A Review of Haruki Murakami’s “Murakami T”
An Autobiography of Clothing
Haruki Murakami has certainly been keeping his translators busy this year. First, he published the very good short-story collection First Person Singular, and, later this fall, he’ll be publishing in English a rather slim volume of autobiography about his T-shirt collection, of all things. That book is called Murakami T: The T-Shirts I Love and features photos and essays of more than 100 T-shirts in his massive collection — some that he never wears and keeps inside boxes. The short essays first appeared in the Japanese men’s fashion magazine Popeye not too long ago, and this book also features a couple of interviews Murakami did for the same magazine around the time that the photos and essays were published, just to pad things out a little bit. (I found that the interview section did repeat some information found in the essays, so I’m not entirely sure why it’s there in this book or was even included in the magazine to begin with, except that, in the case of the former, it slightly lengthens a very short book.)
Murakami T is a slim volume, so slim that you can read it in less than an hour. It is the length of a couple of magazine pieces, so I’m not sure why it is getting a standalone book when this sort of thing might have been more easily published and be much more digestible as, say, a New Yorker article. While the book sort of works as a bit of autobiographical writing, it is not very revealing. The most revealing piece of information is that the author buys a lot of his T-shirts at thrift shops, such as those offered by Goodwill or the Salvation Army. The other piece of information that’s interesting is that Murakami doesn’t wear a lot of these shirts. After all, some of the T-shirts he receives are from his publishers around the world who send him promotional items based on his work. It turns out that the author is a bit of a private man, and doesn’t like to be recognized in public, so he has to wear clothing that is as inconspicuous as possible. However, it seems that he also doesn’t like to throw out stuff — he cops to mentioning in this collection that he keeps all his pencil stubs, even when they’re so short that they can’t be used in a pencil sharpener. Thus, Murakami is a packrat. That I didn’t know. (He also has a collection of vinyl records, mostly jazz, numbering in the tens of thousands, so if I ever visit Japan, I know whose home I’m going to break into to steal stuff from. That’s a joke. I love jazz on vinyl.)
The Murakami aficionado might be interested to know that he groups his T-shirts in this book by theme a little bit. So you get a bunch of T-shirts with lizards and turtles on them because they’re reptiles, though the author is not much of a fan of these creatures, it turns out. There are no obvious section on rock T-shirts, per se, though two R.E.M shirts show up in this volume, and Murakami writes about seeing Bruce Springsteen’s pre-pandemic Broadway shows (Murakami had connections and was able to score tickets to the show) and then presents the T-shirt. (A Ramones shirt shows up towards the end, too, though he is not too much of a fan.) So the book is sometimes random but tries to select themes and run with them, although some of these themes are very tenuous at best and don’t say much about the man who may or may not wear the shirts they’re based on. Mostly, this collection rambles.
I read a galley of this book on my Kindle and, normally, I usually won’t comment on this aspect in my reviews because the copy is not final. However, I can say — even in this primitive type of Kindle file — that the T-shirt photos rendered quite well. However, you might want to read this book either when it comes out as a physical copy or on a colour screen if you have a tablet or other portable reading device because there is the odd reference to a shirt or series of shirts being a particular colour, which, of course, you can’t see on, say, a black-and-white Paperwhite. Still, if you’re worried about reading this book on your Kindle, fret not. The image quality is quite good and there’s only a couple of instances where the colour might be an issue.
In the end, I’m not sure how I feel about Murakami T. It’s not particularly revealing, and not all the T-shirts are rare or are particularly noteworthy. (I mean, did Murakami really have to have Coors Light and Heineken T-shirts included in this volume? It’s not as though I’ve haven’t seen a Heineken T-shirt in all my nearly 46 years of living.) Most of them are of restaurants or record stores and few have any interesting illustrations or designs. And, again, Murakami mentions that he doesn’t even wear most of these shirts for fear of being outed in public or wearing something that might draw attention to himself. Thus, I’m not particularly sure what the purpose of Murakami T is when the author seems disinterested in the subject matter at hand. I think I would have rather gotten a collection of essays about vinyl records that Murakami listens to because the stories behind those records probably would be much more interesting.
Sure, there are instances where a T-shirt was bought because of an encounter with someone semi-famous, and, as an adjunct to Murakami’s memoir on running (What I Talk About When I Talk About Running), there are shirts presented here that were collected from marathons he’s run. However, this is an unrevealing portrait of an interesting Japanese writer. I hate to say it, but this book is merely average. It’s enjoyable in a fluffy sort of way, but most readers might be more interested in Murakami opening himself up and being naked. That’s not here. He might as well wear some of these shirts. I know he doesn’t crave the attention, but for a book of this sort to click that’s what it needs: more interesting stories behind the clothes that fit a man to, well, a T, and less about shirts that the author consigns to cardboard boxes. This book, though enjoyable, is really for die-hard fans only.
Haruki Murakami’s Murakami T: The T-Shirts I Love will be published by Knopf Publishing Group on November 16, 2021.
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You may also be interested in the following reviews: Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore and Haruki Murakami’s First Person Singular.
Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
