Librarians in Japan have ditched their traditional regard for silence to accuse a newspaper of violating the privacy of Haruki Murakami, Japan’s best-known contemporary writer, after it revealed his teenage reading habits.



As a schoolboy in the western port city of Kobe, Murakami delved into the three-volume complete works of the French writer Joseph Kessel, according to library cards leaked to the Kobe Shimbun newspaper.

It is not clear, however, if the then student at Kobe high school read Belle De Jour, Kessel’s 1928 novel about a woman who works as a prostitute by day and reverts to her life as a housewife in the evening. The novel was turned into a film in 1967, starring Catherine Deneuve.

The Kobe Shimbun revealed Murakami’s reading habits of half a century ago after obtaining the cards from the school’s library that carried borrower entries under the author’s name, Japanese media reported.

The newspaper defended its actions, but the Japan Librarian Association accused it of violating the privacy of Murakami and other students whose names appear on the cards.

“Disclosing the records of what books were read by a user, without the individual’s consent, violates the person’s privacy,” said an association report.

While some might liken the breach as akin today of revealing a person’s browsing history on the internet, the newspaper said it had no regrets about divulging details of Murakami’s literary adolescence.

Hideaki Ono, assistant managing editor at the Kobe Shimbun, described the author as the face of contemporary Japanese literature, and said anything related to his professional life was of legitimate interest. “Murakami is someone whose work, and the way he developed his literature, is the subject of scholarly study,” Ono told Agence France-Presse.

“He is known to have profound knowledge of British and American literature. But [the cards] showed he also explored French literature in his younger days. We believed these facts are of great public interest.”

Ono admitted, however, the newspaper had not tried to contact Murakami or any of the other former students who borrowed the books.

The cards were apparently leaked to the paper after a volunteer who once taught at the school came across them while he was sorting out old library books that were to be thrown away.

Murakami, whose failure, so far, to win the Nobel prize for literature has infuriated his legions of fans around the world, has typically not commented on the revelations.

The 66-year-old author of Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and other titles that have sold millions in translation, has, though, overcome some of his past reticence about publicly commenting on his private thoughts. In January he launched a temporary second career as an agony uncle, appearing online to trade mostly light-hearted exchanges with his fans, while revealing he had come to terms with his critics, but felt awkward about sharing a birthday with the Nazi’s second-in-command, Hermann Göring.

In a surprise public appearance at a literary event in Fukushima last week, he likened the solitary act of writing to cooking one of his favourite foods, deep-fried oysters.

His wife can’t stand the dish, so he has no choice but to cook and eat them alone, he told the audience, according to the Asahi Shimbun.

“I am lonely, but they are delicious,” he added. “Like the relationship between solitude and freedom, it moves in an endless cycle. Picking out single words that are contained within me is also a solitary act so [writing novels] is similar to eating fried oysters by myself.

“When my mind grows pressured when I think that I am writing a novel, I feel more relaxed when I think that I am only frying oysters.”