Professional Documents
Culture Documents
And when I awoke, I was alone: Personal Identification, Memory and Music in
Wood and what it has meant to me. When inspecting a text that holds such personal value and
attempting to analyze it, there seem to be hurdles at every step, and it is as if I am equipped with
feeble legs and an inadequate sense of balance. How can I hope to separate myself from a text
that has forever colored my memory and changed it, irreversibly? Can I even examine such a
personally precious work of fiction objectively? Or am I placing too much importance on the
objective in critical analysis; rather, is there some answer to be found in my basic inability to
separate my experiences from the fictional characters’ experiences? Is there a certain type of
critical reading that can benefit from my assumption of the subject-position role in writing about
my memory? How is it that this particular piece of fiction can mean so much and be so
powerful? I think the best I can do is attempt to strike a balance between the personal and the
objective: by examining Murakami’s biography as well as his connection to music and the
influences music has on his writing and juxtaposing these elements with my own history,
perhaps I can arrive at a conclusion that, although no doubt messy, may help me to put my
experiences into a more definable context. Or perhaps I’ll end up more confused than ever,
frantically grasping at memories and attempting to hold onto them while they are in the process
of fading. Perhaps these attempts are all in vain, but there is a reason why Murakami’s novel has
stayed with me, beyond circumstance and beyond personal identification. I hope to find out why
this work of fiction holds such importance for me, all the while aware that I am dangerously
teetering on the edge of complete personal immersion. Here’s hoping I don’t fall in.
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Born in Kyoto, Japan January 12, 1949, Haruki Murakami was the son of two high school
teachers. His father, Chiaki, a Kyoto Buddhist priest for some years, and mother, Miyuki, a full-
time housewife after marriage, were both fairly politically liberal, and overall gave their son a
significant amount of freedom (Rubin 13-14). An insatiable reader even in childhood, Murakami
chose works by Stendhal, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky over Japanese classics. During high school,
his reading branched out to Raymond Chandler, Truman Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Kurt
Vonnegut. Due to its status as an international trading capital, Kobe had many bookstores
Murakami, “What first attracted me to American paperbacks was the discovery that I could read
books written in a foreign language. It was such a tremendously new experience for me to be
able to understand and be moved by literature written in an acquired language” (Rubin 16).
The fact that this “acquired language” was English proved to be more or less
unavoidable. Murakami began his life during the American occupation of Japan, and he grew up
during a time in which America was greatly admired for its prosperity and culture. His early-on
exposure to American music would become a prominent feature in both his life and work. He
initially listened to American rock ’n’ roll on the radio, but it was after hearing Art Blakely and
the Jazz Messengers at a live concert in 1964 that Murakami began skipping lunch to save
Initially planning to study Law but failing the first round of examinations, Murakami
discovered he was much more interested in literature after reading the opening passage from
Truman Capote’s short story, “The Headless Hawk” in an examination preparation book. He
passed the exam for the Department of Literature at Waseda University in Tokyo.
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According to Murakami, “I didn’t study in high school, but I really didn’t study in
college” (Rubin 20), choosing instead to attend jazz clubs in the Shinjuku entertainment district
or in the bars around Waseda. Haruki also met his future wife, Yoko Takahashi, at Waseda in
April 1968. Murakami’s time at Waseda University was significantly colored by the political
tension and general student discontent. Although he never actively participated in collective
action, stating he “. . . enjoyed the campus riots as an individual. I’d throw rocks and fight with
the cops, but I thought there was something ‘impure’ about erecting barricades and other
organized activity, so I didn’t participate” (Rubin 22-23). Participation levels aside, Murakami
Later, when Murakami began to write his fictional history of the era, there would be the
time before and the time after: the promise of 1969, and the boredom of 1970. The
student movement in Japan and the rest of the world collapsed at almost the same time; it
is this almost universal sense of loss that captured readers of Murakami’s generation in
and beyond Japan, and continues to attract readers too young to have experienced the
events themselves, but who respond to the lament for a missing “something” in their lives
(24).
