Haruki Murakami’s narrators cook as carefully as they pick records. Here are five meals from his novels, and what each one says about the person at the stove.
THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE
Spaghetti, boiled to a Rossini overture
The novel opens in a kitchen. The narrator is boiling spaghetti and whistling along to a Rossini overture on the radio when a stranger rings and asks for ten minutes of his time. He tells her to call back, because the pasta is mid-boil. Then he wonders whether ten minutes is enough for two people to understand each other, and compares it to cooking pasta al dente: nine is too short, eleven too long.
The scene is about timing more than sauce, and it set the tone for the many pasta scenes that followed in Murakami’s fiction.
AT YOUR STOVE
Salt the water well, put on The Thieving Magpie overture, and pull the spaghetti a minute before the packet says. Let the phone ring.
HARD-BOILED WONDERLAND AND THE END OF THE WORLD
A sandwich cut with a very sharp knife
The narrator has opinions about sandwiches, and this one passes every test. The bread is fresh and firm, the knife is clean and sharp, the mustard is good, the lettuce is crisp, and the mayonnaise is close to homemade. It is the best sandwich he has eaten in a long while, and he says so at length. It comes from the professor’s granddaughter, and the professor himself crunches cucumber slices beside it.
Murakami turns a plain lunch into a small standard of craftsmanship.
AT YOUR STOVE
Butter the bread edge to edge so the filling cannot soak in, slice the cucumber thick for crunch, and cut the finished sandwich with your sharpest knife.
HARD-BOILED WONDERLAND AND THE END OF THE WORLD
Dinner for the librarian
While he waits for the young reference librarian to arrive, the narrator makes a quiet Japanese dinner: a salad with a dressing of pickled plum (umeboshi) mashed by hand, fried sardines, fried tofu pouches and mountain yam, and beef simmered with celery. She is known for an enormous appetite, so the care he takes feels almost tender. He is also a man who rarely has company, and the menu shows how much this evening matters to him.
AT YOUR STOVE
No quantities appear in the book, so improvise. Mash two umeboshi with a little oil and rice vinegar for the dressing, bread the sardines, tofu and yam in flour, egg and crumbs, and simmer sliced beef and celery in soy, sake and mirin. Short of umeboshi, mashed capers with lemon come close.
A WILD SHEEP CHASE
A mountain villa and a very full kitchen
This is probably the most food-dense of Murakami’s novels. Holed up in a remote mountain villa, the narrator cooks his way through the waiting. He sautés chopped onion before mixing it into a hamburger steak, and he grinds the beef himself. He roasts beef, marinates salmon, simmers wild greens with dried bonito, pickles cabbage quickly, and makes a pilaf from canned salmon, wakame and mushrooms. He even prepares drinking snacks for a visitor who may never turn up.
The same book is home to the cod-roe-and-butter spaghetti that Japanese fans love to recreate.
AT YOUR STOVE
Cook the onion first and let it cool before mixing it into the meat. Warm onion makes the patty fall apart.
NORWEGIAN WOOD
Midori’s home cooking
Midori is the serious cook in the novel, and her food is the opposite of showy: a rolled omelet, simmered eggplant, miso-marinated Spanish mackerel and rice cooked with shimeji mushrooms. It is a full traditional meal built from ordinary dishes done carefully, and it says a lot about her warmth.
AT YOUR STOVE
Start with the rolled omelet. Seasoned dashi in the egg is what makes it soft, and a nonstick pan makes the rolling forgiving.
Which meal would you cook first? Start with the spaghetti and the sandwich, then work up to the umeboshi dinner.