WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.980 Okay, so let's unpack this. Imagine, right, you 00:00:03.980 --> 00:00:07.639 are wandering through a city at night and you 00:00:07.639 --> 00:00:09.980 stumble into this tiny, like, obscure dive bar. 00:00:10.220 --> 00:00:13.279 Okay, I'm picturing it. There's this indie band 00:00:13.279 --> 00:00:16.699 playing on a cramped stage in the corner and 00:00:16.699 --> 00:00:19.160 their sound is, well it's weird, it's highly 00:00:19.160 --> 00:00:20.879 experimental, totally outside the mainstream, 00:00:21.280 --> 00:00:23.920 and honestly just a little bizarre. Right, not 00:00:23.920 --> 00:00:26.859 your typical radio pop. Exactly. Now imagine 00:00:26.859 --> 00:00:30.039 that exact same band without changing a single 00:00:30.039 --> 00:00:34.219 note of their strange, dreamlike music, inexplicably 00:00:34.219 --> 00:00:36.320 becomes the biggest stadium act in the world. 00:00:37.219 --> 00:00:39.640 Like, they are suddenly filling arenas globally. 00:00:40.340 --> 00:00:42.280 Millions of people are singing along to lyrics 00:00:42.280 --> 00:00:44.920 that, frankly, don't quite make logical sense. 00:00:44.979 --> 00:00:47.780 That is a wild visual, but it really is the perfect 00:00:47.780 --> 00:00:50.020 analogy. Right. That is essentially the story 00:00:50.020 --> 00:00:52.700 of Haruki Murakami. Welcome to this deep dive, 00:00:52.899 --> 00:00:54.560 everyone. Glad to be here. We have a lot of ground 00:00:54.560 --> 00:00:57.539 to cover. We really do. Today, we are pulling 00:00:57.539 --> 00:01:00.159 from a massive stack of sources for you. We've 00:01:00.159 --> 00:01:03.000 got comprehensive biographies, recent literary 00:01:03.000 --> 00:01:06.980 essays, his own memoirs, all to decode the fascinating 00:01:06.980 --> 00:01:10.959 life, the highly unusual creative process, and 00:01:10.959 --> 00:01:13.599 the massive global impact of a man who didn't 00:01:13.599 --> 00:01:15.640 write a single word of fiction until he was almost 00:01:15.640 --> 00:01:17.950 30. Which, you know, is late for a writer of 00:01:17.950 --> 00:01:20.489 his caliber. Yeah. But the central mystery we're 00:01:20.489 --> 00:01:22.909 looking at today isn't just the sheer scale of 00:01:22.909 --> 00:01:25.510 his fame. Right. It's the underlying mechanics 00:01:25.510 --> 00:01:29.049 of why his deeply surreal, almost hallucinatory 00:01:29.049 --> 00:01:32.390 fiction crosses cultural borders so effortlessly. 00:01:32.790 --> 00:01:34.909 I mean, we're examining an author whose work 00:01:34.909 --> 00:01:37.849 features, like, parallel dimensions, reigning 00:01:37.849 --> 00:01:40.010 fit. Talking cats. Don't forget the talking cats. 00:01:40.150 --> 00:01:42.569 Exactly. Talking cats. And a whole lot of solitary 00:01:42.569 --> 00:01:45.290 people making pasta. Yet somehow it strikes a 00:01:45.290 --> 00:01:48.269 universe across vastly different political realities 00:01:48.269 --> 00:01:50.689 and languages. It's crazy. It is. And to understand 00:01:50.689 --> 00:01:53.269 the architecture of that kind of global resonance, 00:01:53.709 --> 00:01:55.230 you really have to look at how he constructs 00:01:55.230 --> 00:01:58.030 his worlds. And to do that, we have to go back 00:01:58.030 --> 00:02:00.989 to a very specific, honestly incredibly mundane 00:02:00.989 --> 00:02:05.390 moment in 1978. And we need to explore this bizarre 00:02:05.390 --> 00:02:08.110 creative process he later dubbed the Automatic 00:02:08.110 --> 00:02:11.430 Dwarfs. The origin story here is famously unlikely. 00:02:11.710 --> 00:02:15.090 It really is. So in 1978, he was just a regular 00:02:15.090 --> 00:02:17.409 guy. He was running a small jazz club in Tokyo 00:02:17.409 --> 00:02:19.689 called the Peter Cat. He didn't even consider 00:02:19.689 --> 00:02:21.729 himself a writer at this point. Not at all. He 00:02:21.729 --> 00:02:23.729 was a guy making sandwiches, washing glasses, 00:02:23.949 --> 00:02:26.610 flipping jazz records. But then he goes to a 00:02:26.610 --> 00:02:29.229 baseball game. Just a normal afternoon out. Yeah, 00:02:29.270 --> 00:02:31.110 he's sitting in the outfield of Jingu Stadium, 00:02:31.250 --> 00:02:33.509 drinking a beer, watching the Yakult Swallows 00:02:33.509 --> 00:02:37.199 play. A player hits a double. And in that exact 00:02:37.199 --> 00:02:40.219 moment, hearing the crisp crack of the bat echo 00:02:40.219 --> 00:02:43.000 through the stadium, he says he felt this sudden 00:02:43.000 --> 00:02:45.879 warm sensation. The literal light bulb moment. 