After receiving an undergraduate degree from Waseda University after seven years of on
and off study, Murakami, along with his new wife, Yoko, decided to open a jazz club, “Peter
Cat.” In addition to providing an outlet for his love of jazz, “Murakami is convinced that if it
hadn’t been for those years in the bar he would never have become a novelist. He had time to
observe and to brood, and he believes that ‘the hard physical work gave me a moral backbone’”
(Rubin 27). This experience provided him with “ideal perspective on the evolution of Tokyo’s
bored-but hyper youth culture that was then emerging” (Gregory 111).
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Given his love affair with music, it is no surprise that melodies permeate all of
Murakami’s work. As explained by frequent Murakami translator and fan Jay Rubin,
For Murakami, music is the best means of entry into the deep recesses of the
unconscious, that timeless other world within our psyche. There, at the core of the self,
lies the story of who each of us is: a fragmented narrative that we can only know through
images . . . the novelist tells stories in an attempt to bring out the narrative within; and
through some kind of irrational process these stories send reverberations to the stories
Murakami supplies a soundtrack of sorts for Norwegian Wood, ranging from The Beatles’ titular
song, Norwegian Wood, which the character Naoko says makes her “. . . imagine myself
wandering in a deep wood. I’m all alone and it’s cold and dark, and nobody comes to save me”
(109), to the Kyu Sakamoto classic, “Sukiyaki.” Most of the music featured in the text carries
sentimental connotations: “. . . indeed, the tone of the entire book resembles nothing so much as
It’s difficult to verbalize the power of music and the sense of nostalgia that often comes
with it, precisely because there is such sentiment in an affecting song. Feelings are not meant to
be put into words, and Murakami understands this more than anyone. He understands the ability
of a song to transport a person back to a time in his or her past. His detailed employment of
songs that are familiar to many and simplistic in their eminence creates an overall atmosphere of
longing—of ache—that, in my opinion would not be possible to create without his mentions of
music. In describing the necessary qualities of a good pop song, Rubin explains “. . . it has to
use conventional ideas and images and musical turns to appeal to a wide audience but at the
same time manage to say something true about human experience” (Rubin 153). Similarities can
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be found in Norwegian Wood; Murakami’s most popular novel to date, it inspired legions of
followers, including “The Norway Tribe,” a term describing “. . . young girls dedicated to the
book who want to talk more seriously about love and how to live” (Rubin 160). Indeed,
Norwegian Wood has appealed to a massive audience through its truth about the human
experience.
Not only is music vital for Murakami’s prose, but it also directly influenced his writing
style. Murakami explains that without music, he might not have become a novelist. In fact, he
claims that almost everything he understands about writing, he learned from music. Even thirty
years after his initial novel, Murakami writes that he is still learning an impressive amount of
Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have
good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the
importance of rhythm from music — and mainly from jazz. Next comes melody —
which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm.
