Murakami looking for a cat
In Norwegian Wood, Toru often describes how he must wind himself up every day in order to keep going. Boiling it down to the bare bones, the bird represents responsibility of my own life and motivation to keep living it.
I started to imagine another me somewhere, sitting in a bar, nursing a whisky, without a care in the world. The more I thought about it, the more the other me became the real me, making this me not real at all.– Murakami
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers offered the real thing; that was their task. In War and Peace Tolstoy describes the battleground so closely that the readers believe it’s the real thing. But I don’t. I’m not pretending it’s the real thing. We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world. So our stories are the same; we are walking through fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through these scenes, are real. The situation is real, in the sense that it’s a commitment, it’s a true relationship. That’s what I want to write about.–Murakami
Let’s call the world we actually have now Reality A and the world that we might have had if 9/11 had never happened Reality B. Then we can’t help but notice that the world of Reality B appears to be realer and more rational than the world of Reality A. To put it in different terms, we are living a world that has an even lower level of reality than the unreal world. What can we possibly call this if not ‘chaos’?–Murakami
That evening he didn’t take a single photo. Leaning against the wall, he smoked Seven Stars, and opened another can of peaches and ate it. At nine he went to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, tugged off his clothes, slipped into the sleeping bag, and shivering, tried to sleep. The night was cold, but his shivering wasn’t just brought on by the cold alone. The chill seemed to be arising from inside his body. Where in the world did I come from? he asked himself in the dark. And where the hell am I going?–Murakami, 1Q84
It’s good when food tastes good. It’s kind of like proof you’re alive.–Murakami,
Norwegian Wood
Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.–Murakami, 1Q84
I think of myself as a very normal person. At the same time, I’m a very abnormal person. But I can’t tell the difference. Sometimes, when I look at myself in a mirror, I can find a very abnormal person in the mirror but the next moment I can see a very normal person. It’s scary. Very scary.–Murakami
When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come. I don’t choose what kind of story it is or what’s going to happen. I just wait.–Murakami
The characters just pop up in my mind, from the blue. When the Sheep Man appeared, I was shocked.–Murakami
Fiction garners its power by telling skillful lies – which is to say, by making up fictions that appear to be true. The novelist can bring a truth out to a new location and shine a new light on it. In most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to clarify where the truth lies within us. This is an important qualification for making up good lies.–Murakami
Sometimes the tourism even crosses metaphysical boundaries. Murakami often hears from readers who have “discovered” his inventions in the real world: a restaurant or a shop that he thought he made up, they report, actually exists in Tokyo. In Sapporo, there are now apparently multiple Dolphin Hotels — an establishment Murakami invented in “A Wild Sheep Chase.” After publishing “1Q84,” Murakami received a letter from a family with the surname “Aomame,” a name so improbable (remember: “green peas”) he thought he invented it. He sent them a signed copy of the book. The kicker is that all of this — fiction leaking into reality, reality leaking into fiction — is what most of Murakami’s fiction (including, especially, “1Q84”) is all about. He is always shuttling us back and forth between worlds.
This calls to mind the act of translation — shuttling from one world to another — which is in many ways the key to understanding Murakami’s work.–”The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami”, The New York Times
My style boils down to this: First of all, I never put more meaning into a sentence than is absolutely necessary. Second, the sentences have to have rhythm. This is something I learned from music, especially Jazz. In Jazz, great rhythm is what makes great improvising possible. It’s all in the footwork. To maintain that rhythm, there must be no extra weight. This doesn’t mean that there should be no weight at all – just no weight that isn’t absolutely necessary. You have to cut out the fat.–Murakami
I have drawers in my mind, so many drawers. I have hundreds of materials in these drawers. I take out the memories and images that I need.
It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.–Murakami, 1Q84
Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life,” he said. “If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy. I’m not a fast thinker, but once I am interested in something, I am doing it for many years. I don’t get bored. I’m kind of a big kettle. It takes time to get boiled, but then I’m always hot.
I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I’ve had this tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. I could always think of things to do by myself.–Murakami
Sometimes I find it too hot to run, and sometimes too cold. Or too cloudy. But I still go running. I know that if I didn’t go running, I wouldn’t go the next day either. It’s not in human nature to take unnecessary burdens upon oneself, so one’s body soon becomes disaccustomed. It mustn’t do that. It’s the same with writing. I write every day so that my mind doesn’t become disaccustomed. So that I can gradually set the literary yardstick higher and higher, just as running regularly makes your muscles stronger and stronger.–
Murakami
Waste is the highest virtue one can achieve in advanced capitalist society. The fact that Japan bought Phantom jets from America and wasted vast quantities of fuel on scrambles put an extra spin in the global economy, and that extra spin lifted capitalism to yet greater heights. If you put an end to all the waste, mass panic would ensue and the global economy would go haywire. Waste is the fuel of contradiction, and contradiction activates the economy, and an active economy creates more waste.–Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
Like a reader who keeps turning the pages while excitedly thinking ‘What’s going to happen next?’ I want to keep writing my own novel while excitedly thinking ‘What’s going to happen next?’ That’s the ideal.–Murakami
We got into her bed and held each other, kissing as the sound of the rain filled our ears. Then we talked about everything from the formation of the universe to our preferences in the hardness of boiled eggs.–Murakami, Norwegian Wood
Some people say that’s escapism. But that’s fine by me. I live my life, you live yours. If you’re clear about what you want, then you can live any way you please. I don’t give a damn what people say. They can be reptile food for all I care.–Murakami
Someone who can search for something is happy. Searching gives a meaning to life. Nowadays it’s not so easy to find something you might be looking for. The most important thing, however, is the search itself, the way you take. It’s not so important where it leads. That’s why my characters are always looking for something, maybe only a cat, a sheep or a wife, but that is at least the beginning of a story.–Murakami
I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.
Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.
At the end of May, Kipper, my cat, died. Suddenly, without warning. I woke up one day and found him curled up on the kitchen floor, dead. He himself probably hadn’t known it was happening. His body was cold and hard, like yesterday’s roast chicken, sheen gone from the fur. He could hardly have claimed he had the best life. Never really loved by anyone, never seeming really to love anyone either. His eyes always had this uneasy look, like, what now? You don’t see that look in a cat too often. But anyway, he was dead. Nothing more. Maybe that’s the best thing about death.–Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
I am nothing. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything.–Murakami, 1Q84
A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else.–Murakami, 1Q84
Sometimes I think I’ve got this hard kernel in my heart, and nothing much can get inside it. I doubt if I can really love anybody.–Murakami
If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life.–Murakami, 1Q84
May the life you lead be a good one, a life free of regrets.–Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that’s how we’ve got to live.
All my books are weird love stories. I love weird love stories.
Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It’s like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven’t seen in a long time.
When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we’d be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.–Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
Kafka on the Shore contains several riddles, but there aren’t any solutions provided. Instead, several of these riddles combine, and through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes shape. And the form this solution takes will be different for each reader. To put it another way, the riddles function as part of the solution. It’s hard to explain, but that’s the kind of novel I set out to write.
I met her near the end of September. It had been raining that day from morning to night – the kind of soft, monotonous, misty rain that often falls at that time of year, washing away bit by bit the memories of summer burned into the earth. Coursing down the gutters, all those memories flowed into the sewers and rivers, to be carried to the deep, dark ocean.–Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes
Hey, Mr. Nakata. Gramps. Fire! Flood! Earthquake! Revolution! Godzilla’s on the loose! Get up!
Extraordinary things happen to ordinary people. That is what my stories are about.
