The Tatami Time Machine Blues

Tomihiko Morimi was born in 1979 in Nara Prefecture and studied agricultural sciences at Kyoto University — a biographical detail that, like most things about Morimi, is more interesting for what it reveals about the gap between expected trajectory and actual destination than for what it tells you about agriculture. Kyoto University's campus, its clubs, its cafeterias and alleys and the particular atmosphere of student life in that city of temples and seasonal tourists, became the setting for his early novels and has remained a recurring backdrop in his work. He published his debut novel, The Tatami Galaxy, while still a graduate student, in 2004.

The Tatami Galaxy is the work that most perfectly encapsulates what Morimi does: a nameless university student, on the verge of completing his time at Kyoto University, considers the multiple lives he might have lived depending on which club he chose to join in his first year. The novel's structure — variations on a theme, each exploring a different possible route through student life — is executed with a verbal exuberance and a comic timing that propels the reader through its repetitions. The protagonist is self-deceiving, grandiose, and entirely recognizable; his pursuit of the 'rose-coloured campus life' he believes he deserves, and his consistent failure to find it, has the quality of genuine social comedy raised to something more philosophical.

The 2010 anime adaptation directed by Masaaki Yuasa — with its extraordinarily rapid narration matching Morimi's prose rhythm, and its distinctive visual style — introduced the novel to an enormous audience and is considered one of the finest anime films of its decade. Night Is Short, Walk On Girl, his subsequent novel, was adapted into a film by Yuasa in 2017 with equal success: a girl wanders through Kyoto in an epic single night, encountering the city's eccentric community, while a boy follows her at a nervous distance. The Penguin Highway, adapted into an anime film in 2018, moves to a different, more science-fictional register.

Morimi's prose style — densely allusive, rapid, deeply affectionate toward the eccentrics and dreamers who populate his Kyoto — has made him a beloved figure among Japanese readers who feel that his work captures something specific and irreplaceable about the experience of young intellectual life in a city that is simultaneously ancient and provisional. He continues to write prolifically, and each new work is received with genuine excitement.