Text | Jean-Michel Serres, Composer-pianist (Apfel Café Music): Website

5 April 202123 August 2023

Haruki Murakami Made a Speech at An Entrance Ceremony of Waseda University

On 1st April, 2020, Haruki Murakami made a speech to 1400 freshmen at an entrance ceremony of the department literature and culture of his old school Waseda University, while using his unique expressions and metaphors. What he said is below.

“Hello. Congratulations on your admission. Still the world, but does not settle down easily, this year is thus to gather here with everyone, to celebrate the new beginnings together I think that’s great.

I entered the literature department of this university more than 50 years ago (1968), but at that time, I didn’t have any particular desire to become a novelist.

But when I got married, graduated from college, and was busy with work every day, I suddenly felt like “I want to write a novel”, and when I suddenly realized I became a novelist like this. Somehow, it’s called Nariyuki, or something that led me to it. I don’t really understand it myself.

By the way, I got married while I was in school, so I got married first, started work, and finally graduated. The order was reversed from that of ordinary people. I don’t really recommend that way of life, but it’s something that can be done.

So, I think, a novelist can’t be very smart. That’s because smart people think about things right away. The written novels that I think of in my head are usually not very interesting. You can’t write a good novel unless you think about it with your heart, not your head.

However, writing sentences that other people will read uses a lot of head, so I will work my head as needed. But it’s just the right time to be a talented person and not an honor student. It’s hard to find the right time.

Because some of students of the Faculty of Literature and the Faculty of Culture, Media and Society, you may want to become a novelist, but please find a good balance between them. I think Waseda University is a fairly suitable environment for such work.

This fall, the International Literature Museum (Haruki Murakami Library) will open on this Waseda campus. This is a space where students can freely use books, materials, and music collections.

The motto of the library, or the word at the entrance, is “Let’s open up a story, let’s tell our hearts”. This may need some explanation.

First of all, it seems easy to talk about your heart, and this is quite difficult. Because we usually think this is our mind, because it is only a small part of our whole mind. In other words, our consciousness is nothing more than a bucket of water pumped from the pond of our hearts. The remaining area is untouched and is left as an unknown area.

But what really moves us is the remaining heart. It’s not consciousness or logic, it’s a broader, bigger heart. So how do we find the unknown realm of that mind? How can I find the source of the power that really moves me? One of the things that plays that role is the story.

The story sheds light on areas of the mind where our consciousness cannot be read well. It transforms our unspeakable mind into a form of fiction that emerges figuratively. That’s what we novelists are trying to do. For example, this is the basic function of the novel. There is something called “for example” that can only be expressed in a one-step replacement form. Speaking of roundabouts, it’s roundabouts, isn’t it?

Therefore, novel is of little use to society directly. No matter what, it’s not like a quick-acting drug or vaccine. However, without the work of novel, society cannot move forward in a healthy manner.

This is because, society also has a heart. Things that cannot be scooped up by consciousness and logic only. Things that are left behind. It is the role of literature in the novel to scoop up such things firmly and slowly. The novel fills the gap between the mind and consciousness.

Therefore, novels have been picked up by people in various forms and in various places for over 1000 years. The profession of a novelist has been handed down like a torch. I would be very happy if some of you would inherit the torch, or if there was someone who would warmly and cherish it.

Once again, congratulations on your entrance. Have a nice and fulfilling year on this campus.”

Book Review | First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami, Bugeishunju, 2020

First Person Singular is a short story collection book by Haruki Murakami, originally published in 2020. This book is consist of eight short stories.

Descriptions of each of the stories are wrote by simple first person singular noun and its view. So the stories appears to be made by real personal experiences, and their mysterious occurrences and unexpected plots have certain realities and worths. I think readers should read these stories are Murakami’s real experiences. And I felt the purity of Murakami by the voice or connotation of BOKU (僕) the Japanese first person singular noun of which boys and men use and speak. (Only First Person Singular is described by WATASHI (私), the first singular noun of women and serious adult men.)

