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Birthday honour

Haruki Murakami reveals his surprise at discovering that his private celebration, shared with Jack London, had become a public event Saturday January 10, 2004The Guardian


Part 1

First let me tell you about one particular birthday - my own. I was given life in this world on January 12 1949, which means I belong to the baby-boom generation. The second world war had at last come to an end, and those who had managed to survive looked around them, took a deep breath, got married and started making children one after another. During the next four or five years, the world's population expanded - indeed, exploded, in a way never seen before. I was one of the nameless, numberless children produced during that period.






Delivered in the burnt-out ruins left after the intense bombing raids, we in Japan matured with the cold war and the period of rapid economic growth, entered the flowering of adolescence and received the baptism of late-60s counterculture. Burning with idealism, we protested against a rigid world, listened to The Doors and Jimi Hendrix (Peace!) and then, like it or not, we came to accept a real life that was neither very idealistic nor imbued with rock 'n' roll. And now we are in our mid-50s. Dramatic events occurred along the way - men on the moon, the crumbling of the Berlin wall. These seemed like meaningful developments at the time, of course, and they may well have exerted some practical influence on my own life. Looking back now, however, I have to say in all honesty that these events do not seem to have any special effect on the way I balance happiness versus unhappiness or hope versus despair in my life. However many birthdays I may have counted off, however many important events I may have witnessed or experienced first hand, I feel I have always remained the same me, I could never have been anything else.