#38: TONY TAKITANI BY HARUKI MURAKAMI – BY J.Y.L. KOH

Available in: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman and The New Yorker

Other stories: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning (in The Elephant Vanishes), Dabchick (in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman)

In the mid-80s, Murakami and his wife were driving around Maui when they stopped at a thrift shop. While browsing, they found a yellow promotional t-shirt with the name Tony Takitani printed across the chest in black letters. Murakami bought the t-shirt for a dollar. When he returned to Tokyo, he began wearing it out and about, all the while wondering who Tony Takitani was and what he did for living. Murakami felt compelled to imagine a life for the man behind the name and that is how he came to write one of my favourite short stories.

The Story

Tony Takitani’s father, Shozaburo, is a free-spirited jazz trombonist who leaves Tokyo and winds up imprisoned by the Chinese Army at the end of World War II. Upon his return to Japan in 1946, he discovers that he has no family left. Shozaburo marries but his wife dies three days after giving birth to their son. He names the boy Tony, after a friend who is an American army major.

As a child, Tony is a loner. His name makes things difficult: other kids tease him as a half-breed, and people are either angered by his name or think it’s a bad joke. He and his father are accustomed to solitude and are emotionally distant from each other: “Shozaburo Takitani was not well suited to being a father, and Tony Takitani was not well suited to being a son.”

Tony becomes a technical illustrator and his career brings him a small fortune. He never considers marriage until he falls in love, unexpectedly, with a young woman from a publishing company who comes to his office one day to pick up an illustration.

They marry, bringing Tony’s loneliness to an end. It soon becomes apparent, however, that Tony’s wife is unable to restrain herself from the continual acquisition of beautiful clothing. She buys so many clothes that they have to convert a room in their home into a walk-in closet. Her collection grows so large that Tony calculates she could change outfits twice a day and still not repeat herself for almost two years. When he asks her if she really needs so many expensive dresses, she begins to try to cure herself of the addiction.

Why it Sticks

‘Tony Takitani’ is an exquisite meditation on love, loss and loneliness, and the things people leave behind when they die.

One of the things I love about the story is that Murakami doesn’t conform to the popular rule that a writer should open with a scene that drops readers straight into the middle of the action. The story does open with a hook about Tony’s name but we then spend a good first quarter of the narrative engrossed in backstory – a summary of the thirteen years of Shozaburo’s life leading up to Tony’s birth.

‘Tony Takitani’ is also a lesson in how much plot can fit into a short story. In the hands of another writer, the story might have been a novel. It certainly had enough content to sustain a 75-minute feature film adaptation, which was made in 2004 under the direction of the late Jun Ichikawa.

What I find ingenious about Ichikawa’s adaptation is that almost all the scenes were filmed on a small set built in a windswept suburban field. You wouldn’t know it just by watching the film. In the midst of all that grass, the crew conjured up a host of beautifully lit interiors. In one scene, we watch Shozaburo at a jazz club, playing his trombone. In another, Tony eats dinner at his kitchen table, with the lights of the city twinkling behind him through a window.

The camera frequently tracks from left to right, passing through walls that act as frames for transitions between scenes. The actor Issei Ogata plays both father and son, and Rie Miyazawa plays Tony’s wife, as well as his prospective assistant.

Using a suburban field and two key actors, Ichikawa tells a story that spans decades and wideranging locations. His approach makes me think that the short story form, like the field and Ichikawa’s camera, may be a limited frame but the range of scenes passing through that frame need not be limited. Fiction, at any length, is a canvas of infinite possibilities, particularly when inspired by a name printed in black letters on an old yellow t-shirt.

J.Y.L. Koh’s short stories appear in The Fish Anthology, The Sleepers Almanac, The Lifted Brow and Kyoto Journal (forthcoming). Short films based on her fiction have screened at the St Kilda Film Festival, the Good Dog! International Film Festival and the Palm Springs International Shortfest. In 2013, she was a finalist in the Qantas Spirit of Youth Awards Written Word category, commended for the Australian Society of Authors' Ray Koppe Young Writers' Residency, longlisted for the Australian Book Review’s Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, and shortlisted for the Overland Victoria University Short Story Prize for New and Emerging Writers. jylkoh.com