A Study Guide for Haruki Murakami's "Toni Takitani"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Haruki Murakami's "Toni Takitani", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Studentsfor all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: May 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781535846134

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Tony Takitani

Haruki Murakami

1990

Introduction

Tony Takitani is a short story by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami. A shorter version of the story was first published in Japanese in the June 1990 issue of the literary magazine Bungeishunj (Literature Fall and Spring). A longer version appeared in Murakami Haruki Zen Sakuhin 1979–1989 (The Complete Works of Haruki Murakami, 1979–1989), published in 1991. The story was first published in English translation in the April 15, 2002, issue of the New Yorker and later included in Blind Willow, Sleeping Dragon, a collection of twenty-four of Murakami's short stories published in English translation in 2006. The name of the story's title character was inspired by Murakami's purchase of a T-shirt with the name Takitani on it; the T-shirt had been distributed by a political candidate of that name in Hawaii.

Tony Takitani is the story of a young man who lives much of his life alone. His loneliness is interrupted when he falls in love, but it may be fated to return. The story provides an example of Murakami's postmodernist sensibility, an artistic approach that relies on a strong sense of irony and black humor, along with disjointed realities, parody, and unreliable narrators. Another characteristic, one prominently on display in Tony Takitani, is a tendency toward minimalism, that is, toward the construction of slice-of-life stories told with a minimum of characters and a reliance on a spare plot and mundane details. Thematically, the story embodies the author's observations about the loneliness and alienation he saw in post–World War II Japan. The period emphasized, in his view, work and the acquisition of wealth at the expense of the nation's cultural values, leaving the people of contemporary Japan disconnected from one another and spiritually empty.

Author Biography

Murakami was born in Kyoto, Japan, on January 12, 1949, and grew up in Kobe, Japan. His father was a Buddhist priest, his mother a merchant. As a child, Murakami enjoyed reading the work of American authors and listening to Western music, especially American jazz. In 1968, he enrolled at Waseda University in Tokyo. After graduation in