00:02:46.180 --> 00:02:48.159 Truly. Out of nowhere, the thought just simply 00:02:48.159 --> 00:02:49.840 arrived in his head as saying, I can write a 00:02:49.840 --> 00:02:51.759 novel. That's amazing. So he goes home, sits 00:02:51.759 --> 00:02:53.219 in his kitchen table, and just starts writing 00:02:53.219 --> 00:02:55.889 his first book, Hear the Wind Sing. He did it 00:02:55.889 --> 00:02:57.870 in these tiny brief stretches late at night after 00:02:57.870 --> 00:03:01.210 closing up the bar. And that spontaneous, almost 00:03:01.210 --> 00:03:04.409 unexplainable genesis perfectly mirrors his actual 00:03:04.409 --> 00:03:07.210 writing process, which honestly is a radical 00:03:07.210 --> 00:03:09.370 departure from traditional methods. Oh, completely. 00:03:09.710 --> 00:03:12.110 Like most conventional novelists, you know, they 00:03:12.110 --> 00:03:14.569 rely heavily on structure. They build extensive 00:03:14.569 --> 00:03:16.750 character biographies. They map out the narrative 00:03:16.750 --> 00:03:19.069 arc on whiteboards. They know the ending before 00:03:19.069 --> 00:03:21.650 they write chapter one. Exactly. But Murakami 00:03:21.650 --> 00:03:25.400 completely rejects that. In a 2022 essay, he 00:03:25.400 --> 00:03:27.960 detailed this concept he calls the automatic 00:03:27.960 --> 00:03:30.990 dwarfs. Which is such a great phrase. It is. 00:03:31.189 --> 00:03:33.490 He claims he almost never decides on his characters 00:03:33.490 --> 00:03:36.169 or plots in advance. Instead, as he sits down 00:03:36.169 --> 00:03:38.909 at the keyboard, fragments of information and 00:03:38.909 --> 00:03:41.270 memory are just pulled from these subconscious 00:03:41.270 --> 00:03:44.169 cabinets in his brain. Like magic. Basically. 00:03:44.490 --> 00:03:48.030 He compares the process to iron scraps flying 00:03:48.030 --> 00:03:50.669 through the air and attaching to a magnet. He 00:03:50.669 --> 00:03:53.169 describes the characters as like materializing 00:03:53.169 --> 00:03:55.849 on the page and then breaking free of his control 00:03:55.849 --> 00:03:58.250 to act entirely independently. He essentially 00:03:58.280 --> 00:04:00.620 claims he's just taking dictation from his own 00:04:00.620 --> 00:04:03.699 subconscious. He even compares writing to making 00:04:03.699 --> 00:04:06.479 a movie just for himself, where he gets to sit 00:04:06.479 --> 00:04:08.879 in the theater and be surprised by the twist 00:04:08.879 --> 00:04:12.259 ending. Which sounds incredible. It does, but 00:04:12.259 --> 00:04:14.560 here's where I have to push back a little. I 00:04:14.560 --> 00:04:16.939 have a hard time buying this whole mystical channel 00:04:16.939 --> 00:04:20.259 or framing. Oh, really? How come? Well, it sounds 00:04:20.259 --> 00:04:22.360 a bit like an author trying to make his process 00:04:22.360 --> 00:04:25.000 sound more magical than it actually is. You don't 00:04:25.000 --> 00:04:27.180 just sit down at a kitchen table without an outline 00:04:27.180 --> 00:04:29.459 and accidentally write a structurally coherent 00:04:29.459 --> 00:04:32.600 masterpiece. Fair point. I would argue this automatic 00:04:32.600 --> 00:04:34.959 process is actually the result of the massive 00:04:34.959 --> 00:04:38.560 amount of Western literature and music he consumed 00:04:38.560 --> 00:04:41.259 growing up. His mental cabinets weren't empty, 00:04:41.480 --> 00:04:44.069 right? They were meticulously stocked. You know 00:04:44.069 --> 00:04:46.850 that skepticism is entirely warranted. And actually 00:04:46.850 --> 00:04:48.689 cognitive science would back you up on that. 00:04:49.009 --> 00:04:52.009 Oh, it would. Yeah. What looks like pure untethered 00:04:52.009 --> 00:04:54.269 improvisation is almost always the result of 00:04:54.269 --> 00:04:57.230 intense structural internalization. Think about 00:04:57.230 --> 00:04:59.569 it like a brilliant jazz saxophonist on stage. 00:05:00.009 --> 00:05:02.129 They're letting the music flow spontaneously, 00:05:02.149 --> 00:05:04.910 but they can only improvise because they've spent 00:05:04.910 --> 00:05:08.029 thousands of hours internalizing chord progressions, 00:05:08.269 --> 00:05:10.949 scales, and music theory. Ah, that makes total 00:05:10.949 --> 00:05:14.009 sense. So he had the scales down. Exactly. Growing 00:05:14.009 --> 00:05:17.110 up, Murakami obsessively read Franz Kafka, Kurt 00:05:17.110 --> 00:05:19.889 Vonnegut, Raymond Janler. He listened relentlessly 00:05:19.889 --> 00:05:22.470 to Russian classical music and American jazz. 00:05:22.629 --> 00:05:24.930 So he was absorbing all these structures. Right. 