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Students in Advanced English visit Haruki Murakami’s native soil to explore the public order and private dislocation behind his novels.

Somewhere in Japan, beside a wide river with mountains rising in the distance, Eric Wang ’26 sits down and opens his journal. For days, he has been moving through the landscape as if it were a dream. Now the words come pouring out. Words about temples and train stations, crowded streets and quiet Shinto shrines, handmade soba and bullet trains, the old world and the new. For a student whose favorite Haruki Murakami novel is Kafka on the Shore, the moment feels surreal: a young traveler, far from home, sitting near the water, trying to make sense of where he has been and what he has seen.

The twelve students on this trip have spent the winter term studying Murakami in David Ring’s Advanced English class. One of Japan’s most widely read contemporary novelists, Murakami is known for books rooted in modern Japan. They are also shaped by Western pop culture, giving his work a distinctive “in-between” quality.

In the novels, Murakami’s characters move through the world alone, absorbed by private questions and interior lives. The cities they inhabit are highly ordered with precise transit systems, quiet neighborhoods, tidy apartments, and carefully prepared meals. Beneath the surface, Murakami’s characters are frequently adrift, cut off from others, tortured by memory, searching for a self they do not fully understand.

After several months of reading about Japan from 7,000 miles away, David Ring’s Advanced English students are ready to see the place for themselves.

THE FIRST STOP IS TOKYO. The itinerary calls it “a city of contrasts.” Before it was Tokyo, the city was Edo, a small fishing village. Starting in the early 17th century, it grew into a seat of military power in Japan, presided over by The Tokugawa Shogunate. The emperor, who lived in Kyoto, was the symbolic, sacral source of power, while the shogun held absolute military and executive authority. This “dual polity” lasted for more than two centuries, until 1868, when the shogunate fell, and Edo was renamed Tokyo. The emperor moved there from Kyoto soon after, and the city became the center of Japan’s new modernizing government.

In 2026, our students visit the National Museum and Ueno Park, known for its stunning springtime cherry blossoms. They explore Akihabara, a district synonymous with the bright circuitry of modern Japanese pop culture. They pass through Asakusa, home to the city’s oldest Buddhist temple next to one of Japan’s best restaurants, a Michelin-starred nikudokoro serving premium Wagyu sukiyaki. They bear witness to the stillness of Meiji Shrine, set inside a wooded garden, and they experience the crush of Shibuya Crossing, where 3,000 people cross the street every single light cycle.

“One of the central tensions in Murakami’s books,” Eric observes, “is the relationship between order and isolation. Now I can see why.”

Many Pomfret students, like Eric, choose to travel in the US or abroad during their time on the Hilltop. In doing so, they gain valuable insight into different cultures, different languages, and different ways of seeing the world. More often than not, these lucky students return transformed by our travel programs and are excited to share what they have learned with others.

A few days later, the group explores Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, an area that stretches across volcanic mountains, crater lakes, hot springs, forests, coastlines, and islands, with Mount Fuji rising as its most recognizable landmark. In Kamakura, a historic coastal city located about an hour south of Tokyo, they visit Tsurugaoka Hachimangu Shrine and the Great Buddha. From Fuji-Hakone-Izu, a bullet train carries the group to Kyoto. For more than a thousand years, Kyoto served as Japan’s capital and home to the imperial court. Much of the city still carries that sense of ceremony, refinement, and historical depth. Its temples, gardens, wooden streets, and palace grounds are a stark contrast to Tokyo’s crowded crossings and electric districts. Here, our students tour Nijō Castle, the red torii gates of Fushimi Inari, the Golden Pavilion, and the bamboo forest of Arashiyama.

In Nara, they visit Todai-ji Temple and walk among the famous deer of Nara Park. “There was a whole park of deer just walking around,” Eric remembers. “It is remarkable how nature and human beings can coexist.”

At various points along the journey, Constanza Sanchez Villalpando ’27 is also struck by the coexistence of opposing forces in Japanese culture. Murakami’s novels are filled with scenes of contemporary Japan, but beneath the surface run older and deeper psychological fault lines. “Murakami shows how the past and present can live side by side in the same person,” she says.

THE PRESENT IS ALWAYS HAUNTED BY THE PAST. In July 1945, as World War II neared its end, Allied leaders issued the Potsdam Declaration, calling on Japan to surrender unconditionally or face “prompt and utter destruction.” When no reply came, the United States treated Japan’s silence as rejection.

On August 6, 1945, the American B-29 Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb known as “Little Boy” over Hiroshima. It exploded 2,000 feet above the city center, unleashing blast waves, thermal rays, fire, and radiation on a city of roughly 350,000 people. Within a mile radius of the hypocenter nearly everything was incinerated. In total, about 92 percent of the city’s roughly 76,000 structures were severely damaged or destroyed.

The devastation did not end when the fires went out. By the end of the year, an estimated 140,000 people had died. Survivors carried radiation illness, grief, and stigma for decades.

The lights were dimmed, and it felt like I was walking for miles, but I didn’t even notice it. I was just so absorbed by all the things I was seeing."Joshua Leslie ’27

For Joshua Leslie ’27, visiting Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, located at ground zero of the 1945 atomic bombing, is the trip’s defining moment. “It was the first time that we really took a pause,” he says.

Japan’s official travel site describes the museum as displaying artifacts that remain from the bombing to convey the horror of the violence done there. Through photographs, personal belongings, survivor testimony, models, artifacts, and city records, the museum foregrounds its exhibits in the lives of victims and survivors as moral witnesses.

“The lights were dimmed, and it felt like I was walking for miles,” Joshua remembers, “but I didn’t even notice it. I was just so absorbed by all the things I was seeing.”

For eleven frenetic days, David Ring’s students had followed in the footsteps of a writer best known for exploring the lives of deeply isolated characters. Yet, somehow, in this moment, they had never felt more connected to the human story.

This story appeared in the Summer 2026 issue of Pomfret Magazine.
 

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