Murakami has trained me well.
When I was reading Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, I came across a piano piece called Le mal du pays.
Now, a normal reader probably sees the title and just keeps turning the pages.
But after you read enough Murakami, that is no longer an option. That man has conditioned his readers. He mentions a song, a jazz record, a classical piece, and suddenly we are all amateur music researchers.
So naturally, I went to YouTube.
Of course the piece was there.
I pressed play.
Beautiful. Quiet. Melancholic. Exactly what I expected.
Then I looked at the comments.
Near the top, someone had written five years ago:
"Yes, I'm here because of Murakami too."
I smiled. That seemed about right.
Then I noticed that the comment had a ridiculous number of replies.
Curiosity took over.
I clicked.
And that was the moment when things got weird.
The replies went on and on.
"Same."
"Colorless Tsukuru brought me here."
"I found this because of Murakami."
"Murakami sent me."
"Me too."
At first it was funny.
Then I kept scrolling.
More replies.
More people.
Different countries. Different years. Same story.
I honestly did not expect that. There must have been hundreds of people who followed exactly the same path: reading the same novel, stopping at the same page, looking up the same piano piece, finding the same YouTube video, and ending up in the same comment thread.
It felt like discovering a hidden tunnel that connects readers from all over the world.
The shocking part was not finding the music. Murakami readers do that all the time.
The shocking part was realizing how many people had done exactly what I was doing, years before I even got there.
Imagine being the composer.
You spend years creating a piece of music.
Then decades later, an army of readers keeps arriving just because a Japanese novelist casually mentioned your work in a book.
At that point Murakami is not only a novelist anymore.
He is a global recommendation engine.
Spotify recommends songs.
YouTube recommends videos.
Murakami recommends entire corners of culture.
And apparently, every road eventually leads to a YouTube comment section that is full of Murakami readers saying, "I thought I was the only one."
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