Word: murakami
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...Books: Haruki Murakami...
...Well," said sprightly temple worker Kayoko Murakami, "people realized that they couldn't continue sakoku," or national seclusion. If not for the U.S. and Harris, she told me, "Japan could be like North Korea" today. Now there's a sobering thought. It helped to explain the Perry and Harris-mania that grips the town. By that I mean the "black ship" manholes in the streets, the Perry Aqua Dome at the Shimoda Aquarium and the dramatization of the Harris and Okichi story in tourist literature. The place even celebrates a black ship festival every May. Town officials are busily planning...
...begins a tale in Haruki Murakami's After the Quake, a collection of six stories set in Japan immediately following the 1995 earthquake that ravaged the city of Kobe and gave a psychic jolt to the entire nation. In Murakami's novels, including A Wild Sheep Chase and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, a normal guy often experiences a life-changing event, usually with the help of some fantastical device. Ultimately, his struggle is psychological, and so it is in these short stories. Katagiri, for instance, needs giant insects to help him realize he must battle his personal frustrations before...
...Murakami's fiction, which has sold millions of copies to under-30s in his homeland and made him the West's favorite Japanese writer, has always been about such epiphanies. The 1995 Kobe earthquake looms in the background of these stories: none are actually set in Kobe, but none would have occurred without the disaster. (It is the earthquake, for instance, that awakens the worm in Super Frog Saves Tokyo.) Some of the characters in After the Quake are allowed to find true love or happy endings, but there's a wicked twist in that notion. All six stories take...
...wasn't always this way. Baseball has been played in Japan since the late 1800s, and the Japan League started in 1936, but before 1995 only one Japanese player had made it to the major leagues. Reliever Masanori Murakami appeared in a total of 54 games for the San Francisco Giants in 1964 and '65, and then only because his parent club sent him to the U.S. for seasoning. But in the winter of '95 Kintetsu Buffaloes pitcher Hideo Nomo and his agent, Don Nomura, exploited a loophole in the agreement between Japanese baseball and the major leagues...