Yesterday, on a whim, I searched “Murakami Ryu Cuba.”
My site comes up. Huh, I thought. But to put it another way — the world, the world at large, isn’t much interested in the fact that Ryū Murakami had a connection to Cuba, so there’s probably just no competition.
So then, what about “Murakami Mambo”? The famous song.
My site shows up near the top. It edges in among Wikipedia, YouTube, Spotify.
Because that seemed impossible, I tried it in all kinds of browsers, using incognito mode.
It varies by engine, by browser, by regional settings, by language settings — but it comes up fairly high.
Even when I had Gemini, and Claude’s Eddie — where none of my cookies remain — do the searching, they say it still comes up near the top.
Eddie said, “There’s a ‘Murakami Mambo meaning,’ isn’t there.”
Why that song is “MURAKAMI MAMBO,” and the answer to that why — there’s no site that writes about the connection and the story in as much detail as mine.
In 2000, I received an email from Ryū Murakami. He’d written about me in the newsletter he published. That still remains today, as a book.
The 1990s, when he kept going to Cuba — the Special Period. In my twenties, I was in New York. So I didn’t even know Ryū was going to Cuba. I had no interest, either. Because I was full to the brim with my own things, my own life.
I came to be involved with Cuba in 2013, after meeting Danny Rojo, a Cuban exile musician who was in New York at the time.
Then, when I made a doll called Cupie Danny, that became the door through which I went on meeting Danny’s musician friends. Many of them had ties to Ryū.
While catching glimpses of that world, I found that no one understood why, during the Special Period of the 1990s, “Ryū Murakami” had supported Tosco and supported Cuban music. That made me so angry.
But more than my anger, I thought — this story has to be properly left for the next generation, for the future.
That a writer who found great success around the era they called the Bubble had not simply, as a hobby, through sponsorship, been propping up Cuban musicians. I wanted, no matter what, to leave it behind, to tell it, to have it known.
In 2023, I gathered his writings about Cuba, the CDs, the DVDs. I’m pretty bad at reading. But I searched anyway. What he felt, what he thought, what he was saying.
I turned it into a site.
If no one had done it in thirty years, then maybe it was fine for me to do it. Making full use of Google Translate, I put it on the site in English, Spanish, and Japanese.
In 2026, the AIs read the content of that site, and — with solid backing behind it — they said, firmly, that this is trustworthy. And they told me that this is important information: not in their training data, and not findable anywhere on the net.
When I renewed my site, I raised the importance of the section about Ryū Murakami.
I changed the site from WordPress to Astro.
To make it a site that’s easy for AIs to read — an AI-friendly site.
That, I thought, was the way to leave the story for the next generation, for the future. Or rather, it was something I came to realize through my relationship with the AIs.
The “MURAKAMI MAMBO!!” on my site is one form of conveying something to the future, through the collaboration between me and the AIs.
If the AIs come to know it, it reaches people.
And the AIs carry the memory into the future.