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Murakami T

The T-Shirts I Love

Author Haruki Murakami
Translated by Philip Gabriel
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Hardcover
$25.00 US
Knopf
5.64"W x 7.03"H x 0.82"D  
On sale Nov 23, 2021 | 192 Pages | 9780593320426
Grades AP/IB
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The international literary icon opens his eclectic closet: Here are photographs of Haruki Murakami’s extensive and personal T-shirt collection, accompanied by essays that reveal a side of the writer rarely seen by the public.

Many of Haruki Murakami’s fans know about his massive vinyl record collection (10,000 albums!) and his obsession with running, but few have heard about a more intimate passion: his T-shirt collecting.

In Murakami T, the famously reclusive novelist shows us his T-shirts—from concert shirts to never-worn whiskey-themed Ts, and from beloved bookstore swag to the shirt that inspired the iconic short story “Tony Takitani.” These photographs are paired with short, frank essays that include Murakami’s musings on the joy of drinking Guinness in local pubs across Ireland, the pleasure of eating a burger upon arrival in the United States, and Hawaiian surf culture in the 1980s.
 
Together, these photographs and reflections reveal much about Murakami’s multifaceted and wonderfully eccentric persona.
 
“Murakami’s charming, utterly self-effacing eccentricity—one of the hallmarks of his fiction—shines brightly here.” —Bill Ott, Booklist
© Elena Seibert
HARUKI MURAKAMI was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and one of the most recent of his many international honors is the Cino Del Duca World Prize, whose previous recipients include Jorge Luis Borges, Ismail Kadare, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Joyce Carol Oates. View titles by Haruki Murakami
I’m not particularly interested in collecting things, but there’s 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 records—so many I’ll never listen to them all; books I’ve already read and will probably never open again; a ragtag assemblage of magazine clippings; dinky little pencils so worn down they don’t fit into a pencil sharpener anymore—all kinds of things just keep on piling up. Like the character Urashima Taro in the Japanese fairy tale, who can’t help himself from rescuing a little turtle on the beach, I find myself somehow resigned to it. Carried away by some emotion I can’t even name, I wind up gathering things around me. Though I’m well aware that collecting hundreds of stubs of pencils doesn’t serve any possible purpose.
 
T-shirts are one of those objects that just naturally pile up. They’re cheap, so whenever an interesting one catches my eye, I invariably buy it—plus 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 clothes... Which is how, before I even realized it, the number of T-shirts in my life has skyrocketed, to the point where there’s no room in my drawers for all of them anymore and I’ve had to store the overflow in stacked-up cardboard boxes. It’s not at all like one day I simply made up my mind that Okay, I’m going to start a T-shirt collection. Believe me, that’s not the case.
 
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 again—maybe not. Either way works for me. I’m just hoping you can find some measure of enjoyment in this little collection.
Copyright © 2021 by Haruki Murakami. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
"Mr. Murakami takes readers through a sartorial journey, sharing memories and musings through the lens of the clothes he has accumulated over the years."--Anna P. Kambhampaty, The New York Times

"Murakami T: The T-shirts I Love, is part ode, part exhibit that reads with restrained affection for his accidental accumulations...The diaristic entries have the simplicity of a show-and-tell, with Murakami’s spare prose offering a material history of his closet...Haruki Murakami’s understated love letters to his T-shirts convey how we give life to our things and vice versa."--Charlene K. Lau, The Atlantic

"This lively peek into his collection provides some surprising insights into the humble, real Murakami...A playful, witty, nostalgic journey with an acclaimed novelist." -- Kirkus Reviews
"Murakami's charming, utterly self-effacing eccentricity—one of the hallmarks of his fiction—shines brightly here..." —Bill Ott, Booklist

"Murakami’s many fans will eat up this charming ramble." —Publishers Weekly

About

The international literary icon opens his eclectic closet: Here are photographs of Haruki Murakami’s extensive and personal T-shirt collection, accompanied by essays that reveal a side of the writer rarely seen by the public.

Many of Haruki Murakami’s fans know about his massive vinyl record collection (10,000 albums!) and his obsession with running, but few have heard about a more intimate passion: his T-shirt collecting.

In Murakami T, the famously reclusive novelist shows us his T-shirts—from concert shirts to never-worn whiskey-themed Ts, and from beloved bookstore swag to the shirt that inspired the iconic short story “Tony Takitani.” These photographs are paired with short, frank essays that include Murakami’s musings on the joy of drinking Guinness in local pubs across Ireland, the pleasure of eating a burger upon arrival in the United States, and Hawaiian surf culture in the 1980s.
 
Together, these photographs and reflections reveal much about Murakami’s multifaceted and wonderfully eccentric persona.
 
“Murakami’s charming, utterly self-effacing eccentricity—one of the hallmarks of his fiction—shines brightly here.” —Bill Ott, Booklist

Author

© Elena Seibert
HARUKI MURAKAMI was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and one of the most recent of his many international honors is the Cino Del Duca World Prize, whose previous recipients include Jorge Luis Borges, Ismail Kadare, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Joyce Carol Oates. View titles by Haruki Murakami

Excerpt

I’m not particularly interested in collecting things, but there’s 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 records—so many I’ll never listen to them all; books I’ve already read and will probably never open again; a ragtag assemblage of magazine clippings; dinky little pencils so worn down they don’t fit into a pencil sharpener anymore—all kinds of things just keep on piling up. Like the character Urashima Taro in the Japanese fairy tale, who can’t help himself from rescuing a little turtle on the beach, I find myself somehow resigned to it. Carried away by some emotion I can’t even name, I wind up gathering things around me. Though I’m well aware that collecting hundreds of stubs of pencils doesn’t serve any possible purpose.
 
T-shirts are one of those objects that just naturally pile up. They’re cheap, so whenever an interesting one catches my eye, I invariably buy it—plus 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 clothes... Which is how, before I even realized it, the number of T-shirts in my life has skyrocketed, to the point where there’s no room in my drawers for all of them anymore and I’ve had to store the overflow in stacked-up cardboard boxes. It’s not at all like one day I simply made up my mind that Okay, I’m going to start a T-shirt collection. Believe me, that’s not the case.
 
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 again—maybe not. Either way works for me. I’m just hoping you can find some measure of enjoyment in this little collection.
Copyright © 2021 by Haruki Murakami. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Praise

"Mr. Murakami takes readers through a sartorial journey, sharing memories and musings through the lens of the clothes he has accumulated over the years."--Anna P. Kambhampaty, The New York Times

"Murakami T: The T-shirts I Love, is part ode, part exhibit that reads with restrained affection for his accidental accumulations...The diaristic entries have the simplicity of a show-and-tell, with Murakami’s spare prose offering a material history of his closet...Haruki Murakami’s understated love letters to his T-shirts convey how we give life to our things and vice versa."--Charlene K. Lau, The Atlantic

"This lively peek into his collection provides some surprising insights into the humble, real Murakami...A playful, witty, nostalgic journey with an acclaimed novelist." -- Kirkus Reviews
"Murakami's charming, utterly self-effacing eccentricity—one of the hallmarks of his fiction—shines brightly here..." —Bill Ott, Booklist

"Murakami’s many fans will eat up this charming ramble." —Publishers Weekly

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