“It was nearly five years ago now, but I lived next to a baseball field. This was during my third year of college. I say baseball field, but it really wasn’t anything all that spectacular, just a field with some tufts of grass. There was a backstop, a pitcher’s mound, a makeshift scoreboard next to the first base bench, and then there was a metal net that surrounded the whole thing. The outfield, instead of a nice grass, was a bunch of weeds, all dry and crumbly. There was one small bathroom, but there was nothing like a changing room or a locker room. The field belonged to this steel company that had a huge factory close by, and they hung a sign on the entrance that said ‘Unauthorized Entrance Prohibited.’ Whenever Saturday and Sunday rolled around, ad hoc teams of steel company businessmen and workers would come and play baseball. And then there was the official company team, which practiced on weekdays. Besides those there was also a women’s softball division. It looked like the company really liked baseball. But living next to a baseball field isn’t all that bad. My apartment building was just behind the third base bench, and I lived on the second floor. If I opened the window, the metal netting was right in front of my eyes. So whenever I got bored — and during the day I was bored every day of the week — I passed time by just gazing at the games or practices. But watching baseball was not the reason I came to live there. That was for a totally unrelated reason.”

After the young man said that, he paused his story, took a cigarette from his jacket pocket, and took a few drags.¹

Thus begins “Baseball Field,” one of Haruki Murakami’s lesser-known short stories. Part of the story was extracted, edited and expanded into “Crabs,” published in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, but the entirety has never been published in English. The young man in the story is at a café with Murakami himself. He mailed Murakami one of his short stories (the content of which the real-life Murakami later turned into “Crabs”), and Murakami, charmed by the young man’s interesting handwriting and somewhat impressed with the story itself, read all 70 pages and sent him a letter of suggestions. “Baseball Field” tells the story of their subsequent meeting over coffee. The point of view goes back and forth between Murakami, the young man, and, briefly, the characters in the young man’s story. Voyeurism is a major theme (the young man actually moved to the apartment to spy on a girl he had a crush on), and storytelling as an act of voyeurism, looking into other people’s lives, is the central theme of the collection in which “Baseball Field” was included: Dead Heat on a Merry-go-round 『回転木馬のデッド・ヒート』.²

In this collection, Murakami experimented with techniques he used in Norwegian Wood and later in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and by looking at how Dead Heat came into being, we can better grasp the development of Murakami’s thought process. Not only did he gain valuable experience writing “realistic” fiction, he was able to sharpen the point he wants to make with his writing: reality is strange, and humans have little control over the path their lives will take.

Murakami began his writing career in 1979 by submitting a novel, on a whim, to the popular literary magazine Gunzō.³ The novel, Hear the Wind Sing (『風の歌を聴け』, 1979), won the magazine’s prize for new authors, so he decided to write more, but it was not until after his second novel, Pinball, 1973 (『1973年のピンボール』, 1980), that he sold the jazz bar he owned and started to write full-time.⁴ His output expanded dramatically after Pinball, 1973: he wrote essays, short stories, movie reviews, and translations for many different magazines and publishing companies.⁵ In 1982 he published his third novel, A Wild Sheep Chase (『羊をめぐる冒険』) using the same cast of characters as his first two novels.

These early novels were written in first person, telling the story of an unnamed “I” (boku), his girlfriend, a bartender named “J,” and a friend named “the Rat.” In addition to the boku persona, another notable characteristic of Murakami’s early fiction was the use of the fantastic: girls with magic ears, talking pinball machines, and a “Sheep Man.” Murakami’s short fiction during the period — with the exception of a few stories, notably “A Slow Boat to China” and “Firefly” — was also very surreal.

In the fall of 1983, there were still four more years before Murakami would publish Norwegian Wood — the bestseller that changed Murakami “from a writer into a phenomenon.”⁶ The period from 1983 to 1985 was a formative one for Murakami, in which he can be seen honing his unique version of realism and developing a distinct worldview. He would later note that after finishing the Rat series, he wanted to try and write “a completely new type of fiction using completely different themes.”⁷ Murakami’s next set of stories would depart from his standard first-person narration and fantastic themes to directly address the shared reality around him in Tokyo.

