Events Podcasts Videos News About NTS Supporters Help and Feedback

iOS App Android App Join the Chat Newsletter

Live now

NTS GUIDE TO: JAZZ IN MURAKAMI NOVELS

'Somewhere along the line Coltrane’s soprano sax runs out of steam. Now it’s McCoy Tyner’s piano solo I hear, the left hand carving out a repetitious rhythm and the right layering on thick, forbidding chords. Like some mythic scene, the music portrays somebody’s - a nameless, faceless somebody’s - dim past, all the details laid out as clearly as entrails being dragged out of the darkness. Or at least that’s how it sounds to me. The patient, repeating music ever so slowly breaks apart the real, rearranging the pieces. It has a hypnotic, menacing smell, just like the forest' - Kafka On The Shore Music, and specifically jazz, has always featured heavily in the literary imagination of Haruki Murakami. In this radio special, NTS lays down two hours of jazz records as featured throughout Murakami's corpus.