Word: jazz
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...Wind-up Bird Chronicle, 1994 Critics regard this 600-page tome, penned over four years while Murakami was living in the U.S., as his best novel. It stars Murakami's signature jazz-listening loner, but is interwoven with the horrifying narrative of a soldier in World War II Manchuria - the author's first real foray into the dark realms of Japanese history...
...South of the Border, West of the Sun, 1992 Like Bergman and Oe, Murakami never tires of his archetypes - in this case the lovelorn, middle-aged male loner. In this tale of lost innocence, a jazz-club owner approaching his 40s reunites with his elusive childhood sweetheart...
...symbolism of the moment when he decided he would write his first novel. It was April 1978 and Murakami was in the stands at Tokyo's Meiji-Jingu Stadium, watching a baseball game, beer in hand. He was verging on 30, and nearly a decade into running a jazz café with his wife Yoko. A journeyman American batter named Dave Hilton came to the plate for the Yakult Swallows, stroked the first pitch into left field, and safely reached second base. As he watched the batter swing at the ball, "I just felt all of a sudden that...
...moment came while watching an American athlete play an imported game is entirely in keeping with a man whose work - at least in its early stages - was not shaped by Japanese literature, but by the secondhand foreign paperbacks he read growing up near the port of Kobe, and the jazz and rock he absorbed as a student in Tokyo. Long before his self-imposed exile overseas, to avoid the crush of his celebrity in Japan, Murakami was an expatriate in his mind. "His work referenced not classic Japanese culture but pop culture, mainly from the U.S.," says Motoyuki Shibata...
...Explicitly, you could say there is a problem [of homophobia] in reggae and dancehall, but it's in every type of music to a certain extent," says Stuart Baker, owner of the Sounds of the Universe reggae record shop London and the record-label Soul Jazz. "It is part of dancehall, but it doesn't define it... [Stop Murder Music] are justified in protesting their corner...