Career
In the trial that followed, Murao was charged with selling the book and Lawrence Ferlinghetti with publishing lieutenant Murao and Ferlinghetti were exonerated and Howl was judged protected under the First Amendment, a decision that paved the way for the publication of Henry Miller, Doctorate.H. Lawrence, William Burroughs, and many other writers who offended puritanical elements of society. In 1942, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Murao and his family were interned at the Minidoka War Relocation Center, Idaho.
He joined the Military Intelligence Service in 1944, and worked in post-war Japan as an interpreter.
Murao worked without pay for the first few weeks, but eventually became the manager of the bookstore, and his genial personality set the tone for the bookstore. Murao suffered the first in a series of strokes in the fall of 1975.
When he returned to work Ferlinghetti wanted to bring in new management. Murao refused this arrangement and walked away from the store that has been his life.
Murao and Ferlinghetti never reconciled.
After his separation from City Lights, he held court in the Caffe Trieste and published a photocopied zine called Shig"s Review. The first three issues of Shig"s Review, published in 1960 and 1969, were printed and bound. Beginning in 1983, Murao revived the review as a photocopied zine.
He would take a collection of poems, photos, poetry reading fliers, or his own collages to a copy shop and make twenty or thirty copies.
He would then staple them in the corner, put his hanko on the cover in red ink, and walk down to the Caffe Trieste, where he would give them to his friends. Murao published about eighty issues of the quirky review before his death.
In the nineties Murao moved to an assisted living home in Palo Alto, California, and briefly recreated his life in North Beach, visiting cafes and bookstores in an electric wheelchair. After an accident in the wheelchair, he moved to a convalescent hospital in Cupertino, California, where he died in 1999.
