The summer of the year after Hashi had left home, Kazuyo had announced that she was going to Tokyo to look for him, so Kiku agreed to go along. As he read, she picked over a box lunch they’d bought at the station, looking as though she were about to burst into tears, but Kiku was secretly in a go...
While studying at the Musashino College of Art in Tokyo, he submitted Almost Transparent Blue in a competition for new writers conducted by the literary monthly Gunzō. Published as a book, the novel won the Akutagawa prize for 1976. Besides continuing with his writing, Murakami has had a weekly d...
I got up around noon and read the newspaper first thing. It was full of details about the schoolgirl murder. In the early morning hours of December 28, a restaurant employee in the Kabuki-cho section of Shinjuku, Tokyo, reported to police that on leaving work he had discov...
“Ken-san,” Iwase said, “you remember last year when we went to Hakata?” “Sure. The time we spent the night in the movie theater, right?” He was talking about one weekend the previous summer when he and I had taken a train to Hakata to see some films...
As if we’d just ridden the new roller coaster at Magic Mountain or something. My answer—and even I couldn’t believe I was saying it—was: “A little.” I think my body, and my nervous system, were trying to get back to normal. They wanted me to let it go, forget about it—what was done was done. Fran...
The rocket attack at the seashore just above Atami was treated as big news in the media. The authorities were investigating it as the probable work of some extremist political faction, and the four Midoris avoided all suspicion. Their names never even came up in the investigation. For one thing, ...
Have I ever let you down? When it comes to holding auditions, I’m a pro, you know. Just leave the details to me.’ Yoshikawa got strangely fired up that night. Not content with quiet drinks in the hotel bar, he’d loaded Aoyama into a taxi and taken him to what he called his ‘special ...