Sixty-Nine

69 is an autobiographical coming-of-age novel by the Japanese author Murakami Ryu, based on his own high school experiences. Published in Japan in 1987, its title comes from 1969, the year in which the story is set. 1969 was a lively and restless year: the University of Tokyo suspended entrance examinations; the Beatles released The White Album, Yellow Submarine, and Abbey Road in succession, and the Rolling Stones put out hit singles; long-haired hippies called for love and peace, student protests in the streets of Paris shook Europe, the war in Vietnam still burned, and in Japan the wave of the Zenkyoto student movement was surging. Amid this worldwide tide of youth culture, Yazaki Kensuke, a high school student in Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, is absorbed in rock music, avant-garde film, and hippie culture. For the girl he likes, he gathers his friends and plans a school lockdown and a carnival. The motive is so simple as to be almost childish, but the spectacle grows ever bigger, with results entirely beyond his expectations. And so the spring of his seventeenth year unfolds like a festival. Looking back on that turbulent and dazzling era through a boy's eyes, the novel stirs together music, political slogans, lines of literature, and absurd campus exploits, capturing all the reckless vitality of adolescence and its longing to be seen. In chronological terms the work can be regarded as a prequel to Almost Transparent Blue; it has sold over a million copies in Japan and was adapted into a film of the same name in 2004.