Although every year it sounds in the windows of the Nobel Prize for Literature, there are few writers as determined to subtract up importance to themselves as Haruki Murakami. The Japanese treasure millions of readers around the world and is the author of bestsellers translated into 50 languages as the death of the Commander, Kafka on the shore or trilogy 1Q84. He also of non-fiction books much more personal as what I'm talking about when I speak of writing, what I'm talking about when I talk about running or recent music, just music, all published in Spain by Tusquets. But he has always been closer to wanting to be a pop icon than a prestigious literacy. Without going any further, no other writer can presume that Uniqlo has dedicated a collection.
About to meet 73, Murakami has just surprised his fans (and his Haters, who also has them) publishing a book about his favorite t-shirts that, of course, is much more than a book about t-shirts. It is titled Murakami T: The T-Shirts I Love (Knopf) and is the perfect excuse to talk about style, the passage of time, the literary inspiration, the value of things (something very different from the price) and, definitively, What our material possessions say (what we accumulate and with what we end up fondoring) about ourselves. All this happened through the Murakami sieve, that mixture of lightness, apparent simplicity and pop minimalism.
In addition to vinyl, spent pencils and magazines, Murakami has a collection of about 200 t-shirts and when in Japanese Popeye magazine they proposed to make a selection of their favorites and write about them, the idea seemed great. The favorite of him is a yellow canary that leads in blue letters the words "Tony Takitani". "I found it in a store in Maui and I bought it for a dollar," she explains in the introduction. "I asked myself: what kind of person could be Tony Takitani? I let my imagination fly and I ended up writing a story with him of protagonist who later became a movie. And the shirt only cost a dollar, can you believe it I have done many investments in my life, but this was, without a doubt, the best of all ". Apparently, Murakami is a great buyer of cheap t-shirts in stores was second hand like those of the Salvation Army. Many of the fans of him have been excited to know that the great literary star also sew up in the buckets of all to a dollar in search of treasures.
In the book there is everything: several surf t-shirts from his time as a teacher in Hawaii (Banana Yoshimoto, who was a student, gave him one) and music, from the Beach Boys to one of the Ramones that no longer dares to take away In public because "there are certain limits when you have fulfilled the 70s," he confesses. Several have to do with the American Way of Life, from which Murakami is a strange devout: there is the old promotional coca-cola t-shirt and one with the S by Superman Raída.
We knew that Murakami gives great importance to the ritual of drinking a cold beer, so it does not surprise that he has selected one of Heineken, but knowing how much he takes care of him (when he started running at 33 he stopped eating so much meat), surprise That one of the t-shirts is a Heinz promotional specimen with the motto I put Ketchup on My Ketchup that, as he himself recognizes, at this point he is almost a private joke between Americans that Europeans did not catch.
The book also includes a shirt that was a gift from its Spanish publishers. "It was an element in the promotion of the men's stories book without women, and in it we add the motto" Keep Calm and Read Murakami "a cat's profile, an animal that appears on numerous works by the author," explain from Tusquets. "Obviously, the shirt was made with the complicity of the author, and when they were ready, we sent him several. Murakami liked it so much that he used it in public several times. And when he published his book on Japan on T-Shirts, he included it, what we He made very happy, "they confess from the publisher. A life, in short, counted through shirts.
Date Of Update: 10 December 2021, 12:43