00:05:25.129 --> 00:05:27.750 He was internalizing very specific narrative 00:05:27.750 --> 00:05:30.449 rhythms, the hard -boiled pacing of a detective 00:05:30.449 --> 00:05:34.230 novel, the absurdity of Kafka, that heavy constant 00:05:34.230 --> 00:05:37.089 diet of Western influence built an intuitive 00:05:37.089 --> 00:05:39.350 internal architecture. So when he finally sat 00:05:39.350 --> 00:05:43.660 down to write, those automatic dwarfs had a massive 00:05:43.660 --> 00:05:45.920 inventory of sophisticated tools to build with. 00:05:46.420 --> 00:05:48.139 Exactly, which explains how he could write so 00:05:48.139 --> 00:05:50.259 uniquely right out of the gate. But, and this 00:05:50.259 --> 00:05:53.439 is crucial, that heavy reliance on Western structures 00:05:53.439 --> 00:05:56.779 is the exact reason his own country's literary 00:05:56.779 --> 00:05:58.860 establishment initially rejected him. Oh yeah, 00:05:58.980 --> 00:06:00.779 they did not know what to do with him. He was 00:06:00.779 --> 00:06:03.420 the ultimate outsider. And to really put you, 00:06:03.459 --> 00:06:06.360 the listener, in the context of the era, you 00:06:06.360 --> 00:06:08.439 have to understand the environment he was pushing 00:06:08.439 --> 00:06:11.079 against in Japan. Right, his upbringing is key 00:06:11.079 --> 00:06:13.579 here. He was raised by parents who literally 00:06:13.579 --> 00:06:16.860 taught Japanese literature. But as a teenager, 00:06:17.319 --> 00:06:19.879 he fiercely rebelled against that pedigree. He 00:06:19.879 --> 00:06:22.259 immersed himself completely in Western culture, 00:06:22.660 --> 00:06:25.079 and that rebellion became the defining feature 00:06:25.079 --> 00:06:27.459 of his early writing style. It fundamentally 00:06:27.459 --> 00:06:30.709 altered his narrative DNA. Because for decades, 00:06:31.269 --> 00:06:33.029 traditional Japanese literature was dominated 00:06:33.029 --> 00:06:35.850 by the i -novel tradition. The wadakushi shisetsu. 00:06:36.029 --> 00:06:38.670 Right. Exactly. These were highly confessional, 00:06:38.990 --> 00:06:41.529 hyper -realistic narratives. They placed a heavy 00:06:41.529 --> 00:06:44.970 focus on societal duty, intense family dynamics, 00:06:45.389 --> 00:06:48.089 and the suffocating intimacy of social obligations. 00:06:48.370 --> 00:06:50.370 So if you were reading Japanese lit at the time, 00:06:50.389 --> 00:06:52.410 that was the baseline expectation? Completely. 00:06:52.649 --> 00:06:55.350 And Murakami intentionally drove in the absolute 00:06:55.350 --> 00:06:58.029 opposite direction. He utilized first -person 00:06:58.029 --> 00:07:00.490 narratives, but but his protagonists are profoundly 00:07:00.490 --> 00:07:03.050 solitary and detached. They're like these independent 00:07:03.050 --> 00:07:05.769 guys who value emotional distance over intimacy. 00:07:06.149 --> 00:07:09.029 Right. They exist almost entirely outside of 00:07:09.029 --> 00:07:11.370 traditional societal structures. They just spend 00:07:11.370 --> 00:07:13.629 their time listening to records, cooking simple 00:07:13.629 --> 00:07:16.269 meals, and passively observing the weirdness 00:07:16.269 --> 00:07:19.310 of the world. He actually called himself an ugly 00:07:19.310 --> 00:07:22.350 duckling and a black sheep. in the Japanese literary 00:07:22.350 --> 00:07:25.550 world. And domestic critics initially found his 00:07:25.550 --> 00:07:28.509 work to be aggressively un -Japanese. It felt 00:07:28.509 --> 00:07:31.069 entirely foreign to them. Especially when you 00:07:31.069 --> 00:07:33.870 factor in how he deployed magical realism. Like, 00:07:34.050 --> 00:07:36.490 let's look at the short story, Super Frog Saves 00:07:36.490 --> 00:07:38.970 Tokyo. Oh, that's a classic example. It's so 00:07:38.970 --> 00:07:43.209 good. The setup is that a perfectly normal unimaginative 00:07:43.209 --> 00:07:45.949 bank employee comes home to his apartment to 00:07:45.949 --> 00:07:48.610 find a six -foot tall frog standing on two legs. 00:07:48.889 --> 00:07:50.829 Just waiting room. Just waiting. Yeah. The frog 00:07:50.829 --> 00:07:52.629 makes them both a cup of tea and they sit down 00:07:52.629 --> 00:07:54.730 to calmly discuss an impending earthquake that 00:07:54.730 --> 00:07:57.470 will destroy Tokyo unless they team up to fight 00:07:57.470 --> 00:08:00.410 a giant subterranean worm. As you do. Naturally. 