The Hanshinkan Kid (3): Sake brewers Haruki Murakami a product of a town known for its sake

	Some notable characters in Haruki Murakami’s novels are hard drinkers. In particular, the protagonists of his first two novels, “Hear the Wind Sing” and “Pinball, 1973,” drink beer like a fish.


Here’s a famous passage from “Hear the Wind Sing,” the author's 1979 debut work. “As if possessed by something, I and the Rat spent the whole summer drinking an amount of beer roughly equivalent to a jug the size of a 25-meter pool.” After one of their massive drinking sessions, the protagonists, totally drunk, drive a Fiat at a blistering speed well above the limit and through a fence in a park and then over a patch of shrubbery before eventually crashing it into a stone pillar. In his later works as well, the characters drink various alcoholic beverages, but almost all are Western liquors. Murakami stuck to the preference in the latest novel Killing Commendatore there is detailed dialogue about how the characters drink whiskey.


	Killing Commendatore

	In “Murakami Harukido no Gyakushu,” a collection of essays, he explained why he stopped drinking Japanese sake. “Now I hardly ever drink Japanese sake because of unpleasant memories about how I frequently got sick by drinking too much sake while I was a college student. I’m 100 percent responsible for my bad experiences with sake, and none of the blame should be placed on the Japanese beverage. Should I ever be brought to trial for not drinking Japanese sake, I would make no attempt to defend myself and plead guilty to all the charges.”


	Murakami Harukido no Gyakushu
	A LIBRARY DONATED BY A SAKE BREWER But Murakami spent his early years in places awash with sake. He was born in Fushimi, a major sake production center in Kyoto. Soon after his birth, his family moved to Nishinomiya, which is famous for its thriving sake industry, because his father, Chiaki, was recruited to teach at Koyo Gakuin, an educational institution that operates private integrated junior and senior high schools.


	Koyo Gakuin　 junior high school
	Nishinomiya has a vibrant and prosperous sake brewing industry, with its main Sake Brewery Street lined with time-honored sake producers with a history dating back to the Edo Period (1603-1867), such as Tatsuuma-Honke, known for its Hakushika brand of sake, Hakutaka, Nihonsakari and Ozeki. Koyo Gakuin is a prestigious educational institution that offers integrated junior and senior high school education. Its predecessor was Tatsuuma Gakuin Koyo High School, which was founded during the Taisho Era (1912-1926) with financial assistance from the Tatsuuma family, a leading brewer in Nishinomiya that first started producing sake in the Edo Period. In an interview open to the public held in Kyoto in May 2013, Murakami said he barely read any book until he was a third-grader. “After I became a fourth-grader, I would regularly go to a library in Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, (where I lived back then) by bicycle and read most of the books for children that were in the library,” he said. (The interview was reported in the May 7 evening edition of The Asahi Shimbun.)


	The former Nishinomiya City Library
	The library he referred to was the former Nishinomiya City Library, built in 1928 with money donated by the Tatsuuma family, which operated Koyo Gakuin, where Murakami’s father taught. Some passages in his “Kafka on the Shore” may reflect his boyhood in Nishinomiya. One of the characters in the novel said, “The Komura family’s been a major sake producer since the Edo Period, and the previous head of the family was quite a bibliophile, nationally famous for scouring the country in search of books.” Another said, “Before World War II, a vibrant local culture was established less through the efforts of local government than those of wealthy connoisseurs such as the Komura family. They were, in short, patrons of the arts.” The Komura family is strongly reminiscent of the Tatsuuma family, and there are clear parallels between the Komura family’s role in promoting culture as described in the novel and the contribution the Tatsuuma family made to Nishinomiya’s cultural scene. The young Murakami lived in housing built for teachers at a school founded by a sake brewing family and constantly visited a library the family donated to the city. He came to realize the pleasures of reading at the library. In other words, he was immersed in a local culture created by a sake brewing family as he grew up in Nishinomiya.


	Sake barrel of Tatsuuma-Honke Brewing Co.
	The Nada area in southeastern Hyogo Prefecture, extending from Nishinomiya to eastern parts of Kobe, is known as a major sake-brewing center. The area is located in the Hanshinkan region between Osaka and Kobe. The area produces more “seishu,” or refined sake, than any other part of Japan. The sake brewing industry has been flourishing for more than three and a half centuries since the Edo Period, and sake produced in this area has earned a national reputation as fabled “Nada no Kiippon" (pure Nada sake). In the Hanshinkan region, there is another prestigious educational institution operating integrated junior and senior high schools called Nada Junior and Senior High School. Sake also played a key role in the genesis of this institution, which was founded by sake brewers in the Nada area, including Kano Jiroemon, a member of the venerated Kano family, which produces the nationally famous “Kikumasamune” brand of sake; Kano Jihei, a member of the branch family of the Kano clan that produces the well-known “Hakutsuru” brand of sake; and Yamamura Tazaemon, a member of the family that produces the “Sakuramasamune” brand of sake. In the Hanshinkan region, there are also many art and other museums with large collections of objects of art and curios previously owned by generations of well-to-do brewers. There are also various cultural facilities established by the patrons of the arts in the sake industry. Many sake brewers were erudite connoisseurs of artworks and antiques. They were also well-educated aficionados of a wide range of Japanese culture, including paintings, calligraphies, haiku poems, the tea ceremony and classical popular performing arts. Just within 500 meters from the house where the Murakami family lived in Nishinomiya, for example, there are two museums--the Hakushika Memorial Sake Museum and the Tatsuuma Archeological Museum, both founded by Tatsuuma families.


