Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 167: Sunny

Prompt: "A song that starts and ends with the same letters that your Day 5 song's title started and ended with (respectively)"

Selected by Sunny

Day 5 song: "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" by the Four Lads

"I Heard It Through the Grapevine"

Marvin Gaye

In the Groove, 1968

I was thinking about Nate's Day 163 post mentioning Ishiguro and repetitive genius. I haven't been shy on this blog on my love of Japanese creatives: Ishiguro, Miyazaki, Ito, Kojima... Mishima(?)... umm, anime and jrpgs generally...

Something about the combination of contending with surrender from WWII shattering the nation's mind, and then the actual radiation fallout from the bomb of WWII shattering their genes, drove cultural reverberations for generations on that little island. I once read that Japan's pressure cooker culture, for every 100 youths, produces 99 neurotic introverts who can live in a fifty sq. ft. apartment and one mad genius.

Which is a long way to get to: if you're into magical realism, medium grit detective stories, and/or meditations on mind, I recommend Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. This isn't even Murakami's best or longest work, but it's fun and has some flashes of genius. More importantly for today, the book references enough music to have a full soundtrack with plenty of old Motown and jazz standards, which must be Murakami's wheelhouse. The author, now less in the writing game, loves spinning records on Japanese radio. So that's the type of thing you can do once you're comfortably retired (and a potential future for PoYB).