00:08:00.870 --> 00:08:03.009 But the genius of it is the deadpan delivery. 00:08:03.750 --> 00:08:05.930 The absurdity isn't treated as a fever dream. 00:08:06.310 --> 00:08:08.529 It's treated with the same mundane realism as 00:08:08.529 --> 00:08:11.300 cooking spaghetti. And the mechanics of that 00:08:11.300 --> 00:08:13.879 deadpan surrealism are exactly what propelled 00:08:13.879 --> 00:08:17.709 him to global phenomenon status. Because he treats 00:08:17.709 --> 00:08:20.350 the bizarre with such casual acceptance, the 00:08:20.350 --> 00:08:22.269 reader just, well, accepts it too. Right. You 00:08:22.269 --> 00:08:24.170 just go along for the ride. And if we look at 00:08:24.170 --> 00:08:27.089 the historical timeline of his exploding popularity, 00:08:27.310 --> 00:08:30.550 a really fascinating pattern emerges. Murakami 00:08:30.550 --> 00:08:33.610 himself noted that his deeply surreal books became 00:08:33.610 --> 00:08:36.490 massively popular in Germany right around the 00:08:36.490 --> 00:08:39.570 time the Berlin Wall fell. Wow. And shortly after 00:08:39.570 --> 00:08:41.789 that, his readership just exploded in Russia 00:08:41.789 --> 00:08:43.970 following the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union. 00:08:44.090 --> 00:08:46.269 That timing is incredible. I mean, think about 00:08:46.269 --> 00:08:49.110 it. When the actual political and social structures 00:08:49.110 --> 00:08:52.269 of a country collapse and reality literally stops 00:08:52.269 --> 00:08:54.970 making sense, people gravitate toward a guy writing 00:08:54.970 --> 00:08:57.330 about talking frogs and parallel dimensions. 00:08:57.529 --> 00:08:59.669 Because it serves as a psychological survival 00:08:59.669 --> 00:09:01.529 guide for disorientation. That's a great way 00:09:01.529 --> 00:09:04.009 to put it. His style perfectly captures the confusion 00:09:04.009 --> 00:09:06.809 of modern people going through sudden, chaotic, 00:09:06.889 --> 00:09:10.649 systemic shifts. When your real world feels unstable 00:09:10.649 --> 00:09:13.470 and surreal, a traditional linear story feels 00:09:13.470 --> 00:09:18.210 false. about a detached guy navigating a dreamlike, 00:09:18.549 --> 00:09:20.629 unpredictable landscape where the rules keep 00:09:20.629 --> 00:09:24.149 changing, that feels incredibly authentic to 00:09:24.149 --> 00:09:26.909 the lived experience of societal collapse. It's 00:09:26.909 --> 00:09:28.809 like he's the literary equivalent of a master 00:09:28.809 --> 00:09:32.129 fusion chef. He takes the setting... and the 00:09:32.129 --> 00:09:35.049 mundane ingredients of modern life, but he mixes 00:09:35.049 --> 00:09:38.190 in Western narrative spices and heavy doses of 00:09:38.190 --> 00:09:40.830 surrealism to create this coping mechanism for 00:09:40.830 --> 00:09:43.269 the modern world. Exactly. But OK, this brings 00:09:43.269 --> 00:09:46.009 up a major structural problem in his early work, 00:09:46.090 --> 00:09:48.889 which is, well, if your protagonists are completely 00:09:48.889 --> 00:09:52.169 detached, solitary figures who just passively 00:09:52.169 --> 00:09:53.850 observe the weirdness around them while drinking 00:09:53.850 --> 00:09:56.639 beer. How do you keep the stories from floating 00:09:56.639 --> 00:09:59.200 away into meaningless absurdity? That is the 00:09:59.200 --> 00:10:01.600 danger of that style. Right. A character can 00:10:01.600 --> 00:10:03.820 only stay detached for so long before they have 00:10:03.820 --> 00:10:05.860 to actually care about the real world. And they 00:10:05.860 --> 00:10:08.480 eventually did. That detachment was a protective 00:10:08.480 --> 00:10:10.539 shell. And you are totally right. It couldn't 00:10:10.539 --> 00:10:13.379 last forever. The real world eventually crashed 00:10:13.379 --> 00:10:16.559 into Murakami's surreal universe with terrifying 00:10:16.559 --> 00:10:19.379 force. Which forced a massive shift. Right. Yes. 00:10:19.980 --> 00:10:22.659 A defining turning point to both his literary 00:10:22.659 --> 00:10:26.110 mechanics and his per - world view. This pivot 00:10:26.110 --> 00:10:30.149 happened in 1995. Japan experienced two incredibly 00:10:30.149 --> 00:10:33.049 horrific collective traumas almost back to back 00:10:33.049 --> 00:10:35.929 which fundamentally shattered the myth of national 00:10:35.929 --> 00:10:38.450 safety. It was a very dark year. First was the 00:10:38.450 --> 00:10:40.970 devastating Kobe earthquake in January. It killed 00:10:40.970 --> 00:10:44.149 over 6 ,000 people and exposed massive systemic 00:10:44.149 --> 00:10:46.370 failures in infrastructure and government response. 