Birthday Honour. Part 4-5-6

Part 4

A public event?
Oh well, public event or not, at least at that moment some of the people throughout Japan - it was a nationwide broadcast - standing (or sitting) by their radios may have had at least some fleeting thought of me. "So, today is Haruki Murakami's birthday, eh?" Or, "Oh, wow, Haruki Murakami's ** years old, now too!" Or, "Hey, whaddya know, even guys like Haruki Murakami have birthdays!" In reality, though, how many people in Japan could have been up at this ridiculous pre-dawn hour listening to the radio news? Twenty or thirty thousand? And how many of those would know my name? Two or three thousand? I had absolutely no idea.
Statistics aside, though, I couldn't help but feel a kind of soft, natural bond with the world. It was not a bond that could serve any practical purpose, nor one that had any real impact on a person's life. It was, I suppose, that special bond people feel with each other when they know one of them is celebrating his or her birthday. For a while, I tried to visualise this bond in my mind's eye - its material and colour and length and angle and intensity. Again, for a time, I thought about ideals and compromise, about the cold war and Japan's economic growth. I thought, too, about growing older, and about wills and fireworks. And then I stopped thinking at all and instead concentrated on making myself a good cup of coffee.

When the coffee was ready, I poured it into a mug (one with an Australian Museum logo: something I bought in Sydney), carried it to my study, sat at my desk, switched on my Apple Mac, put a Telemann concerto for woodwinds on the stereo at low volume and started the day's work. It was still dark outside. The day was just beginning. It was a special day in the year, but at the same time it was an absolutely ordinary day. I was working at my computer. Maybe one of these years I would have the kind of dramatic birthday when I would want to sail a boat out to the middle of Tokyo Bay and set off a massive firework display. And should such a birthday ever come, I would charter the boat without hesitation, no matter what anybody might say, and I would head out to Tokyo Bay in the depths of winter with an armload of fireworks. But today, at least, was not such a day. This year's birthday was not such a birthday. I would just be sitting at my desk as always, quietly putting in a day's work.

Part 5

As I said earlier, my birthday falls on January 12. I once looked on the internet to see who else I shared this date with and was thrilled to find Jack London's name (and one of the Spice Girls too, I might add). I have been a devoted Jack London reader for years. Not only have I read his well-known works such as White Fang and The Call of the Wild with great enthusiasm, but also several of his lesser-known stories and his biography. I love his strong, simple style and his strangely clear novelistic vision, I love his singular energy, the way it transcends common sense and forges straight ahead, no matter what, as if to fill in some great emptiness. I have always thought of him as a writer who deserves far higher literary praise than he is normally accorded. To think that Jack London and I have the intimate bond of a shared birthday! His own January 12 occurred in 1876, 73 before my own.

Part 6

When I was travelling in California in early 1990, I visited the farm Jack London owned in a place called Glen Ellen, Sonoma County, to pay my respects to this legendary writer. Or, more precisely, once, when I was making the rounds of the Napa Valley wineries in a rented car, the thought popped into my mind, "Come to think of it, Jack London had a farm around here somewhere", so I checked the guidebook and took a detour to visit the place. London bought a winery in Glen Ellen in 1905 and turned it into a large-scale experimental farm of about 1,400 acres. He lived there until his death in 1916, running the farm and writing fiction. A part of his farm (about 40 acres' worth) has been preserved as Jack London State Historic Park. It's a beautiful place. The day I was there the sunlight shone with an unwavering clarity, and a quiet, pleasant breeze caressed the grass as it blew over the hills. I whiled away the autumn afternoon looking in the rooms and at the desk that London once used.
Thanks in part to such pleasant memories, I make it a point to open a bottle of Jack London wine (Cabernet Sauvignon) for dinner every year on my birthday. This particular wine is not made in Glen Ellen, but in the neighbouring district of Kenwood. Still, it is made in a winery crowned with the name "Jack London Vineyard" and its label bears the original wolf picture that was used for the cover of White Fang. This may not be the most appropriate ceremony with which to commemorate the death of a drinker of such outrageous proportions as London (he destroyed his liver and died at the age of 40) but I raise my glass in the hope that this outstanding American writer might rest in peace.

· This is an edited extract from the introduction to Birthday Stories, a collection of stories by writers including Paul Theroux and William Trevor, edited by Haruki Murakami, published by Harvill.

Fin