	Sake Museum and the Tatsuuma Archeological Museum
	Such art-loving sake brewers and wealthy dilettantes actively socialized and built close relations with famous writers and artists of the time. Tatsuuma Etsuzo, who headed the brewer of Hakutaka, for instance, was on friendly terms with Tomioka Tessai (1837-1924), a reputed painter. Hideo Nishida, chief of the brewer that produces the Goshun brand of sake, enjoyed the friendship of Tanizaki Junichiro (1886-1965), a famous writer. In Nishinomiya and the neighboring Hanshinkan area, arts patronage emerged as a major cultural trend before World War II as big sake brewers and business moguls became dedicated art patrons. ORDINANCES TO PROMOTE TOASTING IN SAKE Despite growing up in a rich sake culture, Murakami appears to be a staunch Western liquor drinker. A broad array of liquors appear in his novels. Here’s a list: Four Roses in “A Wild Sheep Chase”; Chapter 15 of “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” is titled “Whiskey, Torture, Turgenev” and Wild Turkey, Cutty Sark, I.W. Harper and Jack Daniel’s appear in the novel; vodka tonic in “Norwegian Wood”; pina colada in “Dance, Dance, Dance”; Wild Turkey, vodka gimlet in “South of the Border, West of the Sun”; Cutty Sark, again, in “The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.” In “Kafka on the Shore,” one character said, “From time immemorial, symbolism and poetry have been inseparable. Like a pirate and his rum.” Another character of the novel is a cat killer named Johnnie Walker. There is a scene in “1Q84” where two persons drink Cutty Sark together. “They drank their new Cutty Sarks--the man his highball and Aomame hers on the rocks.” As indicated by Murakami’s early works, beer has become the favorite alcoholic beverage among Japanese in the postwar period. It has become customary to start a party by everyone toasting with a beer in their hands. In efforts to change this situation, local governments in major sake production areas across the nation have enacted ordinances to promote toasting in sake at the beginning of parties. The city of Nishinomiya issued such an ordinance on Oct. 1, this year. An event to celebrate the establishment of the ordinance was held on Oct. 5, in which some 2,000 people toasted with sake all at once. The venue for the event was Nishinomiya Shrine, which was a playground for children during Murakami’s boyhood years.


	An event to celebrate the establishment of the ordinance
	When I met Akio Tatsuuma, director and senior adviser to Tatsuuma-Honke Brewing, the other day, I told him about Murakami’s attitude toward Japanese sake. Tatsuuma apparently felt disappointed and said, “I wish Murakami-san had drunk our tasty sake when he was a student instead of the poor-quality sake that made him sick.” At the outset of “Murakami Harukido no Gyakushu,” Murakami described a conversation he had with Kozaburo Arashiyama, then editor in chief of "Taiyo" (Sun) magazine, when he was still a fledgling writer. Although Murakami, still young, drank mainly beer at that time, Arashiyama predicted that he would eventually come to prefer other kinds of liquor as he grew older. In fact, “The share of beer in the total amount of alcohol I drink has been declining gradually,” Murakami wrote. Indeed, over the years, the liquors characters in his novels drink and the dishes they eat with the drinks have become increasingly diversified and sophisticated. This probably reflects a steady refinement of Murakami’s own gastronomical tastes. Unfortunately, however, sake has yet to appear in any of his novels.


	If Our Language is Whisky,
	“If Our Language is Whisky,” published in 1999, is a collection of Murakami’s essays on his travels to whisky-related places such as Islay, a Scottish island known as a major whisky producing area, and various parts of Ireland. In these essays, Murakami not only described the tastes of various whiskies he drank but also wrote about distilleries that produced them and bars where locals drank them. When I first read the book 11 years ago, I felt an irresistible impulse to drink whisky and ran to a nearby liquor shop to buy a bottle of Scotch. My hope is that Murakami will someday write essays about the Sake Brewery Street in Nishinomiya and about the time-honored sake producers that line the street in a way that makes people around the world desperately thirsting to drink Japanese sake. (end)