I’ve been reading Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle for the first time in about a decade. I’ve mentioned before the title was in part the inspiration for EWC. Actually, we’d toyed with the idea of simply calling it East, and at one point there was the idea of calling it Pacific Rim Sports. My idea was Yellow Pennant Fever, which I still like, but admittedly, it’s a bit much. Not that you asked, but the name of this site, which was Jackson’s idea, is one of the few things on here that I’ve never thought twice about.

At the time I’d read that Murakami is a big baseball fan, which made the idea of appropriating one of his book titles all the better. When I started to reread the book I planned to keep an eye out for any baseball references. I found one yesterday.

Without giving away too much of the plot (the book is very good and I recommend it), the central character and narrator Toru Okada, is undergoing a kind of existential self-examination at the bottom of a well. He stays down in the well for several days, and one of the things he’s confronted with is the notion of time, which he cannot live without, or, stop paying attention to. Here Toro is considering time in the outside world, and is relating it to baseball. This is just absolutely brilliant writing and it happens to be about baseball. His reverence for the game evident. Enjoy.

The hands of my watch showed seven twenty-eight. I must have looked at my watch some two thousand times since coming down here. Now it was seven twenty-eight at night, that much was certain; at a ball game, it would be the bottom of the third or the top of the fourth. When I was a kid, I used to like to site up high in the outfield stands and watch the summer day trying not to end. The sun had sunk below the western horizon, but the afterglow was still brilliant and beautiful. The stadium lights stretched their long shadows across the field as if to hind at something. First one-and then another light would be turned on with the utmost caution shortly after the game got going. Still, there was enough light in the sky to read a newspaper by. The memory of the long day’s glow remained at the door to keep the summer night from entering.

With patience and persistence, though, the artificial illumination was winning its quiet victory over the light of the sun, bringing forth a flood of festive colors. The brilliant green of the playing field, the handsome black earth, the straight white lines newly drawn upon it, the glinting varnish on the bats of players waiting for their turn at the plate, the cigarette smoke floating in the beams of light (looking, on windless days, like souls wandering in search of someone to take them in) — all these would begin to show up with tremendous clarity. The young beer sellers would hold their hands up in the light, flashing bills tucked between their fingers. The crowd would rise from their seats to follow the path of a high fly ball, their voices rising with its arc or dissolving into a sigh. Small flocks of birds returning to their roosts would fly past toward the sea. This was the stadium at seven-thirty in the evening.

I thought about the baseball games I had seen over the years. The Saint Louis Cardinals had come to Japan once, when I was little, for a friendship game. I had seen that one with my father from an infield seat. Before the game itself, the Cardinals players stood along the perimeter of the field with baskets full of autographed tennis balls, throwing them into the stands as fast as they could. People went crazy trying to grab a ball for themselves, but I just stayed in my seat without moving, and before I knew it, I had a ball in my lap. It was a magical happening: strange and sudden.

Murakami recently did a rare interview which was used for an article in the Japan Times.