Haruki Murakami - Murakami T: The T-Shirts I Love

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Im not particularly interested in collecting things, but theres one sort of running motif in my life: despite my basic indifference, objects just seem to collect around me, of their own volition. Stacks and stacks of LP recordsso many Ill never listen to them all; books Ive already read and will probably never open again; a ragtag assemblage of magazine clippings; dinky little pencils so worn down they dont fit into a pencil sharpener anymoreall kinds of things just keep on piling up. Like the character Urashima Taro in the Japanese fairy tale, who cant help himself from rescuing a little turtle on the beach, I find myself somehow resigned to it. Carried away by some emotion I cant even name, I wind up gathering things around me. Though Im well aware that collecting hundreds of stubs of pencils doesnt serve any possible purpose.

T-shirts are one of those objects that just naturally pile up. Theyre cheap, so whenever an interesting one catches my eye, I invariably buy itplus people give me various novelty T-shirts from around the world, I get commemorative T-shirts whenever I finish a marathon, and I pick up a few at my destination when I travel, instead of bringing along extra clothesWhich is how, before I even realized it, the number of T-shirts in my life has skyrocketed, to the point where theres no room in my drawers for all of them anymore and Ive had to store the overflow in stacked-up cardboard boxes. Its not at all like one day I simply made up my mind that Okay, Im going to start a T-shirt collection. Believe me, thats not the case.

But now that Ive lived this long, and find myself with enough T-shirts to write a whole book about them, frankly it seems kind of scary. People talk about continuity as key, and theyre spot on. I get the feeling like thats all Ive relied on in my life.

The Japanese magazine Casa BRUTUS interviewed me about my record collection for a special music edition, and when I happened to mention that I also kind of have a T-shirt collection the editor asked me if Id consider writing a series on that. So I went along with the idea, and over the course of a year and a half, I wrote a series of essays spotlighting T-shirts in Popeye, a Japanese mens fashion magazine published by the same company. These are the essays collected here in this volume. It isnt like these are valuable T-shirts or anything, and Im not claiming they have any particular artistic value. I simply brought out some old T-shirts Im fond of, we took photos of them, and I added some short essays. Thats all there is to it. I doubt this book will be that useful to anyone (much less being of any help in solving any of the myriad problems we face at present), yet, that said, it could turn out to be meaningful, as a kind of reference on customs that later generations could read to get a picture of the simple clothes and fairly comfortable life one novelist enjoyed from the end of the twentieth century into the beginning of the twenty-first. But then againmaybe not. Either way works for me. Im just hoping you can find some measure of enjoyment in this little collection.

Of all my T-shirts, which one do I treasure most? That would have to be the Tony Takitani shirt. I ran across this T-shirt in a thrift shop in Maui and bought it for about a dollar. I asked myself, What kind of person could Tony Takitani be? and let my imagination take over, and I actually ended up writing a short story with him as the protagonist, which later was made into a film. And the T-shirt was just one dollar, if you can believe it! Ive made a lot of investments in my life, but this was, hands down, the absolute best.

In the Summer, You Gotta Go Surfing

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This was a long, long time ago. The 1980s, to be exact. Im a little embarrassed to admit it, but back then, I surfed for a few years. When I lived in Kugenuma in Fujisawa City, a guy I knew in the neighborhood was crazy about surfing (there were a lot of people like him there), and he invited me to try it. I rode a long board in the ocean off Kugenuma, but when I visited Hawaii, I used to rent a Dick Brewer short board, and surfed the waves every day off the beach at the Sheratonblissfully, if a bit tentatively. Nearly every morning found me in the ocean, then at noon Id go back to my room, and make some chilled