00:10:46.409 --> 00:10:50.799 Yeah. Then just two months later the Ayum Shinrikyo 00:10:50.799 --> 00:10:53.379 cult unleashed sarin gas on the Tokyo subway 00:10:53.379 --> 00:10:56.340 system during rush hour. It was an act of domestic 00:10:56.340 --> 00:10:58.860 terrorism that deeply traumatized the national 00:10:58.860 --> 00:11:00.679 psyche. And up until this point, you have to 00:11:00.679 --> 00:11:02.840 remember, Murakami had been living abroad in 00:11:02.840 --> 00:11:04.740 the United States and Europe. He was maintaining 00:11:04.740 --> 00:11:06.759 his physical and emotional distance from Japan, 00:11:07.000 --> 00:11:09.399 just writing his dreamlike fiction. Keeping that 00:11:09.399 --> 00:11:12.179 detachment. Exactly. But the sheer scale of these 00:11:12.179 --> 00:11:14.279 twin tragedies pulled him back. He moved home 00:11:14.279 --> 00:11:17.100 to Japan. And in conversations with psychologists 00:11:17.100 --> 00:11:19.500 and critics later on, he explicitly stated that 00:11:19.500 --> 00:11:21.659 these Owens forced him to change his core stance 00:11:21.659 --> 00:11:24.759 as a writer. From detachment to commitment. Exactly. 00:11:25.259 --> 00:11:27.840 The passive observation of his early protagonists 00:11:27.840 --> 00:11:30.700 was no longer a sufficient response to a world 00:11:30.700 --> 00:11:34.100 that contained that level of active real -world 00:11:34.100 --> 00:11:37.279 evil. And we see that psychological shift instantly 00:11:37.279 --> 00:11:40.799 alter the DNA of his books. He writes his massive 00:11:40.799 --> 00:11:44.379 opus, The Windup Bird Chronicle. Such a monumental 00:11:44.379 --> 00:11:47.080 book. It is. The protagonist still starts out 00:11:47.080 --> 00:11:49.440 as a passive guy looking for his missing cat. 00:11:49.549 --> 00:11:52.210 but he's eventually dragged down into the literal 00:11:52.210 --> 00:11:55.289 and metaphorical darkness to confront the horrific 00:11:55.289 --> 00:11:58.250 history of Japanese war crimes in Manchukuo during 00:11:58.250 --> 00:12:01.230 World War II. He's no longer just watching. Right. 00:12:01.370 --> 00:12:03.590 Murakami forces his character to actively fight 00:12:03.590 --> 00:12:06.950 the darkness, and he also completely steps out 00:12:06.950 --> 00:12:08.909 of his comfort zone to publish his first major 00:12:08.909 --> 00:12:11.500 work of nonfiction. underground. Which was a 00:12:11.500 --> 00:12:14.179 massive journalistic undertaking. Opposed entirely 00:12:14.179 --> 00:12:16.000 of interviews with the everyday commuters who 00:12:16.000 --> 00:12:18.580 survived the subway gas attack. He fundamentally 00:12:18.580 --> 00:12:21.019 changed the function of his platform here. He 00:12:21.019 --> 00:12:22.759 realized that the ability to weave compelling 00:12:22.759 --> 00:12:25.059 narratives couldn't just be used for escapist 00:12:25.059 --> 00:12:27.500 surrealism or detached irony anymore. He had 00:12:27.500 --> 00:12:29.940 to do something more. Right, he had to use his 00:12:29.940 --> 00:12:33.100 craft to foster social consciousness. Underground 00:12:33.100 --> 00:12:35.820 was his way of helping his country process its 00:12:35.820 --> 00:12:38.500 pain by looking directly at the victims rather 00:12:38.500 --> 00:12:41.480 than the perpetrators. It forced the public to 00:12:41.480 --> 00:12:43.820 confront the fragility of their everyday lives. 