Koizumi Kyoko in Venice　-Murakami radio-

　　　　In the mid-1980s, I lived in Rome for a few years. Ryu Murakami was coming to Italy on business, and he kindly said, "If there's anything you need, I'll bring it", to which I replied, "Well, I'd like a cassette tape of Japanese songs". This was back when the Sony Walkman was still a new product. He looked through about five tapes and brought them back to me. Among them, I liked the ones by Yosui Inoue and Kyoko Koizumi and listened to them often. I liked Inoue Yosui and Koizumi Kyoko and listened to them a lot: Negativity and Ballad Classics. My ears must have been tired from listening to Italian with a sharp, Roman accent from morning till night. The sound of Japanese was pleasant. A little later, I travelled alone to Venice. At the time, I was going through a very difficult time personally. My chest was suffocating, and my consciousness felt disjointed and unintegrated. So I closed my train of thought, emptied my head as much as possible, and just walked around in an unknown city, listening to the same music tapes over and over on my Walkman.

Venice in spring is a beautiful place, but all I remember from that trip is the gentle light shining off the canals and the song by Kyoko Koizumi repeated on my headphones. But I cannot recall the lyrics. The melody and the voice are in my memory, but the words are almost blank. There was no connection between the sound of the Japanese language and the message it represented as words - perhaps that is what happened. But rather, by not making the connection, these songs protected me in a foreign land as the broken echoes of a nostalgic code. That's how I feel. I can't really explain it. There have been a few times in this life that I have felt really sad. Events that are so tough that the body's mechanisms change all over the place as it goes through them. Needless to say, no one can go through life unscathed. But each time, there was some special music there. Or rather, each time I was in that place, I needed some special music.

Sometimes it was a Miles Davis album, sometimes it was Brahms' piano concerto. Another time it was a cassette tape of Kyoko Koizumi. The music just happened to be there at the time. I took it up absent-mindedly and wore it as an invisible garment. Sometimes people attach their pent-up sadness and pain to music to prevent themselves from falling apart under its weight. Music has such a practical function. Novels have a similar function. They show us that emotional pain and sadness are personal and isolated, but at the same time, they can be carried on a deeper level by someone else and can be gently incorporated into a common, broad landscape. I hope that my writing plays a similar role somewhere in this world. I sincerely believe that.

This Week in Murakami

Have you ever seen a car with the 'young leaves' symbol and the 'autumn leaves' symbol side by side? I wouldn't want to get too close.