Murakami T
  • Published: 16 November 2021
  • ISBN: 9781787303195
  • Imprint: Harvill Secker
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $38.00

Murakami T

The T-Shirts I Love

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16 Nov 2021
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16 Nov 2021
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The international literary icon opens his eclectic closet: Here are photographs of Murakami's extensive and personal T-shirt collection, accompanied by essays that reveal a side of the writer rarely seen by the public.

The international literary icon opens his eclectic closet and shares photos of his extensive unique personal T-shirt collection, accompanied by essays that reveal a side of the writer rarely seen by the public.

Haruki Murakami's books have galvanized millions around the world. Many of his fans know about his 10,000-vinyl-record collection, and his obsession with running, but few have heard about a more intimate, and perhaps more unique, passion: his T-shirt-collecting habit.

In Murakami T, the famously reclusive novelist shows us his T-shirts - including gems found in bookshops, charity shops and record stores - from those featuring whisky, animals, cars and superheroes, to souvenirs of marathons and a Beach Boys concert in Honolulu, to the shirt that inspired the beloved short story 'Tony Takitani'. Accompanied by short, frank essays that have been translated into English for the first time, these photographs reveal much about Murakami's multifaceted and wonderfully eccentric persona.

'The world's most popular cult novelist' Guardian
  • Published: 16 November 2021
  • ISBN: 9781787303195
  • Imprint: Harvill Secker
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $38.00
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About the author

Haruki Murakami

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers’ award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami’s unique and addictive fictional universe.

Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring Murakami’s place as one of the world’s most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

portrait photo of Haruki Murakami

Also by Haruki Murakami

The City and Its Uncertain Walls
Birthday Girl
Kafka on the Shore
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Norwegian Wood
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)
South of the Border, West of the Sun
See all

Praise for Murakami T

It's safe to say there is no one like Murakami

Literary Review

Murakami is one of the best writers around

Time Out, on Norwegian Wood

Everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility

Guardian, on Norwegian Wood

Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work of a true original

The Times, on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

One of the most influential novelists of his generation.

Observer

Fascinating...part ode, part exhibit that reads with restrained affection for his accidental accumulations....these tees excavate an intimate history. The choices we make about what we find and keep point to our interior worlds...Murakami's understated love letters to his tees also convey how we give life to our things and vice versa.

Atlantic

Undeniably a somewhat eccentric book. But it's also a very likeable one... The overall effect is not unlike sharing a conversation with a genial bloke in a bar

Reader's Digest

An incredibly readable and charming tour through Murakami's life through the T-shirts he has collected along the way... [the reader] feels a personal connection with him, as if we are reading his secret diary

Adam Davidson, Northern Echo