I enjoyed to read this book, but I couldn’t find new things. There are many frequently appeared motifs and storylines of Murakami’s works. For example, miserable and mysterious woman and her vanishment (Naoko in Norwegian Wood), strange old man like the God suggests a precept or gives a salvation (Colonel Sanders in Kafka on the Shore), longing for lost things (the Spaceship Pinball Machine in Pinball, 1973), black long haired beautiful girl (Naoko, the 100% perfect girl in On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning), support for weak and minor things (American literature in Norwegian Wood), ugly or fat but fascinating woman (pink daughter of the docter in the End of the World), to talk with non-human beings (Commendatore in Killing Commendatore) and to wear suit rarely (Wind-Up Bird Chronicleand Murakami’s some essays). All eight stories, I feel I’ve already read in novels and essays of Murakami. It’s a kind of déjà-vu.

Yet, this book is fine and interesting, and some descriptions are beautiful or wonderful. I think the stories are one of variations of Murakami’s works. But they are splendid variations, and excellent and skilful short stories written by the great veteran novelist. So I recommend this book for lovers of Murakami’s books also first-time readers will enter the world of Haruki Murakami.

Product Details

First Person Singular (一人称単数)
Haruki Murakami
Bungeishunju, Tokyo, 18 July 2020
236 pages, JPY 1500
ISBN 9784163912394
Contents

On a Stone Pillow
Cream
Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova
With the Beatles
The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection
Carnaval
Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey
First Person Singular

First Person Singular: Stories
Haruki Murakami (Author), Philip Gabriel (Translator)
Knopf, New York City, New York, 6 April 2020
256 pages, $28.00
ISBN 9780593318072

Synopsis | First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami, Bugeishunju, 2020

Information of the Book

First Person Singular is a short story collection book by Haruki Murakami, originally published in 2020. This book is consist of eight short stories. Descriptions of each of the stories are wrote by simple first person singular noun and its view. So the stories appears to be made by real personal experiences, and their mysterious occurrences have a certain reality.

On a Stone Pillow

When I was 19 years old, at a night, my apartment in Asagaya, I slept once with Chiho, a middle of twenties woman, a co-worker of a cheap Italian restaurant and wrote tanka (a style of Japanese short poem). The next morning, she asked to me “Do you want to hear my tankas ?”, I nodded, but hesitated to recite her tankas, so she sent her almost-handmade tanka collection titled On a Stone Pillow to me. The book puts 28 tankas about love between men and women, and death divides the love. When I read her tankas (…)

Cream

When I was 18 years old and a cram school student for university entrance examinations, I had a mysterious experience. I had been received an invitation to a piano recital by a girl had been took lessons in a same piano school, but I and she wasn’t particularly friendly. I went to the concert hall on a mountain in Kobe by bus. There were the hall but there are no people and the recital didn’t hold. So I compelled to sit down a bench in a park near the hall, and I heard Christian sermons from an advertising van. The van went away, suddenly, I was struck by a stress-related hyperventilation. When I became conscious, an old man who is sound in mind and body sat down next to me, and he said “A circle with many pivots it is.” and if I accomplished difficult things, they would become cream of the life, ”crème de la crème” in French, as they are (…)

Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova

I wrote a detailed review of an imaginary record Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova (features Antonio Carlos Jobim (piano), Jimmy Raney (guitar), Jimmy Garrison (base) and Roy Haynes (drummer)) recorded in 1963, and it appeared in a students’ review magazine of a university. 15 years later, strangely, I found the record Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova is complete identical to my description, in a small secondhand record shop on East 14th Street in New York. But it seemed to be a private bootleg or a trick (Someone imitated my review.) and was priced at $35, so I didn’t buy it. Following morning, after all, I wanted to buy it and visited the record shop, but the record was vanished. Long later, I saw a dream Parker plays Corcovado and I (…)

With the Beatles

I exactly remember the scene, in the biggning of fall in 1964, a beautiful girl with black long hair, slender legs and good scent walked down with quick steps through a gloomy corridor of the high school, holding an original UK version LP record of With the Beatles in her arms. But I never see her again.

In 1964, the Beatles were at the height of their worldwide popularity, I like their songs and listened most their songs all the time on the radio. But I was not enthusiastic Beatles fun, I passively listen to their song, and the songs are background music of my adolescent. I listened to entire LP of With the Beatles first time at the middle thirties. But I thought the music is not brilliant and impressive, yet the monochrome cover art of half-shadow portrait of four members is remarkably impressive.