If the way the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’t ask for anything
more. Next is harmony — the internal mental sounds that support the words. Then comes
the part I like best: free improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes
welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow. Finally comes what
may be the most important thing: that high you experience upon completing a work —
upon ending your “performance” and feeling you have succeeded in reaching a place that
is new and meaningful. And if all goes well, you get to share that sense of elevation with
Although he had always entertained the idea of writing as a career, it wasn’t until he
attended a baseball game in April 1978 that he became convinced that writing could be his
future. According to the oft-repeated story, when baseball player Dave Hilton hit a double at the
bottom of the first inning, Murakami realized that he could write a novel. Describing the
revelation, something out of the blue. There was no reason for it, no way to explain it. It was
just an idea that came to me, just a thought. I could do it. The time had come for me to do it”
(Rubin 30). Immediately following the game, Murakami went to a stationary store and bought a
fountain pen and paper. Completing the novel after six months, he submitted the piece to Gunzō,
a literary magazine that offers prizes to new writers. The manuscript, Hear the Wind Sing, won
Murakami followed Hear the Wind Sing with the novel, Pinball, 1973. However, it
wasn’t until his third novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, that Murakami began to confirm his
mysteries, it features gangsters, a man in a sheep costume and a girl whose unusually beautiful
and super-sensitive ears confer extraordinary pleasures” (Williams). Murakami continued in this
surrealistic vein with his next novel, A Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World,
published in 1985. It was his next novel, Norwegian Wood, which would mark a significant
departure from his prose of melded fantasy and reality. Murakami explains,
. . . I next wrote a straight boy-meets girl story called Norwegian Wood after The Beatles’
tune. Many of my readers thought that Norwegian Wood was a retreat for me, a betrayal
of what my works had stood for until then. For me personally, however, it was just the
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opposite: it was an adventure, a challenge. I had never written that kind of straight,
Norwegian Wood opens with the 37 year-old narrator, Toru Watanabe, hearing an
orchestral cover of the popular Beatles’ song of the same name playing over a plane’s ceiling
speakers. Toru explains, “. . . the melody never failed to send a shudder through me, but it hit
me harder than ever.” The music changes to a different tune, but Toru is left “. . . thinking of
what I had lost in the course of my life; times gone forever, friends who have died or
disappeared, feelings I would never know again . . . I could smell the grass, feel the wind on my
face, hear the cries of the birds. Autumn 1969, and soon I would be twenty” (3). He is
transported back to “that day in the meadow” eighteen years earlier, and despite the time that has
passed, he can “. . . still bring back every detail” (4). He recalls what Naoko was describing that
day in the meadow, a dangerous well that cannot be seen but has the ability to swallow a person
whole and in essence ensure a slow and painful death. He also remembers Naoko’s request that
writing this book with all the desperate intensity of a starving man sucking on bones.
This is the only way I know to keep my promise to Naoko . . . now, though, I realize that
all I can place in the imperfect vessel of writing are imperfect memories and imperfect
thoughts. The more the memories of Naoko inside me fade, the more deeply I am able to
understand her. I know, too, why she asked me not to forget her. Naoko herself knew, of
course. She knew that my memories of her would fade. Which is precisely why she
begged me never to forget her, to remember that she had existed (10).
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The reader is immediately transported back to Toru’s young adulthood, and although
there are instances of hindsight in his narration, the remainder of the novel takes place during
this time in his life that seems to have maintained a hold on him, even almost twenty years later.
Shortly after starting university in Tokyo, Toru runs into Naoko on the Chuo commuter line,
almost a year since he had last seen her. They begin a tentative friendship, filled with silence
and inhibited by their shared loss. Kizuki, Toru’s only friend during high school and Naoko’s
boyfriend since childhood, committed suicide when he was seventeen years-old. Leaving behind
neither note nor motive, Kizuki instead leaves only questions that can never be answered. Bound
by this tragedy, Toru and Naoko are at the same time separated by it: their reactions to the
suicide and their transformations as a result of it are as individual as they come. Toru seems
somewhat desperate to uncover Naoko’s conversion, while Naoko seems unable to see very far
beyond her own experiences. Of course, this could be simply a fault of first-person narration: the
reader is given an inside look into Toru’s mind, while only shown observations of Naoko.
Despite this possibility, Naoko does seem to be rather cut off from others, travelling deeper into
her own psyche. Similar to her description of the well on the memorable day that Toru first
revisits, “. . . it was deep beyond measuring, and crammed full of darkness, as if all the world’s
darknesses had been boiled down to their ultimate density . . . you die there in this place, little by
The beginning of their new friendship culminates in Naoko and Toru sleeping
together on Naoko’s twentieth birthday. Naoko begins to cry as if “vomiting on all fours,” and
Toru’s only solution is to embrace Naoko. This embrace turns into sex, and even twenty years
after the act, Toru still wonders if sleeping with Naoko was the right thing to do. The reader gets
the sense that he will continue to question the implications, with no hope for an answer.
