murakami, tees, and me: you are what you wear

One of my favorite T-shirts, although I’m tentative to wear it outside anymore (photo by twi-ny/ees)

One of the more intriguing developments to come out of the pandemic lockdown for me personally is my relationship with my T-shirts. I have more than a hundred printed tees; each one holds the memory of when and where I got it, what I was doing at the time, and why it meant something then and still does now, not unlike my books and records.

As it turns out, my favorite living novelist, Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, published a book during the coronavirus crisis, in November 2021, about his extensive T-shirt collection. “I’m not particularly interested in collecting things, but there’s one sort of running motif in my life: despite my basic indifference, objects just seem to collect around me, of their own volition,” he writes in the preface to Murakami T: The T-shirts I Love (Knopf, $25, November 2021).

He continues, “T-shirts are one of those objects that just naturally pile up. They’re cheap, so whenever an interesting one catches my eye, I invariably buy it — plus people give me various novelty T-shirts from around the world, I get commemorative T-shirts whenever I finish a marathon, and I pick up a few at my destination when I travel, instead of bringing along extra clothes . . . Which is how, before I even realized it, the number of T-shirts in my life has skyrocketed, to the point where there’s no room in my drawers for all of them anymore . . . It’s not at all like one day I simply made up my mind that Okay, I’m going to start a T-shirt collection. Believe me, that’s not the case.”

Over the course of eighteen chapters with such titles as “In the Summer, You Gotta Go Surfing,” “Meaning Unknown,” “The Sandwich Man,” “Lizards and Turtles,” and “Soaring through the Air,” Murakami shares tidbits about his life as he explores his T-shirts, including his love of beer, whiskey, jazz, record stores, and hamburgers, what his cutoff price point is, and why he won’t wear certain shirts in public.

He talks about how a shirt that read “‘Tony’ Takitani House D,” purchased from a thrift shop in Maui for a dollar, led to his short story “Tony Takitani,” later made into a feature-length film; his inability to identify basic bird species; how “Google Analytics” are way over his head; his thoughts about Springsteen on Broadway and superhero movies; and how his assistant gets worried if he shows up at his office in a collared shirt.

“I doubt this book will be that useful to anyone,” he adds in the preface.

I found it exceptionally useful.

Once upon a time my wife and I wrote a a juvenile biography of Moe, Larry, and Curly (photo by twi-ny/ees)

I used to wear collared shirts to the office; conversely, no one got worried if I occasionally showed up on casual Friday in a T-shirt. But now I wear T-shirts to work every single day.

From nine to five, Monday to Friday, I’m an executive managing editor at a major children’s book publisher. Since March 2020, I’ve worked exclusively from home, and my department has been deemed full-time remote, so I don’t ever have to go into the office again if I don’t want to.

Thus, every weekday, I am sitting at my computer, wearing a T-shirt (and pajama bottoms). Behind me is a collared shirt that I throw on whenever I have a virtual meeting where I’m expected to show myself onscreen.

Each morning, I’m extremely careful in selecting what T-shirt I will put on. I have them arranged in separate piles; one is for those meant only for sleep, generally because their images have faded nearly beyond recognition, the logo means nothing to me and I don’t even know how or why I got it, or they are so old and worn they have various holes and rips.

Early on, a favorite “Oh My God! They Killed Kenny!” South Park shirt and a beloved Three Stooges T moved from day to sleep, victims of unceremonious aging. (The latter is a sweet reminder of a juvenile biography of the Stooges that my wife and I wrote together in the mid-1990s.) A few weeks ago, a lovely Italian Guinness T-shirt given to me by friends visiting Firenze had to make the dreaded transition.

The next pile is for day shirts that I don’t mind eventually becoming sleep Ts. This consists mostly of giveaways from sports, music, and food events, often emblazoned on the back with corporate sponsors, many involving the Mets (Mr. Met on an orange background), the Rangers (“The Captain Is Back,” honoring the return of Mark Messier), and beer festivals (the second annual Greater New York Beer Expo from 1994 at the New York Coliseum). I thought I had picked up a shirt with the tag line “Our democracy has been hacked” at some activist art project, but when I looked closer I saw it was promotional swag from Mr. Robot, a TV show I thoroughly enjoyed. As I write this, I have on a light blue Rangers promotional T.

