NEW YORK (AP) — Haruki Murakami was in town last week to hear his words set to music and his praises literally sung.
The 76-year-old Tokyo resident and perennial Nobel Prize candidate received a pair of honors in Manhattan for his long career as a storyteller, translator, critic and essayist. On Tuesday night, the Center for Fiction presented him its Lifetime of Excellence in Fiction Award, previously given to Nobel laureates Toni Morrison and Kazuo Ishiguro among others. Two days later, the Japan Society co-hosted a jazzy tribute at The Town Hall, “Murakami Mixtape,” and awarded him its annual prize for “luminous individuals (including Yoko Ono and Caroline Kennedy ) who have brought the U.S. and Japan closer together.”
Murakami fans know him for such novels as “Kafka on the Shore” and “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” and for his themes of identity, isolation and memory. But they also pick up on his non-literary passions, from beer and baseball to running and jazz. Praising him requires more work than it does for your average high-achieving writer.
At the Center for Fiction gala, held at the downtown Cipriani 25 Broadway, longtime Murakami admirer Patti Smith introduced the author with the ballad “Wing” and its lofty refrain, “And if there’s one thing/I could do for you/You’d be a wing/In heaven blue.” She then shared memories of first learning about him, holding up an old copy of his debut novel, “Hear the Wind Sing,” and reading its opening sentence: “There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.”
Smith said, “I was hooked, immediately.”
The Town Hall “Mixtape” was a sold-out, bilingual evening of music, readings and reflections, framed by Murakami's opening and closing remarks and presided over by the prize-winning jazz pianist Jason Moran, translator-publisher Motoyuki Shibata and author-scholar Roland Nozomu Kelts. “Murakami Mixtape” was entertainment for the casual fan — author tributes don't often include a makeshift bar on stage — and educational even for the specialist, featuring Murakami works little known to English-language readers.
Kelts (reading in English) and Shibata (reading in Japanese) selected fiction and nonfiction passages for Moran and his accompanists to weave through and around. They read from the surreal “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” and the memoir “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.” But they also highlighted such rarities as the short story “The 1963/1982 Girl from Ipanema,” in which the narrator shares a drink with the bossa nova muse, and an old essay about New York before Murakami had ever seen it.
“Does New York City really exist?” Murakami wondered. “I don’t believe, one hundred percent, the existence of the city. Ninety-nine percent, I would say. In other words, if someone came up to me and said, ‘You know, there’s actually no such thing as New York City,’ I wouldn’t be that surprised.”
Kelts remembered asking Murakami about some of his favorite international stops, and how his choices, including Boston and Stockholm, were home to used jazz stores worthy of repeated visits. Murakami's affair with jazz began in his teens, in 1963, when Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers were on tour in Japan. It was rekindled at The Town Hall when Moran brought out the last surviving member of that band, 88-year-old bassist Reggie Workman, who joined the other musicians for a jam on “Ugetsu” (the title track of a live Blakey album) and capped it with a searching solo.
Murakami appeared briefly at the end to read a portion in Japanese from “Kafka on the Shore,” and explained that he might have been a musician instead of a writer, but he couldn’t bear to rehearse every day. At the start of the evening, Murakami shared some impressions of New York once he did arrive, in 1991. His comments were read in English by Japan Society President & CEO Joshua Walker.
“Back then was the height of Japan bashing,” Murakami said. “You could find events, where, for a dollar, they hand you a hammer and let you take a whack at a Japanese car.”
On Dec. 7, 1991, the 50th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Murakami was advised to stay at home “just in case there was any trouble.” The author began to feel more welcome after Japan's economy fell into a decades-long slump, the threat to the U.S. apparently diminished. But he continued to feel isolated by his native country's “cultural” deficit.
“You often hear that Japan has no real face, no identity. I almost never came across contemporary Japanese fiction in American bookstores. As a Japanese writer, I couldn’t help but feel a real sense of crisis,” he said.
“And now I see young Japanese writers venturing abroad, earning recognition, their books being picked up by readers as a matter of course, in music, film, anime and more. The advances have been remarkable. Economically, people talk about Japan’s three last decades, but culturally, I think it’s fair to say that Japan’s face has finally emerged.”
FILE - Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami appears during a press conference at the Waseda University in Tokyo on Sept. 22, 2021. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko, File)
When Indiana adopted new U.S. House districts four years ago, Republican legislative leaders lauded them as “fair maps” that reflected the state's communities.
But when Gov. Mike Braun recently tried to redraw the lines to help Republicans gain more power, he implored lawmakers to "vote for fair maps.”
What changed? The definition of “fair.”
As states undertake mid-decade redistricting instigated by President Donald Trump, Republicans and Democrats are using a tit-for-tat definition of fairness to justify districts that split communities in an attempt to send politically lopsided delegations to Congress. It is fair, they argue, because other states have done the same. And it is necessary, they claim, to maintain a partisan balance in the House of Representatives that resembles the national political divide.