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Naoko eventually ends up in a sanitarium of sorts in the hills outside Kyoto. Meanwhile,
a fellow classmate, Midori, befriends Toru. Midori seems, for all intents and purposes, to be the
opposite of Naoko. Opinionated and lively, Toru describes her to be like “a small animal that
has popped into the world with the coming of spring.” However, his thoughts lie primarily with
Naoko. After visiting Naoko and her equally troubled but extremely charming roommate, Reiko,
at the sanitarium twice, Toru begins to make plans regarding his future with Naoko. Describing
his plans to forego dormitory life for an apartment, he expresses his wish that Naoko move in
with him, explaining to her that the longer she stays in the sanitarium, the more difficult it will be
for her when she is finally ready to leave (Murakami 238). Naoko fails to give him a reply, and
although Toru interprets this as initial hesitation, the reader cannot help but feel that there is
more to Naoko’s silence than simple indecision. After failing to hear back from Naoko in their
traditional correspondence, Toru is left waiting for letters from both Naoko and Midori. Midori,
fed up with Toru’s insensitivity and carelessness regarding their fragile relationship and her
feelings, refuses to speak to Toru. Hoping for forgiveness and a response, Toru writes to Midori,
attempting to apologize for his behavior but offering no explanations for his actions. After
spending his “whole spring break waiting for letters” (243), Toru finally receives a letter from
Reiko, writing on Naoko’s behalf. Reiko describes Naoko’s worsening condition, starting with
the first symptom, her inability to write letters. At this point, Naoko is hearing voices, and as a
result, “. . . she can’t find the right words to speak, and that puts her into a terribly confused state
—confused and frightened. Meanwhile, the ‘things’ she’s hearing are getting worse” (245).
Toru is devastated by this news. He spends “. . . three straight days after that all but
walking on the bottom of the sea . . . my whole body felt enveloped in some kind of membrane,
cutting off any direct contact between me and the outside world. I couldn’t touch ‘them,’ and
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‘they’ couldn’t touch me (247). Toru begins to grasp that Naoko may never heal; yet, at the
same time, he assumes that she will become better, if not completely so. He states that all he can
do is to wait for Naoko to recover, but he does not seem to address the possibility that this
Midori and Toru eventually reconcile and both admit their love for each other, but Toru
explains he can’t make a move—because of Naoko and his “responsibility in all this as a human
being” (263).
Toru finds himself if not at a chasm then at a crossroads. In one direction is the “quiet
and gentle and transparent love” he feels for Naoko, a stalled love with an unhappy
present and an uncertain future. In the other is Midori, who inspires in Toru a feeling that
“stands and walks on its own, living and breathing and throbbing and shaking me to the
roots of my being.” And cruising beneath is the memory of Kizuki, eternally seventeen,
The reader is informed of Naoko’s suicide suddenly and without ceremony. Although
there always seems to be impermanence to Naoko’s character, as if she was not meant to stay for
long, Murakami almost sidesteps telling the reader, relaying the news of her death as more of an
afterthought; Toru writes, “Reiko wrote to me several times after Naoko’s death” (271).
Through the employment of such indirectness, Murakami echoes the suddenness of death. Even
if Naoko always seemed somewhat on the periphery of death, death is always sudden. Upon
hearing this news, Toru holes up in a movie theater for three days and then immediately takes the
first express train he can find. The names of the places where he travelled to he cannot recall,
although he has a memory of the sights, sounds and smells. He spends a month of hiking,
subsisting on a diet of whiskey, bread and water. Upon his return to Tokyo, he is . . . overcome
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with a sense of my own defilement . . . I did nothing for days but shut myself in my room. My
memory remained fixed on the dead rather than the living. The rooms I had set aside in there for
Naoko were shuttered, the furniture draped in white, the windowsills dusty. I spent the better
part of each day in those rooms” (276). Shortly after his return to Tokyo, and most fortunately,
Toru receives a letter from Reiko, expressing her worry over not hearing from him and her
request that he call her at the sanitarium. They decide to meet in Tokyo, and hold their own,
personal funeral for Naoko. Playing a selection of songs on her guitar that Naoko especially
loved and taking requests from Toru, Reiko plays fifty-one songs altogether. After, they sleep
together, a total of four times. Reiko leaves the next day, telling Toru, “. . . just be happy. Take
The final paragraph is one that haunts me to this day. Calling Midori and expressing to
her that he wants to begin “everything” with her, Toru attempts to answer Midori’s question of
Gripping the receiver, I raised my head and turned to see what lay beyond the telephone
booth. Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that
flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again
and again, I called out for Midori from the dead center of this place that was no place
(293).
