[ESSAY] “Liner Notes” by Jeremiah Dutch
Also read Jeremiah Dutch’s story
“Cool Jazz at the Dragonfly Club”.
“Anyone who understands jazz knows that you can’t understand it. It’s too complicated. That’s what’s so simple about it.” —Attributed to Yogi Berra
That is, oddly enough, my favourite quote about jazz, and it comes from a baseball player. It may well be apocryphal, drawn from a supposed conversation that left the interviewer entirely baffled by its end. Whatever its veracity, jazz, baseball, Japan and writing remain loosely linked in my mind, and I have written before that the musical genre and the sport are two of the finest things to have emerged from America.
I am also reminded of Haruki Murakami, whose prose echoes the rhythms of jazz, and whose inspiration to become a writer arrived, famously, at a baseball game. The epiphany came in April 1978, at Meiji Jingu Stadium. He was twenty-nine at the time, and had never wished to become a salaryman; instead, he owned a jazz bar. Yet the spark to pick up a pen came while he was enjoying a beer at the season opener for the Yakult Swallows. Their lead-off hitter was an American named Dave Hilton, who struck a double, and for whatever reason the call to become a novelist arrived to Murakami as clearly as that ball against the Tokyo afternoon sky.
It may be wise to take inspiration wherever we can find it. I submitted my story “Cool Jazz at the Dragonfly Club” in March this year and in May, Cha‘s editor-in-chief Tammy Lai-Ming Ho asked me to write an essay introducing the story. I will not pretend to be an expert on jazz (anyone with a serious interest in the contemporary scene in Japan would do well to consult Michael Pronko’s A Guide to Jazz in Japan and his website).
Given my limited knowledge, I was reticent to accept, but as I write this, the world is mourning the loss of the legendary saxophonist Sonny Rollins, who happened to share my birthday. As silly as it sounds, I am taking that as a sign to continue.
I could say that, being a very verbally-oriented person, I was first drawn to jazz by the lyrics of Chet Baker and of Rodgers and Hart, as a lovelorn young man, but it was my wife, Haruka, who truly helped me to appreciate jazz instrumentals. Whatever I know of the genre, particularly cool jazz from the 1950s and early 1960s, I learned almost entirely from her. My name appears below the title, but I could not have written “Jazz at the Dragonfly Club” without her.
“Cool Jazz at the Dragonfly Club” is not itself a romantic story, but ironically it makes me fondly recall the days when we were courting, wandering hand in hand about her hometown of Yokohama, along the waterfront and through the gardens near the ballpark, falling in love. We were both drawn to baseball and literature, but it was she who introduced me to Coltrane, Cannonball, Monk, Miles, Mingus and many others. Her apartment stood near the site of the first jazz café, Chigusa, founded in 1933. We never had the chance to visit it, and it now stands at a different location, having become more of a museum, but I do recall visiting the fine jazz club BarBarBar, which served as an inspiration for this story. The title is also a nod to Diane Hawley Nagatomo’s excellent novel, The Butterfly Café.
Thanks to Haruka, I can contrast Rollins’s phrasing with Coltrane’s “sheets of sound,” just as I can appreciate Dave Brubeck’s use of unusual time signatures. I remember the first time I heard “Take Five.” It struck me just as forcefully as the first time I read Murakami and Junichiro Tanizaki.
The titular character of Tanizaki’s novel, Naomi, is a jazz-obsessed “modern girl” and flapper of the 1920s. Jazz in Japan traces much of its origins to Yokohama, where it first gained popularity during the Taisho era, from 1912 to 1926. The port city has changed a great deal over the years but still retains much of its prewar charm. The old ocean liner Hikawa Maru rests on the southeastern side of the harbour, though today it is a museum ship, dwarfed by the modern cruise ships on the other side of the port. Even so, I can well imagine “The Queen of the Pacific” arriving with new sounds from America, borne by musicians and records alike.
After the war came swing, and later a more sophisticated sound from the West Coast of America. Jazz cafés sprang up across Japan; they had existed since at least the 1930s, but in the decades after the war a vibrant jazz scene truly emerged, including Murakami’s own bar, Peter Cat.
Of course, rock and pop have eclipsed the genre in popularity, as they have all over the world, but jazz fans survive as a robust subculture even into the twenty-first century, in live performance, recorded music and even on film. Swing Girls (2004), a film about a high-school music club taking up big band music, was a hit, and won seven Japan Academy Awards. One contemporary artist whom Haruka and I both admire is Ann Sally, a Korean-Japanese singer and songwriter we have had the pleasure of seeing in concert.
I will close this essay with my second favourite quote about jazz, from Louis Armstrong: “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.”
I have said enough. Now drop the needle, and dig the sound.
Also read Jeremiah Dutch’s story “Cool Jazz at the Dragonfly Club” here.
How to cite: Dutch, Jeremiah. “Liner Notes.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 7 Jul. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/07/07/liner-notes.
As an American who has called Japan home for over 25 years, Jeremiah Dutch’s writing crosses both cultures. He’s written about such diverse topics as horror films and climbing Mt. Fuji. While still an undergraduate, he wrote for The Haverhill (Massachusetts) Gazette and The Portsmouth (New Hampshire) Herald. In 1997, he graduated from the University of New Hampshire and moved to Japan to teach English the following year. In 2007 he earned a MS.Ed in Education from Temple University and for over seventeen years taught at the post-secondary level while continuing to write academic articles, fiction, and non-fiction. He currently teaches at Rikkyo University. In 2022, his short piece, Zen Failure in Kyoto won an Honourable Mention in the Seventh Annual Writers in Kyoto Competition. This was excerpted and adapted from his then novel-in-progress, Gaijin House. Another adapted excerpt was published this year under the name “Transported Souls in the Motel of Regret” in the anthology Mono no Aware: Stories on the Fleeting Nature of Beauty. These days he calls Yokohama home and lives there with his wife and two daughters. When not writing, teaching, or spending time with his family, he enjoys reading, exercising, and following baseball. Some more information about Jeremiah and his writing can be found on his website and Instagram. [All contributions by Jeremiah Dutch.]
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