In October 1983 Murakami started to serialize a set of stories in IN POCKET, a new, pocket-sized Kodansha magazine run by his former editor at Gunzō.⁸ The eight stories for the magazine were written under the collective title Views of the City (『街の眺め』), indexed along with other “short serials” (短編連作). The first story of the series, “Poolside” (「プールサイド」), begins in the third person. A man has turned thirty-five and decides that it is the middle point of his life. A recreational swimmer, he looks at life in the same way he looks at swimming laps; his thirty-fifth birthday is a confirmation that he’s halfway through the pool of life. After a few pages, Murakami abruptly switches to first person, addressing the reader directly:
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English / 日本語

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Wakamatsu Kōji’s latest film 『実録・連合赤軍：浅間山荘への道程』 (The True Story of the United Red Army: the Road to Asama-Sansō) is probably the final and definitive cinematic retelling of the United Red Army (URA) story. In early 1972, the URA terrorist cell achieved infamy for killing off twelve of its own members during ideological training and then battling police from the inside of a mountain lodge near Nagano’s Mt. Asama. Over the course of three hours, Wakamatsu covers the group’s entire history from their formation and eventual arrest, moving the viewer through a brief history of the student movement, the internecine fighting accompanying the foundation of the Red Army Faction (赤軍派), the brutal lynching of fellow members in its secret mountain training lodge, and the final standoff at Asama-Sansō.

Telling the “full” story of such a fractured and complex set of events forces Wakamatsu to use a no-frills “docudrama” approach, including plenty of on-screen text and voice-over narration. The story could not fit neatly into the conventional three-act film. Almost none of the Red Army members survive or stay free of police custody long enough to act as an emotional anchor or arch-villain for the entire three hours. Some characters are little more than historical bookmarks; for example, future Japanese Red Army leader Shigenobu Fusako shows up in the forward to bond with future URA victim Tōyama Mieko, but soon leaves for Lebanon to found the “international wing” of the Red Army. Likewise, Red Army founder and philosopher Shiomi Takaya is arrested in the first hour and taken completely out of the central story. But so goes the actual history.

Wakamatsu and fellow soft-porn filmmaker Adachi Masao were both Red Army sympathizers and chronicled the early proto-Japanese Red Army / Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Lebanon training camps in their 1971 documentary 『赤軍PFLP世界戦争宣言』Red Army-PFLP Declaration of War. In the last few years, both have apparently felt the need to create new films reflecting on the ’70s Japanese leftist terrorism. Adachi’s lackluster 『幽閉者テロリスト』Prisoner / Terrorist retold the story of Lod Airport Massacre attacker Okamoto Kozo losing his mind from years in an Israeli jail. With multiple Japanese fictional films about the United Red Army’s self-destruction already in circulation, however, it may seem odd that Wakamatsu went to such lengths to make yet another film on the topic. He has specifically stated a need to correct falsehoods in the 2002 film 『突入せよ！浅間山荘事件』(Choice of Hercules), which tells the story of the Asama-Sansō hostage crisis from the perspective of law enforcement. Wakamatsu protege Takahashi Banmei’s 2001 film 『光の雨』(Rain of Light) , on the other hand, very skillfully visualizes the horrific URA training deaths, but somewhat tempers it with a distancing meta-approach where the actors are shown “adapting” the novel that lends the film’s name. Although there are slight discrepancies between Takahashi and Wakamatsu’s versions, both generally work from the same historical chronicles and hit the same notes. Wakamatsu’s only real addition is combining the lynchings with the Asama-Sansō tale in a single epic-length film.

The other notable film to pick up the United Red Army narrative is 『鬼畜大宴会』 (Banquet of the Beasts) — Kumakiri Kazuyoshi’s ultra-gory mondo-horror retelling of the early ’70s student movement disintegration — where post-gunshot head-wounds spew blood, men are castrated with knives, and limbs are frequently severed. Beyond twisting this important historical event into purely prurient content, Kumakiri does the URA story great disservice by recasting the event’s true horror — the legitimatization of comrade purging through Marxist utopian ideology — into the result of the evil female leader’s growing “insanity.” When the stand-in for female URA leader Nagata Hiroko is killed late in the movie (by brutal means which I never want to think about again), Kumakiri gives viewers the karmic revenge they ultimately desire. (The historical URA denouement is not so rewarding: sadistic leaders Nagata and Mori were unceremoniously arrested before the Asama-Sansō siege even starts. Mori’s later suicide is always reduced to an afterword.)
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My cable company just added two more music channels, meaning I have six total music channels to be upset about. But I agree with those new Wieden + Kennedy ads: MTV blows me. For all those people who whine about “I remember when MTV played videos,” I challenge you to spend time watching a music video from start to finish. You are also probably remembering back when “pop music was good.”