I, too, have found myself calling out from an indefinable place. It’s difficult to reread a
text that at one point so completely defined a personal experience; to discover that certain lines
no longer provide kicks in the gut or humming in the heart; because that means something has
been lost, feelings have been buried or ignored to a point of eventual disappearance; because that
means that I have grown, and that I have lost myself along the way. Rereading Norwegian
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Wood, I am left with an incredible feeling of hollowness—an emptiness even greater than my
initial experiences with the text, when Murakami’s prose had left me feeling vacant and drained
because they had stirred emotions that I had assumed could never be defined. My eyes travel
over the sentences I had previously underlined, little pieces that seemed to speak to my soul, and
my response does not seem to be what it should be. These lines no longer speak to me as they
once did. I remember the emotions well enough; I have, after all, lived a rather short life so far,
so memory, with its many failings, has not yet noticeably taken its toll. I can conceptualize the
emotions of my past, but I can’t feel them. It’s heartbreaking to attempt to define what changes
have occurred in me, why these lines, at one time so perfectly complete, no longer touch me like
they used to. Yet at the same time, I have never been able to write about those last few days—
that ever-too-short period of time when my makeshift high school family left, and I was left
standing in an airport with only memories. Perhaps I needed to change before I could examine
what had happened and what version of me resulted from my experiences; perhaps I needed to
become harder, more cynical, and less sensitive. As Toru states in the first chapter of Norwegian
Wood,
Once, long ago, when I was still young, when the memories were far more vivid than
they are now, I often tried to write about Naoko. But I was never able to produce a line.
I knew that if the first line would come, the rest would pour itself onto the page, but I
could never tell where to start—the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be
useless. Now, though, I realize that all I can place in the imperfect vessel of writing are
So perhaps this is the deal I needed to strike: I needed to lose myself before I allowed myself to
remember. Now that I have finally written out my first sentence, I feel as if I can’t stop. I am
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clutching this book, that at one point saved me in a sense, and I try to remember, all the while
During my junior and senior years of high school, I attended Nacel International High
School, a school where I was one of three to four Americans. Surrounded by people from
different countries who had left their homes and families for a place completely unknown to
them, I forged some of the most unique relationships of my life—relationships that ended,
somewhat cruelly, before they had even been given the chance to truly flourish. Junior year
came and went, and while I was left picking up the pieces left by those who had returned to their
home countries with little possibility of returning, senior year arrived. Another entirely different
group of people enrolled, and if possible, I created more seemingly-familial bonds than I had the
year before. With the absence of family members, most of the international students had only
each other to turn to, and I consider myself completely fortunate in that I was included into the
development of this make-shift family. I do not think the relationships we formed are remotely
typical for high school experiences: the school’s small size prevented the formation of cliques or
a hierarchy of popularity, and since all the students were completely different in background it
proved to be a learning experience more than anything. Although this intimacy made the pain
greater when it was taken away, I find myself feeling nothing but grateful for the events that
happened. Of course, this is all said in hindsight. Now, I can appreciate and feel grateful for
what was given to me. Yet, at the time, I could not see past my absent friends, and it was during
this painful period that Norwegian Wood re-entered my life. It spoke to me, as no novel has ever
spoken to me before or since. I realize that this could be entirely circumstantial, that my
loneliness and possibly misplaced sense of being abandoned made it more than likely that any
book containing the elusiveness and all-consuming tendencies of loss would seemingly be
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directed towards me specifically. All the same, circumstances or no, Norwegian Wood provided
me with such a necessary outlet that I cannot separate my experience during that time from the
