Shirting The Issues

Legendary novelist Murakami has created an unconventional but fascinating memoir by way of his T-shirt drawer

You know you’ve got some serious status as a writer when you can publish a lavishly illustrated book about your own T-shirts. Haruki Murakami began producing fiction in the late 1970s, but it was only with the 1987 book Norwegian Wood that he really hit the big time. A nostalgic tale of young love, it became a global bestseller and led to a level of adulation that few authors have ever had. In his native Japan, he was mobbed at airports. In America, his subsequent novels were given Harry Potter-style midnight launches in crowded bookstores. And with the appearance of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in the mid-Nineties, his star rose, if anything, even higher.

Indeed, one way of reading Murakami T is as a picture of what a successful writer’s life is like—which is to say pretty nice. Murakami hangs out in Hawaii, sees Bruce Springsteen in New York, watches iguanas in the Galapagos islands, buying (or being given) T-shirts wherever he goes.

The result is undeniably a somewhat eccentric book. But it’s also a very likeable one. Having divided his shirts by theme—bands, cars, drink, animals and so on— Murakami provides short, chatty essays about how he came to have them. He throws in various thoughts about whatever they depict, and ponders T-shirts more generally: which ones seem too boastful to wear (Porsche and BMW designs); and which, in his seventies, he now feels too old to be seen in (The Ramones). At one flattering point, he writes that a T-shirt produced by The Economist magazine has “a very stylish message, as you might expect of something British”. The overall effect is not unlike sharing a conversation with a genial bloke in a bar.