00:12:43.899 --> 00:12:45.960 Which sets up this really fascinating ripple 00:12:45.960 --> 00:12:48.840 effect. If he is forcing his fictional characters 00:12:48.840 --> 00:12:51.279 to confront the dark history and the oppressive 00:12:51.279 --> 00:12:53.840 systems of the world, it forces him to do the 00:12:53.840 --> 00:12:57.220 same in reality. Absolutely. This era of commitment 00:12:57.220 --> 00:13:00.799 turned a notoriously private, reclusive writer 00:13:00.799 --> 00:13:04.399 into a highly vocal critic of real -world political 00:13:04.399 --> 00:13:07.870 systems and historical amnesia. And the philosophical 00:13:07.870 --> 00:13:10.029 foundation for all of his public stances was 00:13:10.029 --> 00:13:12.730 codified a bit later, in 2009. He was awarded 00:13:12.730 --> 00:13:15.029 the Jerusalem Prize, which is a major literary 00:13:15.029 --> 00:13:17.590 award. Right. Because of the intense geopolitical 00:13:17.590 --> 00:13:19.730 conflicts in the region at the time, there was 00:13:19.730 --> 00:13:22.029 immense pressure on him to boycott the ceremony. 00:13:22.190 --> 00:13:25.149 But he went anyway. He chose to attend, and he 00:13:25.149 --> 00:13:27.370 delivered a highly critical speech that introduced 00:13:27.370 --> 00:13:29.830 a metaphor that basically defines his entire 00:13:29.830 --> 00:13:33.600 worldview. He stated, if there is a hard high 00:13:33.600 --> 00:13:36.279 wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will 00:13:36.279 --> 00:13:38.799 stand on the side of the egg. It's such a striking 00:13:38.799 --> 00:13:40.600 image. And let's break down that metaphor for 00:13:40.600 --> 00:13:43.000 everyone listening. Sure. The high hard wall 00:13:43.000 --> 00:13:46.159 represents the system. So that's governments, 00:13:46.340 --> 00:13:49.120 institutions, military forces, corporate bureaucracies, 00:13:49.120 --> 00:13:52.200 basically anything that operates on a cold structural 00:13:52.200 --> 00:13:55.200 logic and forces individuals to conform. And 00:13:55.200 --> 00:13:59.100 the egg naturally represents the fragile, irreplaceable, 00:13:59.159 --> 00:14:02.259 unique human soul. Right. By stating he will 00:14:02.259 --> 00:14:04.659 always stand with the egg, he publicly declared 00:14:04.659 --> 00:14:07.259 his opposition to any form of systemic oppression. 00:14:07.759 --> 00:14:09.299 And just to be clear for you listening, we're 00:14:09.299 --> 00:14:11.940 simply reporting on his specific worldview here, 00:14:12.080 --> 00:14:14.480 not endorsing any political stances. But this 00:14:14.480 --> 00:14:17.000 is how he operates. He explicitly aligned his 00:14:17.000 --> 00:14:19.480 worldview with writers like George Orwell. Viewing 00:14:19.480 --> 00:14:21.299 the role of the novelist as inherently standing 00:14:21.299 --> 00:14:24.259 against the system. Exactly. And you see this 00:14:24.259 --> 00:14:26.820 philosophy applied consistently across various 00:14:26.820 --> 00:14:29.539 global issues over the years. Like, he has publicly 00:14:29.539 --> 00:14:32.039 criticized Japan's historical understanding of 00:14:32.039 --> 00:14:34.480 its actions in World War II, urging the country 00:14:34.480 --> 00:14:37.139 to offer straightforward, unequivocal apologies 00:14:37.139 --> 00:14:40.419 to China and the Koreas to heal those historical 00:14:40.419 --> 00:14:42.799 wounds. Which is a very bold stance domestically. 00:14:43.179 --> 00:14:46.039 Very. Following the 2011 Fukushima disaster, 00:14:46.360 --> 00:14:48.919 he argued that Japan, a nation that intimately 00:14:48.919 --> 00:14:51.620 knows the horrors of radiation, should have firmly 00:14:51.600 --> 00:14:54.039 rejected nuclear power. You also spoke out during 00:14:54.039 --> 00:14:56.419 the pandemic, right? Yes. During the COVID -19 00:14:56.419 --> 00:14:59.600 pandemic in 2021, he publicly criticized the 00:14:59.600 --> 00:15:01.919 Japanese prime minister's optimistic messaging 00:15:01.919 --> 00:15:05.080 while hospital cases were actively surging. Wow. 00:15:05.320 --> 00:15:07.879 And in 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 00:15:08.279 --> 00:15:10.919 he hosted a special international radio broadcast 00:15:10.919 --> 00:15:13.580 specifically focusing on the preciousness of 00:15:13.580 --> 00:15:16.340 individual life over the machinery of war. When 00:15:16.340 --> 00:15:17.919 you lay it all out like that, the continuity 00:15:17.919 --> 00:15:20.159 is just remarkable. Whether his protagonist is 00:15:20.159 --> 00:15:22.570 swinging a baseball bad at a magical subterranean 00:15:22.570 --> 00:15:25.250 monster in a dreamscape, or Murakami himself 00:15:25.250 --> 00:15:27.330 is speaking out against a government policy, 00:15:27.730 --> 00:15:31.070 the core philosophy is identical. Defending the 00:15:31.070 --> 00:15:32.929 fragile individual against the crushing weight 00:15:32.929 --> 00:15:36.350 of the collective. Exactly. But honestly, zooming 00:15:36.350 --> 00:15:40.690 out a bit, the logistics of his life seem impossible 00:15:40.690 --> 00:15:43.990 to me. How so? Well, confronting global trauma. 