Haruki Murakami’s books offers solace as we get older, says his longtime friend, who teaches his work at Tufts
"I measure the passing of time by Haruki’s books. And by reading his works, I feel an incredible sense of connection with everything I’ve gone through," says Hosea Hirata, who directs the International Literary and Visual Studies program and teaches a class on Haruki Murakami. Photo: Alonso Nichols
To read the novels of bestselling Japanese author Haruki Murakami, a former writer-in-residence at Tufts, is to travel through a world of loss and grief, encountering insights that make you feel less alone, says Hosea Hirata. He’s found the experience clarifying as he’s grown older.
Hirata, who teaches a course on the 75-year-old Murakami and directs the International Literary and Visual Studies program at Tufts, has known the writer since they were colleagues at Princeton University in the early 1990s.
Here, he discusses how his longtime friend’s novels—known for their use of humor and magical realism—offer solace in the face of mortality.
Haruki fights aging, I think. He sticks to the same sleep and physical training routine every day, and values stamina, physical strength, and the energy of his body and mind. He has a similar character in 1Q84—an old woman who’s still very vital and gets to know our protagonist Aomame through physical training. The old woman is very private and ethereal and lives in a garden with butterflies—but she also operates a secret organization against men who violate women and is not afraid to assassinate people. She is powerful.
I asked Haruki one night at dinner if he would try to write a story from the perspective of an older man of our generation. And he said, ‘No, I can’t write like that.’ His focus is on young people. But they often look back on their lives the way older people do. There’s a sense of nostalgia for days when we had more uncomplicated hope or happiness, which take on a mythological structure like the Garden of Eden—a timeless, immortal golden age that continues to nourish us, that we’re driven to search for in the future.
His characters also deal with grief and loss, which are challenges as we age. We feel fear and regret for things lost—but because of that process of losing, our existence becomes sharper. His protagonists often face loneliness—but at the same time deeply explore it, whether they go and sit at the bottom of a well for days (as in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) or confront another self who might be hiding somewhere.
I think Haruki has the sense that we exist as a fragment of something, and we are much more connected to the world than we conceive. In Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki writes that the soul is like the wind, ‘blowing through, never aging, never dying.’ It’s essentially animism, a Shinto belief that all objects in nature have their own spirits, and we’re just one of them. To look at the wind blowing and know you’re part of it, substanceless—to me, that’s comforting. And it can make a difference as you get older.
I can see Haruki aging—forgetting things, repeating things. But at the same time, I feel him getting continuously more mature in his writing technique and control of language. The stories just keep welling up somewhere in him, and he keeps discovering new things in himself by writing them. If you’re a writer like Haruki, through focus and empathy, you can clarify a certain narrative out of all the chaos you carry—everything you have experienced. And reading his stories is a vicarious experience of clarification.
Literature doesn’t give you a cure. But it can make you feel that you’re not alone—that you’re sharing this reality with others and going through this journey together. I measure the passing of time by Haruki’s books. And by reading his works, I feel an incredible sense of connection with everything I’ve gone through.
—as told to Monica Jimenez