Since the Japanese music market is melting down like a butterscotch sundae in a toaster oven on Venus, we are limited to singles that the genius marketing teams have determined interlock perfectly with collected consumer research. Besides Denki Groove’s videos for “Shonen Young” and “Mononoke Dance” (amazing punchline), the suits no longer greenlight anything approximating a “creative idea.” Spike Jonze would be outright rejected as an arrogant auteur for daring to come up with his own concepts. The Sukima Switches, Monkey Majiks, and Yamada Yu’s have taken over 100% — dragging J-pop into a dark hole between the poles of pop-punk and uta-hime barefoot female singers. Now the rock bands have to be salt-of-the-eath, the idols have to be unambiguously robotic, and the song titles have to stick to words that everyone knows like “Arigatou.” Seriously, can you imagine naming a song “Thank You” and then performing it in front of a camera and letting your record label show it to other people? “I Just Called to Say I Love You”? You think these kids read Keats or something?!

Objectively, however, I learn more and more about this elusive “youth generation” with every video. For example, the band Monkey Majik’s new single “Together.” Japanese youth apparently love hearing their own hack pop lyric conventions improperly coming out the mouth of Canadian English teachers. Monkey Majik are the musical equivalent of the giant posters of white people that decorate the façades of discount suit stores in the Japanese suburbs, but hey, those suit stores sell a lot of suits! Between MM, Jero, and Leah Dizon, North America seems to be the new recruiting ground for Japanese talent. The mirror phenomenon would be Japanese people moving to the USA and joining the American Enterprise Institute.

More seriously, the new Kato Miriya — sorry, Kato Miliyah — song “19 Memories” is probably our greatest possible window into the female Japanese psyche. First and most importantly, the song “samples” Amuro Namie’s “Sweet 19 Blues,” which only came out 11 years ago and is probably the worst Amuro Namie song of that era. Miriya must have heard from a friend that recent “Black Music” likes to “sample,” and immediately demanded that they sample her last single for her new one. But when they told her to sample an “old song,” she went all the way back to her roots in 1996, when she was 8.
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Sight unseen, Japan’s first truly contemporary art fair opens tonight. Scheduled on the same week as the Art Fair Tokyo, the 101 Tokyo Art Fair forces the megalopolis into its first Tokyo Art Week.

The world looks to Tokyo for what’s next, casually ignoring that what is there now consists of a tangled and underdeveloped infrastructure. It’s akin to many folks’ experience of moving to Tokyo and learning that it actually takes months to even get an internet connection installed. Compared to Basel and New York, Tokyo is a relative village of hovels when it comes to fine art as a commercial system.

On the macro scale, there is a severe lack of support unparalleled in other first world nations. No zaibatsu has a contemporary (or even modern) collection of note, and there is a complete lack of consumer awareness regarding fine art, though magazines like Brutus and Art-It have slowly been attempting to educate their readers about art history and the contemporary milieu. On the micro level, most Tokyo apartments lack adequate systems to actually hang art and real-estate agents charge exorbitant fees to plug holes in walls. There is a complete lack of a support network for emerging artists age 20 to 30 who more often than not leave their art careers in the dust in order to pursue a regular paycheck.

What has been present is an art fair that is more akin to a trade show than an art fair in both look and spirit. The Art Fair Tokyo would do well to look at the 101 interlopers as a source of inspiration. In lieu of a hodgepodge, non-curated mishmash of different genres, eras, and stuffed walls of the work that hasn’t sold for the year, 101 Tokyo offers another option. Namely, it’s a cultivated, highly curated sampling of exhibition spaces. Each gallery involved with 101 is permitted to show three artists maximum, and only new work is exhibited. The 101 Tokyo organizers are committed to educating their audience. They have gone as far as offering two separate seminars on art investing in Tokyo’s market in both English and Japanese, as well as a seminar on Collecting Art in the Context of Wealth Management.

There are other aspects of 101 Tokyo that are quite a change from the other gig in town. The fair is a stark contrast — the Director is an artist, and the crew running the fair is genuinely excited about visual work. All are young, a 32 year-old being the eldest, and they are decidedly international. 101 Tokyo stands as a series of events of inclusivity, something that must be cultivated if contemporary fine art as a commercial sector is to grow into something viable in Tokyo. They even have parties where you can shake your ass and even potentially get laid by someone your age whom you enjoy talking to about contemporary aesthetics with — more than can be said for elsewhere.

As purportedly over-invested in design and architecture as Tokyo is (which is debatable and a whole lot of lip service to say the least), contemporary fine art in Tokyo could really use a kick in the pants. With luck, 101 Tokyo will deliver a decent bruise.