📍Ashiya, Hyōgo, Japan
1950 – 1968“Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and grew up in Shukugawa in Nishinomiya and in neighbouring Ashiya, quiet, comfortable suburbs between the mountains and the sea outside Kobe. He was an only child. Both his parents taught Japanese literature; his father was the son of a Buddhist priest and his mother the daughter of an Osaka merchant. Dinner-table talk often turned to classical Japanese literature, but Haruki, to his parents' disappointment, was drawn elsewhere. Kobe was a port city with a long history of foreign trade, and its secondhand bookshops were full of cheap English-language paperbacks left by sailors and foreign residents. Haruki bought them by the armful and read American novels by writers such as Truman Capote, Raymond Chandler and later Kurt Vonnegut, teaching himself English as he went. He also fell in love with jazz, saving his money to buy records and going to concerts; hearing Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers live in Kobe at fifteen was a revelation. He went to Ashiya's Seido Junior High School and then to Kobe High School, where he worked on the school newspaper. In 1968 he left for Waseda University in Tokyo, where he met his wife, Yoko, and later ran a jazz bar called Peter Cat. His first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, began on his kitchen table at night. The lonely, music-filled suburban world of his novels, with its records, cats and wells, owes much to the Hanshin suburbs of his youth, and after the 1995 Kobe earthquake he wrote about the region with deep feeling in the stories of after the quake.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today