Locations in Murakami Stories

    When reading “Abandoning a Cat,” the locations that Murakami mentions living in as a child stood out to me. This is mostly due to my personal connections to Hyogo Prefecture, as Shukugawa, where Murakami grew up, is where my mom grew up as well and where my aunt and uncle currently live. Learning this, I went back to A Wild Sheep Chase and several of the short stories we read in class to examine references to locations to see to what extent they mirrored Murakami’s life. Though Murakami asserts that he does not want readers to read too far into the similarities between him and Boku, the references in location do seem to be inspired from his own life. 

    In A Wild Sheep Chase, for example, the novel describes Boku’s journey to the funeral with, “the day off the funeral, I took a streetcar from Waseda” (4). Waseda University is where Murakami attended, with this mention of Waseda seeming to be a direct reference to, even though Boku attends ICU, which is in Mitaka, Tokyo. Later when he’s describing himself to his new girlfriend, he says, “I grew up in an ordinary little town, went to an ordinary school… When I was eighteen, I came to Tokyo to go to college” (41). Though it’s not mentioned exactly where Boku’s hometown is and he went to ICU instead of Waseda, this description follows Murakami’s life fairly closely, with him growing up in Kobe until he left for Tokyo when he turned eighteen to go to college at Waseda. 

    In terms of references to Kobe in particular, though Murakami does not reference any locations by name in any of the stories we read, there were a few location descriptions that reminded me of places I have visited when in Japan visiting my extended family. For example, in “A Perfect Day for Kangaroos,” it is set at the local zoo. Though it technically could be any zoo, not even specific to Japan, it instantly reminded me of Oji Koen, which is the local zoo in Kobe where I often visited as a child. There is a kangaroo enclosure in Oji Koen, as well as many food stands scattered throughout the park, many selling Western foods such as hot dogs and sodas. 

    In A Wild Sheep Chase, Boku mentions that he often went to an aquarium close by to where he lived. Though there is a formal museum now in Suma, this seems farther than a 30-minute bike ride from Shukugawa. Similarly, there seems to be a relatively new aquarium in the harbor as well as the Kobe Maritime Museum, there doesn’t seem to be an aquarium in Kobe currently that matches this description, though it is certainly likely that there was one at the time of Murakami’s childhood. 

    Lastly, though this connection is less about location, I also noticed the connection in “Where I’m Likely to Find It” and Murakami’s real life. In “Where I’m Likely to Find It,” the woman’s father-in-law, a Buddhist priest, is killed when he gets drunk and falls asleep on a rainy night on the streetcar tracks. This mirrors closely to how Murakami describes his paternal grandfather’s death in “Abandoning a Cat,” which is also by a train while crossing the tracks of the Keishin Line, which connects Kyoto (Misasagi) and Otsu. 

Sarah