Welcome to the other side of Murakami's world; no fictional characters whatsoever, just Murakami and a closet of his personal T-shirts collection with a writing series spotlighting those collection-- short and light, uniquely told, bit quirky and so chilled! This is light diversionary reading but it may also make you realize what your own qualifications are for which T-shirts you'll actually wear as opposed to those you keep as souvenirs or memorabilia. Aside from his well known collection of jazz LPs, Murakami is also quite the collector of T-shirts, most of which he doesn't wear but instead stores away in file boxes. As you can imagine, many of these are ones that he is given as take-aways from book signings or readings and/or marathon runs (one of his other obsessions c.f. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running ). Murakami Haruki (Japanese: 村上 春樹) is a popular contemporary Japanese writer and translator. His work has been described as 'easily accessible, yet profoundly complex'. He can be located on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/harukimuraka... If you’re looking for the perfect gift for Murakami fans this Christmas, then look no further. Murakami T: The T-Shirts I Love is a gorgeous, small-format, full-colour, photographic gift book, revealing Haruki Murakami’s favourite t-shirts collected on his international travels and giving fascinating autobiographical insight into the internationally acclaimed writer, through his accompanying essays.

In 1978, Haruki Murakamiwas twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers’ award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chaseand Hard-Boiled Wonderlandand the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Runningand Men Without Women, Murakami’s distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world’s most acclaimed and well-loved writers. I love how we're diving into his life, and his stories from all around the world with the t-shirts that he owned. Goes to show how he values his things, and quite frankly, I can relate to some things as well. There is a sort of intimacy whilst going into someone's closet and choice of clothings, but I love how Murakami just went all in and talked about where and why he didn't wear his t-shirts. Whats exciting is how we get to somehow go an adventure with him as well, a trip to his past and his experience as a lecturer, as an author and even as a normal human as well. From why he always wore ties when living in Italy (“you would get these dirty looks if you weren’t”) to what makes a person stylish (“I think it’s great when somebody can make everyday clothes look comfortable”), it turns out Murakami has more to say about fashion than you might imagine. Perhaps the most intriguing revelation is his habit of carrying around a spare pair of trousers, getting the idea from the novelist Komimasa Tanaka, who shared his love of shorts.In a new book, Haruki Murakami, the international literary icon, opens his eclectic closet and shares photos of his extensive unique personal T-shirt collection, accompanied by essays that reveal a side of him rarely seen by the public. Murakami’s books have galvanised millions around the world and there is indeed a t-shirt he treasures the most, the one that inspired his beloved short-story ‘Tony Takitani’. He writes about how he encountered the t-shirt in ‘a thrift story in Maui’ and bought it ‘for about a dollar’. It turned out to be one of his best investments, as he asked himself ‘what kind of person could Tony Takitani be?’, let his imagination run wild and ended up writing a ‘short story with him as the protagonist, which was later made into a film’. For the multitudes whose appetite for details about Murakami’s wardrobe is not sated by Uniqlo’s interview, in November, Murakami T: The T-Shirts I Love will be published. In it, the “famously reclusive novelist” (ahem) will show off his T-shirts, “including gems from the Springsteen on Broadway show in NYC, from the Beach Boys concert in Honolulu to the shirt that inspired the beloved short story, Tony Takitani,” says US publisher Knopf. “Accompanied by short, frank essays that have been translated into English for the first time, these photographs reveal much about Murakami’s multifaceted and wonderfully eccentric persona.” Haruki Murakami's books have galvanized millions around the world. Many of his fans know about his 10,000-vinyl-record collection, and his obsession with running, but few have heard about a more intimate, and perhaps more unique, passion: his T-shirt-collecting habit. It feels so delightful to read his stories and how each T-shirt bringing a memorable fragment to his life-- a record hunting day, a thrift shop encounters, walking into an event, launching a book, running a marathon, meeting a friend, a beach visit, surfing or movies outing; these are all a story living in a piece of his T-shirt. Might be underwhelming to few and the collection pretty ordinary too, but being a fan to the novelist, this was such an endearing read to me.

The t-shirts in the book all have a story behind them, whether they are gems found in bookshops, charity shops, record shops or collected at marathons and at concerts. Some feature whisky, animals, cards and superheroes and look out for bands from Springsteen to The Beach Boys to R.E.M. Between photographs and essays, Murakami’s multifaceted and wonderfully eccentric persona shines through, a true master of stories, and the ‘world’s most popular cult novelist’ ( Guardian) I’m not particularly interested in collecting things, but there’s one sort of running motif in my life: despite my basic indifference, objects just seem to collect around me, of their own volition’ One of the running T-shirt during Murakami triathlon that he gets a lot of people asking; "So, Mr. Murakami, you're sponsoring a marathon now?" The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle's T-shirt that he gets from a reader who was inspired to create it after reading the novel

AVAILABLE FROM March 8th

I didn't expect much going into the book cause let's be real, the moment I heard its about his collection of t-shirts.... I'm here going ... okay?