00:15:44.120 --> 00:15:47.620 Speaking out against oppressive regimes, processing 00:15:47.620 --> 00:15:50.759 national grief, and sitting down to write densely 00:15:50.759 --> 00:15:54.320 layered 1 ,200 page novels. How does a human 00:15:54.320 --> 00:15:57.100 brain not just collapse under that kind of immense 00:15:57.100 --> 00:15:59.600 psychological weight? Well, it absolutely would 00:15:59.600 --> 00:16:01.820 collapse if he relied entirely on his brain. 00:16:01.960 --> 00:16:04.080 What do you mean? The genius of Murakami is that 00:16:04.080 --> 00:16:06.360 he realized the mind cannot sustain that level 00:16:06.360 --> 00:16:09.460 of deep chaotic work on its own. So he effectively 00:16:09.460 --> 00:16:11.759 outsourced his mental endurance to his physical 00:16:11.759 --> 00:16:14.909 body. Ah. This is perhaps the most surprising 00:16:14.909 --> 00:16:17.190 pivot in his entire biography. And really? We 00:16:17.190 --> 00:16:19.629 have to look at his extreme physical discipline. 00:16:20.110 --> 00:16:21.850 This man didn't even start running until he was 00:16:21.850 --> 00:16:24.330 33 years old. Get your mind blown. He'd just 00:16:24.330 --> 00:16:26.809 sold the jazz bar, quit smoking, and wanted to 00:16:26.809 --> 00:16:29.450 lose a little weight. But he didn't just casually 00:16:29.450 --> 00:16:32.149 jog on weekends. He transformed himself into 00:16:32.149 --> 00:16:34.970 the deeply committed, experienced marathoner 00:16:34.970 --> 00:16:38.240 and triathlete. He even traveled to Hokkaido 00:16:38.240 --> 00:16:41.340 to run a 100 kilometer ultra marathon. That is 00:16:41.340 --> 00:16:45.379 intense. Highly intense. And he documented this 00:16:45.379 --> 00:16:48.000 entire physical journey in his memoir, What I 00:16:48.000 --> 00:16:51.100 Talk About When I Talk About Running. He explicitly 00:16:51.100 --> 00:16:53.720 treats physical endurance and literary creation 00:16:53.720 --> 00:16:56.620 as the exact same discipline. You cannot separate 00:16:56.620 --> 00:16:59.370 the running from the writing. Never. And to understand 00:16:59.370 --> 00:17:01.950 the mechanism of why this works, we have to weave 00:17:01.950 --> 00:17:04.670 his deep love for music back into the equation. 00:17:04.869 --> 00:17:07.190 Right, the jazz club background. He has stated 00:17:07.190 --> 00:17:09.809 that music shapes his writing even more than 00:17:09.809 --> 00:17:12.750 the literature he consumes. Because he lacked 00:17:12.750 --> 00:17:14.890 the technical ability to become a professional 00:17:14.890 --> 00:17:17.569 musician, he decided to become a writer by treating 00:17:17.569 --> 00:17:20.410 the physical act of typing as a musical performance. 00:17:20.650 --> 00:17:23.049 That is fascinating. He structures his sentences 00:17:23.049 --> 00:17:25.529 to the internal rhythm of jazz and classical 00:17:25.529 --> 00:17:27.690 music. So you basically have a writer treating 00:17:27.819 --> 00:17:30.839 like a jazz track. Exactly. And in jazz, you 00:17:30.839 --> 00:17:33.640 can only have that erratic, wild, unpredictable 00:17:33.640 --> 00:17:37.000 saxophone solo if there is a relentless, steady, 00:17:37.559 --> 00:17:40.099 repetitive bass line holding the entire song 00:17:40.099 --> 00:17:43.079 together. Yes, the bass line is everything. For 00:17:43.079 --> 00:17:46.160 Murakami, his physical routine is that bass line. 00:17:46.359 --> 00:17:48.440 Let me just lay this out for you. He wakes up 00:17:48.440 --> 00:17:51.019 at 4 a .m. He writes for several hours. He runs 00:17:51.019 --> 00:17:54.140 a 10k or swims. He reads, listens to records, 00:17:54.240 --> 00:17:56.819 and goes to bed by 9 -0 -0 p .m. Every single 00:17:56.819 --> 00:18:01.759 day. True chaos on the page requires extreme 00:18:01.759 --> 00:18:05.069 order in the body. It completely flips our romanticized 00:18:05.069 --> 00:18:07.910 notion of the tortured, chaotic artist on its 00:18:07.910 --> 00:18:10.849 head. He proves that to safely let your mind 00:18:10.849 --> 00:18:13.130 free fall into the furthest, most terrifying 00:18:13.130 --> 00:18:15.670 reaches of the subconscious. To confront national 00:18:15.670 --> 00:18:18.529 trauma or invent parallel universes. Right. To 00:18:18.529 --> 00:18:20.490 do all that, you have to have an unbreakable 00:18:20.490 --> 00:18:23.369 physical tether to the ground. The relentless 00:18:23.369 --> 00:18:25.670 pounding repetition of his feet on the pavement 00:18:25.670 --> 00:18:28.470 is what frees his internal automatic dwarfs to 00:18:28.470 --> 00:18:30.650 build without the whole structure collapsing. 