This new vision for drawing congressional maps is creating a winner-take-all scenario that treats the House, traditionally a more diverse patchwork of politicians, like the Senate, where members reflect a state's majority party. The result could be reduced power for minority communities, less attention to certain issues and fewer distinct voices heard in Washington.
Although Indiana state senators rejected a new map backed by Trump and Braun that could have helped Republicans win all nine of the state’s congressional seats, districts have already been redrawn in Texas, California, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio. Other states could consider changes before the 2026 midterms that will determine control of Congress.
“It’s a fundamental undermining of a key democratic condition,” said Wayne Fields, a retired English professor from Washington University in St. Louis who is an expert on political rhetoric.
“The House is supposed to represent the people,” Fields added. “We gain an awful lot by having particular parts of the population heard.”
Under the Constitution, the Senate has two members from each state. The House has 435 seats divided among states based on population, with each state guaranteed at least one representative. In the current Congress, California has the most at 52, followed by Texas with 38.
Because senators are elected statewide, they are almost always political pairs of one party or another. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are the only states now with both a Democrat and Republican in the Senate. Maine and Vermont each have one independent and one senator affiliated with a political party.
By contrast, most states elect a mixture of Democrats and Republicans to the House. That is because House districts, with an average of 761,000 residents, based on the 2020 census, are more likely to reflect the varying partisan preferences of urban or rural voters, as well as different racial, ethnic and economic groups.
This year's redistricting is diminishing those locally unique districts.
In California, voters in several rural counties that backed Trump were separated from similar rural areas and attached to a reshaped congressional district containing liberal coastal communities. In Missouri, Democratic-leaning voters in Kansas City were split from one main congressional district into three, with each revised district stretching deep into rural Republican areas.
Some residents complained their voices are getting drowned out. But Govs. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., and Mike Kehoe, R-Mo., defended the gerrymandering as a means of countering other states and amplifying the voices of those aligned with the state's majority.
Indiana's delegation in the U.S. House consists of seven Republicans and two Democrats — one representing Indianapolis and the other a suburban Chicago district in the state's northwestern corner.
Dueling definitions of fairness were on display at the Indiana Capitol as lawmakers considered a Trump-backed redistricting plan that would have split Indianapolis among four Republican-leaning districts and merged the Chicago suburbs with rural Republican areas. Opponents walked the halls in protest, carrying signs such as “I stand for fair maps!”
Ethan Hatcher, a talk radio host who said he votes for Republicans and Libertarians, denounced the redistricting plan as “a blatant power grab" that "compromises the principles of our Founding Fathers" by fracturing Democratic strongholds to dilute the voices of urban voters.
“It’s a calculated assault on fair representation," Hatcher told a state Senate committee.
But others asserted it would be fair for Indiana Republicans to hold all of those House seats, because Trump won the “solidly Republican state” by nearly three-fifths of the vote.
“Our current 7-2 congressional delegation doesn’t fully capture that strength,” resident Tracy Kissel said at a committee hearing. "We can create fairer, more competitive districts that align with how Hoosiers vote.”
When senators defeated a map designed to deliver a 9-0 congressional delegation for Republicans, Braun bemoaned that they had missed an “opportunity to protect Hoosiers with fair maps.”
By some national measurements, the U.S. House already is politically fair. The 220-215 majority that Republicans won over Democrats in the 2024 elections almost perfectly aligns with the share of the vote the two parties received in districts across the country, according to an Associated Press analysis.
But that overall balance belies an imbalance that exists in many states. Even before this year's redistricting, the number of states with congressional districts tilted toward one party or another was higher than at any point in at least a decade, the AP analysis found.
The partisan divisions have contributed to a “cutthroat political environment” that “drives the parties to extreme measures," said Kent Syler, a political science professor at Middle Tennessee State University. He noted that Republicans hold 88% of congressional seats in Tennessee, and Democrats have an equivalent in Maryland.
“Fairer redistricting would give people more of a feeling that they have a voice," Syler said.
Rebekah Caruthers, who leads the Fair Elections Center, a nonprofit voting rights group, said there should be compact districts that allow communities of interest to elect the representatives of their choice, regardless of how that affects the national political balance. Gerrymandering districts to be dominated by a single party results in “an unfair disenfranchisement" of some voters, she said.
“Ultimately, this isn’t going to be good for democracy," Caruthers said. "We need some type of détente.”
A protester celebrates as they walk outside the Indiana Senate Chamber after a bill to redistrict the state's congressional map was defeated, Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025, at the Statehouse in Indianapolis. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)
FILE - This photo taken from video shows organizers rallying outside of the Ohio Statehouse to protest gerrymandering and advocate for lawmakers to draw fair maps in Columbus, Ohio, Sept. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Patrick Aftoora-Orsagos, File)
Opponents of Missouri's Republican-backed congressional redistricting plan display a banner in protest at the State Capitol in Jefferson City, Missouri, Sept. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/David A. Lieb)