novel. They are forever intertwined. My memories of the last days at the airport, when the
number of people decreased until it was just me, will always have a slight hint of a melody, and I
What is it about this novel that is so affecting? It’s quite possible that the overall
autobiographical feeling of the text, a sense that Toru is confessing sincerely to the reader and to
the reader alone, gives the book an intimacy that one cannot help but be affected by. When Toru
describes the “desperate intensity” in which he is writing the book, it is almost as if the reader is
“present at the process of composition, as if the book were a long intimate letter addressed to us
alone” (Rubin 152). The fact that Toru feels he almost has no choice in writing his memories
down—he needs to write to remember—creates a sense of urgency that the reader cannot help
but share. Fear of forgetting is a sentiment I have felt myself, and I am sure I’m not alone in this
and we are all doomed to lose. Although it has erased both details and emotions, the fact that the
Toru is writing with eighteen years of hindsight enhances both his storytelling capabilities and
the overall sense of importance these few years have had on his life. The reader gets the
impression that he has never gotten over his experience with Naoko, and eighteen years have
Norwegian Wood is indeed written echoing the imperfection of memory. Characters are
presented without proper introduction; events are described out of order; details are left out; an
element of surrealism colors each relayed experience—the reader is left wondering, along with
Toru, if “all the truly important memories” have been left behind. Moreover, I found myself
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questioning the effect of the eighteen years that have passed, how much of Toru’s perception of
what has occurred has been tainted by hindsight and contaminated with regret. There is no
answer to these queries, and Murakami does not attempt to provide the reader with even a hint.
both confidence and entirety. In my opinion, it is his ability to represent the inconsistency of
memory that proves to be one of the most moving aspect of his prose.
While I feel slightly silly and perhaps even naïve comparing my own, rather mundane
experiences with a novel that contains three suicides—losses that can never be mended and never
explained, I know I’m not alone in my identification with the novel. Everyone has experienced
loss—it is a constant of life, and it is an element that seems to unite people regardless of their
individual differences. Loss can come in all forms, whether is be the more concrete example of
death or the passage of time that no doubt affects both personality and relationships. The loss of
innocence, unavoidable if one is to grow older and live, proves to be a traumatic and life-altering
experience; a person never really returns from this kind of loss. Regardless of what type of
emotion; its power. Loss does not need to be completely similar to be significant, and perhaps
the protagonist Toru’s immense, slightly more tangible loss, provides a sounding board for other
Examining Murakami’s personal as well as his literary biography, along with inspecting
the role of music in his work and writing process, I find I have managed to distance myself
slightly from the text and to look past my own personal identification with the novel. However,
this distance remains minor, and I don’t think I’ll ever read Norwegian Wood with a completely
objective eye. Initially, I was frustrated by this intimacy with the text, by my inability to see past
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myself; in all honesty, writing this paper involved more than one complete rewrite because I was
simply talking too much about myself. However, I think there is something to be said for a book
that inspires personal attachment like mine. Through my assumption of the subject-position role,
I identify along with Toru, feel what he feels, and ache for what he has lost—most likely not the
most critical interpretation, but an interpretation nevertheless. I still don’t understand the overall
effect my time at Nacel International School has had on me; I seem to have only scratched the
surface. It is the best I can offer at this point; perhaps in eighteen years, it will all become clear.
Perhaps I will write with all the desperate intensity of a starving man sucking on bones.
Works Cited
Gregory, Sinda, Toshifumi Miyawaki and Larry McCaffery. "It Don't Mean a Thing, If It Ain't
Got That Swing: An Interview with Haruki Murakami." Review of Contemporary Fiction
22 (2002): 111-19.
Murakami, Haruki. “Jazz Messenger.” Trans. Jay Rubin. New York Times 8 July 2007
Murakami, Haruki. Norwegian Wood. Trans. Jay Rubin. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.
Rubin, Jay. Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words. London: Harvill Press, 2002.