12/30/2025
A Tuesday afternoon read....for inspiration 🎤📖📚🖋️
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"He was 29, running a jazz bar, and had never written a word—then a random moment at a baseball game changed everything."
Before Haruki Murakami became one of the world's most celebrated authors, he was exhausted.
Every morning, he opened Peter Cat, a tiny jazz bar and coffee house in Tokyo. He brewed coffee. Wiped down tables. Managed inventory. By evening, customers filled the small space—listening to Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane spinning on the record player while sipping drinks and losing themselves in the music.
He and his wife had built this place from scratch. It was theirs. They loved it.
But it was also relentless.
By closing time, most nights, Murakami was bone-tired. He'd lock the door, clean the counter, and collapse. Tomorrow would be the same. And the day after. This was his life—a beautiful, demanding, ordinary life.
Then came April 1, 1978.
Murakami decided to take a rare afternoon off. He went to Jingu Stadium to watch the Yakult Swallows play baseball. The sun was warm. The game was unremarkable. He was just another face in the crowd, drinking a beer, watching the players.
Then, in the first inning, an American player named Dave Hilton hit a clean double to left field.
And in that completely ordinary moment—the crack of the bat, the ball sailing through the air—a thought struck Murakami like lightning:
"I could write a novel."
Not "I should try someday." Not "maybe if things were different."
Just: I could do this. Right now.
He went home that evening, sat at his kitchen table, and picked up a pen. He had no training. No literary background. No connections in the publishing world. He didn't even know if he had any talent.
But he started writing anyway.
After closing Peter Cat each night, instead of collapsing into bed, he sat at the bar counter surrounded by the lingering smell of coffee and cigarette smoke. He wrote slowly. Sentence by sentence. Page by page.
His first novel, "Hear the Wind Sing," took months to complete. It was short, experimental, infused with the rhythms of jazz and the feeling of late-night solitude. He sent it to a literary contest.
He won.
That first book led to a second. Then a third. His writing began attracting attention—not just in Japan, but beyond. Publishers became interested. Readers wanted more.
Eventually, he faced a choice: keep the bar, or pursue this strange new path that had opened up.
In 1981, Peter Cat closed its doors for the last time.
What came next rewrote the map of contemporary literature.
"Norwegian Wood." "Kafka on the Shore." "1Q84." "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle." Novels that blended dreamlike surrealism with piercing emotional truth. Books translated into more than fifty languages. Millions of readers across continents. A literary phenomenon that transcended borders.
But here's what matters most about Murakami's story:
He was 29 when he started. Running a small business. No formal training. No clear path. Just a random moment at a baseball game and the audacity to believe that moment mattered.
He didn't wait for perfect conditions. He didn't quit his day job first. He didn't attend prestigious writing programs or seek permission from literary gatekeepers.
He just wrote—late at night, in the margins of an exhausted life, at a bar counter that smelled like coffee and jazz.
Great work doesn't always begin in universities or funded residencies. Sometimes it begins in small rooms, after long days, when you're too tired to doubt yourself.
A jazz bar. A kitchen table. A baseball game.
And the quiet courage to start anyway.
If you've been waiting for the "right time" to begin something—this is your reminder that the right time might be a random Tuesday afternoon when something clicks and you simply decide: today.
Murakami didn't have anything figured out when he started.
He just had a pen, a counter, and a feeling.
Sometimes, that's enough.
