Category: Japan

New Year, New Eyes

New year, new eyes: This has become an annual theme for my first book of the year, and it has usually involved non-fiction that prod me to look at history, music, literature, life, or the world with a set of new eyes.

This year, I was not able to plan my first book. My younger brother was home for the holidays and reading was not part of the itinerary. We spent most of our time adventuring in the kitchen and binge watching shows that I would normally forgo for reading if left to my own devices.

And it was on a brief solitude after lunchtime when I realized that it was already 2024 and I was without a reading plan.

Then these two books that haven’t yet made their way into my shelf caught my eye, presents from a dear friend who recently traveled to Japan. They came with a note that said, “Our hotel in Kyoto had a bookstore right across it…”

I flipped through There Was a Knock by Shinichi Hoshi because the author is not as widely known here in the Philippines as Natsume Sōseki. The next thing I knew, I was at the last page wanting more!

The few times I felt this entertained by a writer’s cleverness it was with the likes of Queaneau’s Exercises in Style and Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler! But rather than being variations on a theme, each of Hoshi’s fifteen stories are unpredictable and different, and they only have one thing in common — the first line: There was a knock. Needless to say it’s a literary gem!

Botchan by Natsume Sōseki, on the other hand, took me more than halfway to warm up to the main character whom I found rather judgmental and cynical. It was Sōseki’s humorous and engaging writing that kept me going, but only to make me understand in the end that this is ultimately a book about human nature.

At first glance, I wouldn’t have considered any of these two as candidates for my annual first book of the year theme, but here we are and I do not regret it!

Perhaps that’s what having new eyes is all about, too!

Happy New Year and Happy New Eyes, dear fellow readers!

Haruki Murakami: Absolutely on Music

“Have you converted?” asked my best friend when he learned that I was reading this book. In other words, “Have you become a Harukist?”

Murakami became extremely popular in our circle during our teens and every reader we knew waved the Haruki banner high. But both of us shared a terrible secret: We were not into Murakami. We tried. We just somehow couldn’t.

Being both musicians, it was the biggest irony, because we love classical music, grew up with music by the Beatles, and listened to jazz — excellent and key ingredients in any Murakami work. (That After Dark opening? That is sheer music! I intentionally re-read it on a trip to Tokyo as the plane landed. Is there a better prelude to that megalopolis?)

But when we were younger, at what seemed to be the height of Murakami’s popularity, we instead entered a beautiful literary space occupied by the diaries of Anaïs Nin, the gushing streams of Clarice Lispector’s consciousness, and Colette. Perhaps we cannot be blamed if we felt like we weren’t missing anything by not being into Murakami.

Twenty-ish years later, I’m tiptoeing back into Murakami’s music room to eavesdrop on his conversations with Seiji Ozawa. (Recognizable to the younger generation and the world outside of classical music as the elderly conductor who, in a wheelchair and in tears, performed Beethoven’s “Egmont” Overture with the Saito Kinen Orchestra — a performance broadcasted live to outer space on the International Space Station in 2022.)

Glenn Gould breathing through the piano in the background as Leonard Bernstein conducts reassures me that, at least for now, I do not have to think about Murakami’s treatment of women in his novels.

The conversations between the two are like musical counterpoints played in tempo giusto. Writing and music as two melodic lines that diverge but remain in harmony, which oftentimes meet in unison when what the two have in common, hungry hearts and a penetrating ear for sound, “dig deeper and forge farther ahead”. 

From the contrasting conducting styles of Bernstein and Karajan, to the presence of “ma” (a Japanese word for the musical quality of pauses and empty spaces charged with meaning in Asian music) in Gould’s interpretations, to the dissection of Brahms’ orchestration, to the difference of sound between the world’s best orchestras, to John Coltrane’s free jazz, to Mahler’s music and the art of his time… I came out from my eavesdropping feeling more enlightened as a musician and as a person.

What a dream to listen to these conversations all day whilst partaking of Yoko Murakami’s rice cakes…

“…you can’t write well if you don’t have an ear for music. The two sides complement each other: listening to music improves your style; by improving your style, you improve your ability to listen to music… So how did I learn how to write? From listening to music. And what’s the most important thing in writing? It’s rhythm. No one’s going to read what you write unless it’s got rhythm. It has to have an inner rhythmic feel that propels the reader forward.” — Haruki Murakami, Absolutely on Music