Authors Alive! ~Meet the Author~ Session Two: Haruki Murakami and Kaori Muraji
The following event report was written by Nanaka Aoki, a then 3rd year student and Cultural Affairs student advisor. The report was originally published in Japanese on November 22, 2021, and has been translated into English here.
The second Authors Alive! ~Meet the Author~ event took place on October 16, 2021 at the Waseda International House of Literature (Haruki Murakami Library). Haruki Murakami was joined this time by guitarist Kaori Muraji, who not only provided music to compliment Murakami’s readings but also performed some songs on her own. Alongside a question-and-answer session, the event was an amazing experience that I wish never ended.
The audience gathered and sat around the iconic bookshelf stairway area of the Waseda International House of Literature, which opened on October 1, to listen to Murakami’s recital and Muraji’s performances. This space, surrounded by a ceiling of wooden arches and shelves lined with books left and right, made for a warm and tender atmosphere to compliment Murakami’s voice and the timbre of Muraji’s guitar.
Murakami would routinely make eye contact with the audience, reading in a way as if he were speaking both to and with us. It was like being in a dream, becoming immersed in these stories in this space where words and music became one. It was my first time enjoying a reading accompanied by music at the same time, and it drew me into the stories’ worlds to the point where I couldn’t imagine the words without the music, nor the music without the words. I was able to enjoy both literature and music, just as one can do in the audio room of the Murakami Library.
For Murakami’s first reading, he chose his own work, The Strange Library. Murakami read for longer than originally planned, and Muraji improvised by starting her performance midway through Murakami’s reading. The music blended with the story and afterwards, when talking to other attendees of the event, some commented they were surprised the music during the reading was an improvisation.
There is a scene in The Strange Library where the protagonist, trapped in the library by the Old Man, is brought donuts and lemonade. During a break after the first half of the event, I got some coffee, donuts, and granola from the Orange Cat cafe located within the library. I realized afterwards that I had been eating my own donut in my own “strange library” as if I had entered the story myself, and wondered if I too was really able to escape.
Now was the time for Muraji’s solo performance. She performed three songs, including a rendition of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.” During Murakami’s reading of The Strange Library, Muraji conveyed the story’s setting through gently strumming her guitar’s strings as softly as possible, but each of her three solo performances filled the building with sound as if it was pouring in from all around, and I found myself overwhelmed by the music.
Murakami’s second reading was from his novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. Muraji chose to play an assortment from Franz Liszt’s “Years of Pilgrimage,” linking it with the wording in the novel’s title.
When introducing the novel and its summary, Murakami touched on the movie Drive My Car, a film adaptation of Murakami’s short story under the same title. He stated that when he went to see the movie, “I couldn’t find the line between what I had written and what was added in for the sake of the film.” Muraji sympathized with this sentiment, mentioning how sometimes composers will hear a song and think what a lovely tune, only to find out it was their own composition. I found this dialogue interesting, and realized that people who create something don’t just stop at one creation, but are continuously producing new work daily.
The event closed with Muraji’s final performance, a rendition of Johann Sebastian Bach’s hymn “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”
In the club I belong to at Waseda University, I have the opportunity to read aloud novels, essays, children’s stories, and poems with my club members. In these moments where I read aloud works I’m interested in and discuss them with my fellow club members, I feel calm and the time just flies by. However, there are not many people who enjoy literature or read books through reading the work aloud and discussing the content together with others in everyday life.
I want the Waseda International House of Literature to become a space where one can engage with literature together with different people and discuss freely with each other, just like this Author’s Alive event. Instead of quietly reading alone, I think it’s important to learn and make discoveries by engaging with these stories with friends or people we meet, especially when this kind of interaction has become less common due to Covid-19. I was reminded that the experience of sharing your thoughts with another person over literature and sharing experiences in the same space, is something precious and not replicable online through a screen.
Though the attendees for this Author’s Alive event were limited to a small number of Waseda University students and the general public, I hope the Waseda International House of Literature will grow into a space where many people can come together to learn and converse with each other.
Works read by Haruki Murakami
- The Strange Library (2005), translated by Ted Goossen in 2014
- Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013), translated by Philip Gabriel in 2014
Songs/pieces performed by Kaori Muraji
Solo performances:
- fille aux cheveux de lin (Claude Debussy)
- avatina (Stanley Myers)
- Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (Ryuichi Sakamoto)
- Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring (Johann Sebastian Bach)
Musical Accompaniments:
- Etudes Simples No.1-No.5 (Leo Brouwer)
- Years of Pilgrimage (Franz Liszt)
・First Year: Switzerland – Homesickness, The Bells of Geneva: Nocturne
・Second Year: Italy – Marriage of the Virgin, Three sonnets of Petrarch (47, 104)
