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About
Sasebo, 1969. While the world burns with student protests and Vietnam, seventeen-year-old Kensuke Yazaki is plotting something far less serious: barricading his high school rooftop, organising a rock festival called “The Morning Erection Festival,” and scheming to impress the girl of his dreams. He and his misfit friends argue about Marxism, Rimbaud, and the Beatles with the passionate ignorance of teenagers who have absorbed the counterculture entirely through magazines and records. This is Murakami’s sunniest, most autobiographical novel — a world away from the transgressive darkness of Almost Transparent Blue — and its joy is infectious. A coming-of-age story set at the exact moment when revolution and adolescence were indistinguishable, told by someone old enough to know the difference and generous enough not to spoil it.