Only now do I understand wha the image to the left of the text is (photo by twi-ny/ees)

Then come the shirts that I wear during the day but want to keep that way; I don’t wear them enough to bring about their eventual demise but I feel very comfortable in them and will even wear them when I’m going outside to grab lunch. Among this batch are several book-related shirts: for Charles Burns’s graphic novel The Black Hole, Tommy Chong’s prison memoir The I Chong: Meditations from the Joint (I share a birthday with Mr. Chong), and City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco.

We then shift to my chest of drawers, where I keep T-shirts that I wear outdoors in the summer, the special ones that I strive to maintain in tip-top shape but also want to advertise to others, since one of the ways to make people think you’re cool is by wearing cool T-shirts. In his book, Murakami singles out Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Mackenzie Phillips for that reason, although in plain, unadorned T-shirts.

Unless it’s a sweltering hot summer day (I don’t want sweat to ruin a treasured T), when I go out I’ll put on one of several BAM Next Wave tees, a souvenir from the Guinness Oyster Festival (an event Mayor Giuliani ultimately banned because people were drinking pints of stout outdoors on one small, blocked-off street, having too much fun and not bothering anyone; Murakami has at least one Guinness shirt as well), a fab T-shirt with a photo of an empty subway car on it, another one with a giant silver subway token above the word “token” (which I’m not sure I can wear outside anymore for fear of it being misunderstood), and a pair of awesome cat shirts with fantastic imagery. (Murakami is a cat lover who often writes about magical felines; we have a little black cat we named Haruki, and it turns out that Murakami had an LBK at one time too.) I want to be able to wear all these shirts for a long time before relegating them to any of the aforementioned piles.

How many cats do you see? (photo by twi-ny/ees)

I have an extensive collection of concert T-shirts, nearly all of which I bring out only when attending a show by that artist — if I can still fit into it. For a Bruce show in Jersey a bunch of years ago, my wife had to wear my 1978 shirt; while we were wandering outside the arena, another fan offered to buy the rare shirt right off her back, but that was just not going to happen. I have a shirt from LCD Soundsystem’s farewell show, at the Garden on April 2, 2011; I wore it two years later when I saw LCD leader James Murphy DJing at an outdoor festival in Times Square and made sure he saw it as well. (The band reunited in 2015 and has been together ever since. Does that make my shirt more or less valuable or cool?)

I have a Plums T-shirt from a terrific mid-’90s band led by my friend Eric Miranda; just seeing the shirt in the drawer makes me remember what awesome times we had going to his shows at clubs that sadly no longer exist. Murakami mentions Miles Davis in the book, although he doesn’t appear to have a T-shirt of the jazz legend, but I do, from a December 1988 gig at Indigo Blues in Midtown.

Just as Murakami has rules about what he can and can’t wear, I won’t wear a music shirt unless I was at the show. One of my most cherished tees was acquired at a Clash concert at Bonds Casino in the late spring of 1981; trying to be supercool, I stupidly wore it to hell night when I was pledging a fraternity the next year. I still have the shirt, but let’s just say it’s not wearable anymore, preserving memories that I have attempted, so far unsuccessfully, to forget about. But I did put on one of my fraternity T-shirts for a 2021 Phi Kappa Sigma reunion on Zoom.

I just realized this moment what Mr. Met is holding in his right hand, sneaking the sponsor onto the front of this shirt (photo by twi-ny/ees)

In the book, Murakami, who has also written such small gems as Norwegian Wood, After Dark, and South of the Border, West of the Sun and such dense, complex doorstops as 1Q84, Killing Commendatore, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, brings up the concept of “T-shirt communication,” how what we put on impacts what we convey about ourselves to the world.

As Polonius tells Laertes in Hamlet, “Apparel oft proclaims the man,” and that is rarely more true than when and where we wear our beloved T-shirts.