00:18:30.910 --> 00:18:32.799 That is so profound. let's just step back and 00:18:32.799 --> 00:18:34.539 look at the incredible arc we've traced today. 00:18:34.640 --> 00:18:37.180 It's been quite a journey. We started with an 00:18:37.180 --> 00:18:39.819 ordinary guy running a jazz club who experienced 00:18:39.819 --> 00:18:42.299 a sudden inexplicable epiphany at a baseball 00:18:42.299 --> 00:18:45.140 game. We watched him rebel against his literary 00:18:45.140 --> 00:18:48.460 heritage to become a black sheep, stubbornly 00:18:48.460 --> 00:18:50.960 writing about talking frogs and detached men 00:18:50.960 --> 00:18:53.619 to capture the disorientation of the modern world. 00:18:53.839 --> 00:18:56.059 And then we saw a real world tragedy force him 00:18:56.059 --> 00:18:58.839 to transform. Yeah, from a passive observer into 00:18:58.839 --> 00:19:01.299 a committed defender of the fragile egg against 00:19:01.299 --> 00:19:04.380 the crushing walls of society. And finally, we 00:19:04.380 --> 00:19:06.819 discovered that the engine powering this massive 00:19:06.819 --> 00:19:10.299 global creative output is the relentless daily 00:19:10.299 --> 00:19:12.910 rhythm of a marathon runner. It is a profound 00:19:12.910 --> 00:19:15.809 synthesis of imagination, physical endurance, 00:19:15.930 --> 00:19:18.250 and social conscience. And I think it reveals 00:19:18.250 --> 00:19:20.789 that true creative longevity isn't about waiting 00:19:20.789 --> 00:19:23.609 for inspiration. It's about building a structure 00:19:23.609 --> 00:19:26.650 strong enough to hold your wildest ideas. Absolutely. 00:19:27.369 --> 00:19:29.430 And as we wrap up this deep dive, we want to 00:19:29.430 --> 00:19:31.430 leave you, the listener, with a final thought 00:19:31.430 --> 00:19:34.130 to mull over. This is drawn from his 2023 novel, 00:19:34.269 --> 00:19:36.710 The City and Its Uncertain Walls. A great book 00:19:36.710 --> 00:19:38.869 to end on. When discussing the themes of the 00:19:38.869 --> 00:19:41.720 book, Murakami noted, that the global pandemic 00:19:41.720 --> 00:19:44.539 and recent geopolitical conflicts have created 00:19:44.539 --> 00:19:47.839 massive invisible walls that divide people, fueling 00:19:47.839 --> 00:19:50.359 a culture of intense fear and skepticism. Which 00:19:50.359 --> 00:19:52.380 is very relevant right now. Highly relevant. 00:19:53.079 --> 00:19:55.460 Regarding the novel's core dilemma, he has a 00:19:55.460 --> 00:19:59.500 very profound question. How is it possible for 00:19:59.500 --> 00:20:02.920 both extreme isolation and warm feelings of empathy 00:20:02.920 --> 00:20:06.039 to coexist? That's a powerful question. And I 00:20:06.039 --> 00:20:08.220 want to challenge you to look at your own environment 00:20:08.220 --> 00:20:11.210 through that exact lens. Think about the walls 00:20:11.210 --> 00:20:13.269 you have built around yourself for protection, 00:20:13.529 --> 00:20:15.589 whether they are professional boundaries, emotional 00:20:15.589 --> 00:20:19.089 detachment, or ideological echo chambers. Are 00:20:19.089 --> 00:20:21.589 those walls actually protecting you or are they 00:20:21.589 --> 00:20:24.190 just locking you in? A tough question to ask 00:20:24.190 --> 00:20:26.589 yourself. It is. And more importantly, how can 00:20:26.589 --> 00:20:29.809 you deploy your own internal automatic dwarfs 00:20:29.809 --> 00:20:32.349 of imagination to finally break through them? 00:20:32.559 --> 00:20:34.859 Because if a guy running a tiny jazz bar can 00:20:34.859 --> 00:20:36.940 figure out how to dismantle the walls of global 00:20:36.940 --> 00:20:39.400 literature just by trusting his own strange, 00:20:39.440 --> 00:20:41.700 uncertain rhythm, well, maybe the walls around 00:20:41.700 --> 00:20:44.240 us aren't as indestructible as they seem. That's 00:20:44.240 --> 00:20:47.079 the hope. Keep listening to the music, keep pounding 00:20:47.079 --> 00:20:49.880 the pavement, and we'll see you on the next Deep 00:20:49.880 --> 00:20:50.240 Dive.