The next year, I got a girlfriend, Sayoko, a classmate of the high school and a daughter of a wealthy family in Kobe. She was not interested in music of the Beatles, and her family listened easy listening such as Percy Faith Orchestra's Theme from a Summer Place.

A Sunday morning in the end of fall, I called for Sayoko to date with her. But she and her family except her older brother had went out. So I reluctantly waited for her at the living room, and I talked with her brother. He told he suffered a disease cuts off his memory, so he didn’t enter a university and spent mostly time at home. Then he asked me to read aloud Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Spinning Gears on my subtextbook of Japanese language. (Her absence is only my mistake, we appointed the next week Sunday.)

About 18 years later, I happened to meet Sayoko's older brother at Shibuya, Tokyo. We went to a café, and he told me that (…)

The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection

I've supported the Yakult Swallows since 1968, the era of the Sankei Atoms, when I moved Tokyo to enter an university. Because my manner is to support the team near a place I live. Swallows was weak, the Meiji Jingu Stadium was deserted, but I was fairly happy to lie down on the outfield lawn bleachers and to watch a baseball game while drinking beer. And I had been accustomed a situation of the world as “It also lost today.”, and learned a wisdom of “how to lose well” is different form “how to beat an opponent”. During this gloomy years, while watching games, I wrote down something like poetry about Swallows on notebooks. Then, in 1982, I published the poetry as The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection at my own expense, and printed 500 copies (…)

Carnaval

F-Asterisk is the most ugly woman I know, but her unusualness attracts certain people and she has a sophistication and a strong originality. A woman who can enjoy her ugliness may be happy. After a concert of a French violinist, I and F-Asterisk ate together at a restaurant, we talked about the ultimate piano music, chose Robert Schumann's Carnaval, and we made something like a club of Carnaval. We went around, I visited her elegant apartment in Daikanyama and talked about Carnaval and Schumann. She said Schumann can see either a human real face of devil with a mask of angel or a real face of angel with a mask of devil. After several months, I knew she was arrested by a swindling, from a TV news show (…)

Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey

I met an old monkey when I took a trip to Gunma. When I took a hot spring of a cheap inn, the monkey entered the spring room, scrubbed my back and talked. He said he lived at a physics professor’s house in Gotenyama, Shinagawa, was educated by him, and he have worked at the inn for three years. On the night, I and the Shinagawa Monkey talked with drinking beer at a room of the inn. He said he was brought up like human being, so he can’t return to the society of monkey also he can’t go with human females he loves. So he stoled seven women’s names by his special skill and spiritual energy, and stocks their name as the love is equal to a fuel for continue to live. 5 years later, when I had a meeting with a editor woman around thirty, she forgot her name and she said she had lost her driving licence nearby Shinagawa (…)

First Person Singular

I rarely wear suit because there's no circumstance to wear suit. So I occasionally wear suit, put on a tie and leather shoes, and walk around my neighbourhood as a ritual. I feel a sense of guilt or an ethical incongruity to wear suit. At a good spring night, I wore a dark blue suit of Paul Smith and put on a fine paisley necktie of Ermenegildo Zegna and went to an unknown bar. At the bar, I drunk vodka gimlet and read a mystery novel. I looked at myself in a big mirror of the bar, I felt I may mistake the route of my life, but I really exist as a self of first person singular. After a while a woman sat down next to me said “What do you enjoy doing like this ?” and “This is to wear stylish clothes, to sit down alone at a bar, to drink gimlet and to be absorbed in reading” (…)

Product Details

First Person Singular (一人称単数)
Haruki Murakami
Bungeishunju, Tokyo, 18 July 2020
236 pages, JPY 1500
ISBN 9784163912394
Contents

On a Stone Pillow
Cream
Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova
With the Beatles
The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection
Carnaval
Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey
First Person Singular

First Person Singular: Stories
Haruki Murakami (Author), Philip Gabriel (Translator)
Knopf, New York City, New York, 6 April 2020
256 pages, $28.00
ISBN 9780593318072