. "It was tough, but I found something very precious there."

4) Steppenwolf: 2005-2006, Volume 2 Found inTranslation by Jay Rubin

Murakami is a lover of music – music of all kinds: jazz, classical, folk, rock. It occupies a central position in his life and work. The title of his first novel commands the reader to Hear the Wind Sing (Kaze no uta o , 1979), and one magazine went so far as to publish a discography of all the music mentioned in his writing, a project later expanded into a substantial book. Murakami owned a jazz bar for seven years and he continues to add to his collection of more than 6,000 records. He is constantly going to concerts or listening to recorded music. It is a wonder that he did not become a musician himself – though, in a way, he did. Rhythm is perhaps the most important element of his prose. He enjoys the music of words, and he senses an affinity between his stylistic rhythms and the beat of jazz, as he noted in a talk at the University of California in Berkeley:

"My style boils down to this: First of all, I never put more meaning into a sentence than is absolutely necessary. Second, the sentences have to have rhythm. This is something I learned from music, especially jazz. In jazz, great rhythm is what makes great improvising possible. It’s all in the footwork. To maintain that rhythm, there must be no extra weight. This doesn’t mean that there should be no weight at all – just no weight that isn’t absolutely necessary. You have to cut out the fat."

For Murakami, music is the best means of entry into the deep recesses of the unconscious, that timeless other world within our psyche. There, at the core of the self, lies the story of who each of us is: a fragmented narrative that we can only know through images.

See Also:

Haruki Murakami  The Hard Boiled Style of Haruki Murakami The Translation Work of Haruki Murakami

A chronological reading Listmania! titled: Read Haruki Murakami

Link to his latest book: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Other books by Murakami

Novels

1  The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle : A Novel (Vintage International)

2  Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: A Novel (Vintage International)

3  A Wild Sheep Chase : A Novel (Vintage International)

4  South of the Border, West of the Sun : A Novel (Vintage International)

5  Kafka on the Shore

6  Norwegian Wood (Vintage International Original) 

7  ’Dance Dance Dance (Vintage International)’ 

8  ’Sputnik Sweetheart (Vintage International)’ 

Short stories

1  After the Quake : Stories (Vintage International)

2  The Elephant Vanishes : Stories (Vintage International)

3  Vintage Murakami (Vintage Original)

4  Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman 

Non-Fiction

1  Underground : The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (Vintage International)