Previous Story by Makoto Wada | Haruki Murakami

Chet Baker
Benny Goodman
Charlie Parker
Fats Waller
Art Blakey
Stan Getz
Billie Holiday
Cab Calloway
Charles Mingus
Jack Teagarden
Bill Evans
Bix Beiderbecke
Julian Cannonball Adderley
Duke Ellington
Ella Fitzgerald
Miles Davis
Charlie Christian
Eric Dolphy
Count Basie
Gerry Mulligan
Nat "King" Cole
Dizzy Gillespie
Dexter Gordon
Louis Armstrong
Thelonious Monk
Lester Young
Sonny Rollins
Horace Silver
Anita O'Day
The Modern Jazz Quartet
Teddy Wilson
Glenn Miller
Wes Montgomery
Clifford Brown
Ray Brown
Mel Torme
Shelly Manne
June Christy
Django Reinhardt
Oscar Peterson
Ornette Coleman
Lee Morgan
Jimmy Rushing
Bobby Timmons
Gene Krupa
Herbie Hancock
Lionel Hampton
Herbie Mann
Hoagy Carmichael
Tony Bennett
Eddie Condon
Jackie & Roy
Art Pepper
Frank Sinatra
Gil Evans

Behind the Scenes: Haruki Murakami | Makoto Wada
Translator's Note

Makoto Wada's cheerful illustrations and
A jazz art book filled with Haruki's warm sentences!
A jazz essay brimming with Haruki and Makoto's love!

Jazz Maniacs Haruki & Makoto's "Invitation to Jazz"

Haruki Murakami has always presented a world of works where music flows, such as “The Age of Loss,” which is like a pop melody, “Dance Dance Dance,” which is like an inner rhythm and blues, and “Sputnik Lovers,” a love story written in jazz.
This book is a jazz essay in which he introduces one of his favorite albums along with a drawing of a jazz musician by popular Japanese illustrator Makoto Wada, along with his personal memories and impressions of the album.

It is a well-known fact that Haruki is a jazz fanatic.
Before becoming a writer, he ran a jazz bar called 'Peter Cat' and was also a collector with over 6,000 records. He said, "I learned a lot about how to write novels from jazz.
He also confessed, “We have a lot in common in rhythm, harmony, and improvisation.”
Makoto, who has received acclaim for two solo exhibitions featuring portraits of jazz musicians and whose paintings even graced the CD jackets of famous record labels, is also a jazz fanatic who has been into jazz since his teenage years.
Having encountered jazz from a young age and having listened to countless famous performances, these two people have carefully selected jazz, combined with text and pictures, to create a wonderful harmony that will amaze jazz enthusiasts and warmly welcome beginners at the same time.

The harmony of the text and pictures, jazz, blends well as if listening to music right next to you.

“For me, each record was a treasure, a precious ticket to another world,” says Haruki Murakami. In this book, he unfolds the poignant feeling he felt while listening to jazz for decades, his own musical preferences, and the extensive musical knowledge and rich musical sensibility of a maniac, with precise and addictive writing.
Rather than just a commentary on the music, readers will be able to experience the epicenter of Haruki Murakami's musical world and the joy of encountering Haruki Murakami, who is very similar to the protagonists of his novels, by reading a text that describes the feeling of listening to jazz and the unique charm of jazz in beautiful poetic sentences.

There, Makoto Wada's drawings, which capture the characteristics of the characters with simple and warm lines, make you smile with their simplicity and wit.
His paintings uniquely capture the colors and mood of each musician's music, a quality that only someone who has been listening to jazz for decades can express.
As readers turn each page, they will be immersed in the illusion that music is flowing right beside them.

The complete edition of Portraits in Jazz with new musicians

The two books, “Portraits in Jazz” and “Portraits in Jazz 2,” written and illustrated by the duo Makoto Wada and Haruki Murakami on the subject of jazz musicians, were published in Korea under the titles “Jazz Essay” and “Another Jazz Essay” translated by Nanju Kim.
As time passed, “Jazz Essay” was republished under the title “Portrait of Jazz” with a translation by Seongwon Yoon, and in the meantime, in Japan, the two books were combined into one book and published in a different format as “Portrait in Jazz.”
At this time, three new musicians, Art Pepper, Frank Sinatra, and Gil Evans, were added, and just like in Japan, Munhaksasang combined “Jazz Essay” and “Another Jazz Essay” into one with a new translation by Kim Nan-ju, and added the three musicians to publish a new complete edition of “Portraits in Jazz.”