3 Key Takeaways – Absolutely on Music by Haruki Murakami and Seiji Ozawa

This is part of my ongoing video series of Three Key Takeaways from books I’ve read – the lessons we should take as authors from what worked and what didn’t work. You can view the original video here with the transcript below: https://www.tiktok.com/@rhiannondaverc/video/7342906874678873376

I’m a professional ghostwriter and these are my key takeaways from Absolutely on Music by Haruki Murakami and Seiji Ozawa. Let’s get into this. I read this book in about two days and it wasn’t because I was enjoying it, it was because I was practically skim-reading it by the end, so I want to get into three things that I personally would have done to improve the book.

But I’m going to start with one positive thing about the book because I like to be positive and this is that it includes notations so that the reader can actually join in the conversation that’s happening. So throughout the book these two authors are listening to classical music recordings and it actually tells you at what point of the music they’re having the conversations. That to me is really useful because if you’re going to follow along and really listen to it with them you know exactly where they’re up to and what part they’re talking about.

So that for me is a really great way to keep the reader involved, make it more interactive, and if you’re going to do something that involves music, what a great way to do it. However, this is the first of my key takeaways to improve the book. The fact of the matter is that a conversation between two people written out as a transcribed interview is a really stilted way to produce a book.

We, the reader, probably would get more out of this if it was a recorded interview that we could actually watch because just having the transcript is quite dull. If you’re going to do an interview, I myself have done lots and lots of interviews for my magazine London Runway. I’ve interviewed big fashion designers and musicians and celebrities.

There are two or three ways that you can do an interview. Okay, one is to give a verbatim script of the interview, a transcript, and just neaten it and tidy up and that’s what’s happened here. That way is actually the most boring and least inclusive to the reader way of doing an interview.

The second way of doing an interview is that you can actually write a narrative about the background of the person you’re talking to, about the setting in which the interview took place, how they looked, how they dressed, all of these details, and then add in quotes. So you don’t actually have to have the conversation but you can have quotes that the interviewee said to you. After all, in most cases, the interviewer is nowhere near as interesting as the interviewee.

This might be one of the exceptions because Haruki Murakami obviously is a massive novelist and so people who are reading this book probably do want to hear from him, but actually it turns out that classical music is nowhere near one of his special knowledge subjects, right? He admits freely during the whole book that he knows nowhere near as much as Ozawa and in a way this kind of detracts from the conversation and makes you think, well actually I kind of just wanted to hear from the expert then. So in this case I think I actually would have preferred to hear Murakami’s observations about this maestro, about the setting, and all of that in that really amazing novelist way that he has of setting scenes with quotes from Ozawa rather than having a conversation between the two of them where Murakami was just asking questions and not really adding too much. The second thing I would have improved about the book is this.

If you are famous for something else, it applies doubly, but no matter who you are actually, even if you are the subject expert in this field and that’s the only thing you’re known for, when you’re writing a book, don’t assume that your reader is an expert. So this book goes quite fast through a lot of classical music, a lot of names of classical musicians, composers, conductors, and so on, musical terms, and it just does so at such a pace that if you don’t understand music to the same level that they do, it’s really hard to keep up with, actually. And because I personally picked this up because I read Murakami, he is a big-name novelist in his own right and so that is what attracted me to the book, this means that I am not an expert in the subject that they are discussing. I’m not here for the subject matter expert, I am here for the author. So with this in mind I really think they should have done some more introductory stuff and really helped people to get into music.

It would have been a great way to introduce more people to the world of classical music in a way that would make it more accessible and allow them to really ease into it and understand what they’re talking about. Instead, it just feels really high level in that maybe they’re aiming it at people who are already classical music fans, which I think was a bit of a miss. And for my final key takeaway, I want to draw your attention to the last printed page in the book.

There is a link to where you can listen to all of the music that they talk about in this book and it is printed on the last printed page. So after you have already read the whole book, probably tried to track down some of the recordings yourself because you wanted to know what they were talking about, then at the end, at the end, you find out that there was a way to do this easier and to listen to it all in one place. This is number one, a mistake and number two, a huge missed opportunity.

If I was writing this book, if I was publishing this book, here is what I would do. I would have a landing page on probably Haruki Murakami’s website because that’s who the publisher is supporting and it would be an opt-in form. And on that opt-in form, all you would have to do is put your email address in and it will give you a whole playlist where you can listen to all of the music for free.

They would then be able to put this link throughout the whole book, at the beginning, after every single song that they mention, in footnotes, everywhere, everywhere because if your reader knows that they can go and listen to this, they will do it and you will get their email address and you can use that for marketing. Putting it at the end like that, honestly next to useless, really useless because I’m sure many people like me read the entire book and I did so not even knowing what they were talking about half the time because I don’t know these classical music pieces. I read the entire book, could have done with an audio aid, got to the end and found out that there was one but I am not going to go back and read this book again just to be able to get the benefit of listening to the music.

If you have useful resources for the reader, make sure that they get them at the appropriate time. Those are my key takeaways from Absolutely On Music. If you enjoyed this, please let me know if there are any other books you would like me to take a look at and distill the learning that we could take from them as fellow authors and if there are any other things that you took from this book personally, please feel free to sound off in the comments.