RYU MURAKAMI · 2016
Japanese Traditional Events
Respect & Love — eight years in the making.
This book came into my hands in January 2024.
It was published on 4 July 2016, but it says inside that it took about eight years to finish.
Ryu Murakami, it seems, began it after seeing a film about the Japanese American internment camps of the Second World War, and the book is written in both Japanese and English.
It comes with a CD of Japanese nursery songs and shōka (school songs), supervised by Ryuichi Sakamoto. The two were close friends — Murakami often wrote in his essays that he would meet Sakamoto in New York and then travel on to Cuba by way of Cancún. It seems he consulted him about Cuban music as well.
Knowing that this CD came after Murakami's stories of America and Cuba, and that Sakamoto fell ill with cancer while the book was still being made, moved me deeply. The music is quiet, warm and beautiful. You can hear Sakamoto's feeling for a dear "friend" turned into sound.
The book is out of print now, but the special site tells you why it was made and lets you listen to the music. Do pay it a visit.
There was a moment during the making of JTE when it dawned on me, with all the clarity of a fine sunrise, that my attitude toward Japanese traditional events was basically one of “respect and love.”Normally I might feel a bit self-conscious about using such words, but in this case they felt so natural and right that I found myself embracing them as our subtitle.
- Title
- 日本の伝統行事 — Japanese Traditional Events (JTE)
- Subtitle
- 大切に思うこと、愛すること — Respect & Love
- Text
- Ryu Murakami
- Illustrations
- Yuka Hamano
- English translation
- Ralph McCarthy
- Music
- Japanese Children’s Songs and Shōka, supervised by Ryuichi Sakamoto — three CDs (Japanese, English, and karaoke)
- Cover
- Haruka Ayase (nail art: Haruna Takahashi)
- Publisher
- Kodansha, 4 July 2016 · ISBN 978-4-06-219960-5