In an interview with the New York Times, Murakami goes into detail about an essay collection he recently wrote about his t-shirt collection, called “Murakami T: The T-Shirts I Love”. He talks about how he unconsciously collects t-shirts as mementos of important times in his life.
He finds his t-shirts in thrift-stores, and talks about how he found a yellow one with the name “Tony Takitani” on it. I feel that the short story he wrote called “Tony Takitani” has been influenced both by this and his related thoughts on physical objects and their connection to memories, as he speaks about it in reference to his collections.
He says, “ I’m not particularly interested in collecting things, but there is a kind of running motif in my life: despite my basic indifference, objects seem to collect around me. Stacks and stacks of LPs, so many I’ll never listen to them all; books I’ve already read and will probably never open again; a ragtag assemblage of magazine clippings; dinky little pencils, so worn down they don’t fit into a pencil sharpener anymore. All sorts of things just keep on piling up.” This practice of unintentionally collecting items seems to be reflected with Tony’s wife’s extreme buying of clothes, filling up entire rooms without trying.
He believes that there is an attachment of meaning to those seemingly random objects. He says, “The kind of clothes people wear, and the way they wear them, expresses something — a lot in fact — about a person’s individual stance. Like it or not.” As for himself, many of his t-shirts are a reflection of his interest in Western culture, or have somewhat baffling messages that show his love for the mysterious. In the book, he goes into detail about each memory that is attached to the t-shirt he has kept with him. Through the decision people make to obtain something, keep it with them, and the remembered experience of doing so that is then ingrained into the item, it seems that Murakami believes there is some essence of the person transferred into it.
This is reflected in the story, when Tony is haunted by all the clothes his dead wife left behind. Tony says, “Size 7 shadows of his wife hung there in long rows, layer upon layer, as if someone had gathered and hung up samples of the infinite possibilities (or at least the theoretically infinite possibilities) implied in the existence of a human being.”
Then after he gets rid of the clothes Murakami writes, “[...] he lost the ability to recall the things that used to be in the room. The memory of their colors and smells faded away almost before he knew it. Even the vivid emotions he had once cherished drew back, as if retreating from the province of his memory [...] Each memory was now the shadow of a shadow of a shadow”. By removing the physical objects that were imbued with his wife’s essence, Tony also loses his tangible memories, showing how objects can be holders of memory.
When Tony’s father dies in the story, he similarly leaves behind a large collection of objects that were precious to him: old jazz records. He puts them into the room that used to have his wife’s clothes, but it begins to bother him more and more that they are there. “His memories had grown indistinct, but they were still there, where they had always been, with all the weight that memories can have [...] Once the mountain of records had disappeared from his house, Tony Takitani was really alone.” This again reflects that idea of objects as holders of memory and of the essence of the person's presence.
I believe Murakami used the short story "Tony Takitani" to explore this idea, which seems fitting since the title and character was also inspired by one of the t-shirts he had collected on his travels as his own personal example of this phenomenon.
Alessandra Leone
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