"All we can do is breathe the air of the period we live in, carry with us the special burdens of the time, and grow up within those confines. That’s just how things are."
His book (fiction), The Wind Up Bird Chronicles, is about many things, but trying to find a missing cat, and an old soldiers memories of war, take up a good bit of the book.
I was told some of his books would be considered "I-Novels" or "watakushi shōsetsu". Which are meant to be books that are based on events in the authors life, yet still entirely fiction. I wonder if this article is speaking about the events that correspond to that particular book.
I read this and, despite his parenthetical explanation of it being somehow normal at the time, rhetorically thought "what the hell is wrong with people and societies?".
The answer to your question is that societies are in transition from Spiral Dynamics stage blue/orange through high orange (late capitalism) and on their way to green, which will be a very painful but necessary evolution for our survival.
For more information, check out Clair Graves' model of psychological evolution, Spiral Dynamics, Leo Gura of Actualized dot org does an excellent video series on this model and the blog post about The Big Picture of Global Politics is an excellent application of this model to everything we're dealing with from China to Trump currently.
I found out when I visited Japan last year that (some? all?) shinto temples are run as kind of private family business, handed down from father to son. Coming from a background in a christian country with an established religion this surprised me.
Murakami is a great author. One of his most famous pieces is A Slow Boat to China, which is definitely worth a read. It's not too long, and touches on very interesting social themes resulting from Japan's rapid post-war industrialization and the failure of the 1960's anti-ANPO student protests / riots.
That is such a beautiful quote.