December 11, 2020, 12:17pm
Disaffected thinkers smoking cigarettes listening to jazz records and gazing from your unadorned apartments onto sprawling urban landscapes, rejoice! Haruki Murakami is hosting a New Year’s Eve radio special live from a studio in Kyoto.
The special will be aired on Tokyo FM’s nationwide network of 38 broadcasting stations, from 11 pm on December 31 to 1 am on January 1. Though Murakami has hosted a bimonthly radio program since August 2018, this is its first live event. “Let’s hear the tolling of the New Year’s Eve bells in the ancient capital and ring in the new year together,” Murakami said in a statement on the show’s website. “It’s a live broadcast, so there’s no telling what I will say . . . Tune in to see what will happen!”
The special will feature two of Murakami’s close friends as guests. The first is Shinya Yamanaka, Nobel Prize-winning stem cell biologist and director of Kyoto University’s Center for iPS Cell Research and Application; the second is Juici Yamagiwa, former Kyoto University president and authority on gorilla studies—which is very Murakami. I personally am excited to play the program through my headphones as I sit on an abandoned playground and gaze into the sky to see . . . how many moons?
[via The Asahi Shimbun]