Haruki Murakami admits his father was a Japanese soldier in unit that executed Chinese POWs

Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami

Globally renowned Japanese novelist addresses importance of facing history

Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami

“Needless to say, the barbaric sight of a human head getting cut off by a military sword was deeply etched into my young mind.”

Haruki Murakami, 70, one of Japan’s leading writers, disclosed that his father had served as a soldier during Japan’s imperial period. The admission appears in a 29-page autobiographical essay titled “Abandoning A Cat: What I Talk About When I Talk About My Father,” published in the June issue of monthly magazine Bungei Shunju.

Murakami explains that his father had been drafted in 1938, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and deployed to China. While Murakami was in elementary school, he writes, his father told him how a Chinese POW had been executed by the unit he was attached to. His father served two more tours with the military and then worked as a teacher after World War II.

“No matter how unpleasant things are and how much we want to look away from them, human beings have to accept such things as part of ourselves. If not, where would the meaning of history lie?” Murakami writes.

The essay begins with Murakami’s recollection of abandoning a cat with his father as a child. After leaving the cat behind, they return home to discover that the cat has somehow gotten there ahead of them. The episode appears to be a metaphor for people’s past, and historical episodes, that cannot be ignored, no matter how much we would like to do so.

“Each of us is a nameless raindrop, one of many raindrops falling toward the vast earth. Even a single raindrop has its own ideas. Even a single raindrop has its own history, and the raindrop that inherits this has its own duties,” Murakami writes at the close of the essay.

After Murakami became an author, he and his father became further estranged, and more than 20 years went by without them seeing each other. But they achieve “something like a reconciliation” in 2008, the year his father died at the age of 90.

This wasn’t the first work in which Murakami addresses Japan’s checkered history. A scene from the novel “Killing Commendatore,” published in 2017, observes that Japanese soldiers killed between 100,000 and 400,000 civilians and captured soldiers in a reference to the 1937 Nanjing Massacre.

By Cho Ki-weon, Tokyo correspondent

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