Summary

“The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection” is an autobiographical story from Haruki Murakami's perspective. The author describes his appreciation for baseball and explains that he is a fan of the Yakult Swallows team, who play at Jingu Stadium in Tokyo.

Murakami grew up in Kobe and enjoyed attending games at Koshien Stadium while he lived there. When he moved to Tokyo at 18, he decided to root for the Swallows, then called the Sankei Atoms. The team was terrible at this time, but Murakami attended games religiously anyway. In 1978, the team finally won a league championship and then the Japan Series. This was the same year Murakami wrote his novel Hear the Wind Sing, which won a literary prize.

During the years in which the team was losing, Murakami brought a notebook and jotted down poems while watching...