MURAKAMI!

I cribbed the following from The Paris Review's Haruki Murakami, The Art of Fiction No. 182. One thing I did not do when younger was read interviews of writers. I was a damned fool thinking William Faulkner wrote The Sound and The Fury in one setting, and that there were no revisions. The actual work of a writer was a mystery, therefore it was easy for me to give it up. Hopefully, posts like this will dispel that mystery. If nothing else, they further my education. 

Murakami is one of those writers I knew of but did not get an opportunity to read until prison. He is one of my favorites now. This should explain the length of these quotes.

sch 8/15

INTERVIEWER

But do you choose the voice that it’s told in, that deadpan, easy-to-follow voice? Do you choose that?

MURAKAMI

I get some images and I connect one piece to another. That’s the story line. Then I explain the story line to the reader. You should be very kind when you explain something. If you think, It’s okay; I know that, it’s a very arrogant thing. Easy words and good metaphors; good allegory. So that’s what I do. I explain very carefully and clearly.

INTERVIEWER

Does that come naturally for you?

MURAKAMI

I’m not intelligent. I’m not arrogant. I’m just like the people who read my books. I used to have a jazz club, and I made the cocktails and I made the sandwiches. I didn’t want to become a writer—it just happened. It’s a kind of gift, you know, from the heavens. So I think I should be very humble.

***

INTERVIEWER

Getting back to your own books: hard-boiled American detective fiction has clearly been a valuable resource. When were you exposed to the genre and who turned you on to it?

MURAKAMI

As a high-school student, I fell in love with crime novels. I was living in Kobe, which is a port city where many foreigners and sailors used to come and sell their paperbacks to the secondhand bookshops. I was poor, but I could buy paperbacks cheaply. I learned to read English from those books and that was so exciting.

INTERVIEWER

What was the first book you read in English?

MURAKAMI

The Name Is Archer, by Ross MacDonald. I learned a lot of things from those books. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. At the same time I also loved to read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Those books are also page-turners; they’re very long, but I couldn’t stop reading. So for me it’s the same thing, Dostoevsky and Raymond Chandler. Even now, my ideal for writing fiction is to put Dostoevsky and Chandler together in one book. That’s my goal.

***

INTERVIEWER

Is that one of the main purposes of revision, then—to take what you’ve learned from the end of the first draft and rework the earlier sections to give a certain feeling of inevitability?

MURAKAMI

That’s right. The first draft is messy; I have to revise and revise.

INTERVIEWER

How many drafts do you generally go through?

MURAKAMI

Four or five. I spend six months writing the first draft and then spend seven or eight months rewriting.

***

INTERVIEWER

Your writing is often talked about as being the most accessible Japanese literature for American readers, to the point that you yourself are described as the most Western of contemporary Japanese authors. I was wondering how you see your relationship to Japanese culture.

MURAKAMI

I don’t want to write about foreigners in foreign countries; I want to write about us. I want to write about Japan, about our life here. That’s important to me. Many people say that my style is accessible to Westerners; it might be true, but my stories are my own, and they are not Westernized.

***

MURAKAMI

Almost all my novels have been written in the first person. The main task of my protagonist is to observe the things happening around him. He sees what he must see, or he is supposed to see, in actual time. If I may say so, he resembles Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. He is neutral, and in order to maintain his neutrality, he must be free from any kinship, any connection to a vertical family system.

***

INTERVIEWER

The global pop-culture reservoir.

MURAKAMI

Narratives are very important nowadays in writing books. I don’t care about theories. I don’t care about vocabulary. What is important is whether the narrative is good or not. We have a new kind of folklore, as a result of this Internet world. It’s a kind of metaphor. I’ve seen that movie, The Matrix—it’s a folktale of the contemporary mind. But everybody here said it’s boring.

***

INTERVIEWER

Is that your secret formula?

MURAKAMI

I don’t calculate. But if I could manage that, it would be good. I liked to read Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan while I was a college student. They had a sense of humor, and at the same time what they were writing about was serious. I like those kind of books. The first time I read Vonnegut and Brautigan I was shocked to find that there were such books! It was like discovering the New World.

***

INTERVIEWER

To continue the metaphor of the movie set, might the pulling back of the camera intend to show the workings of the studio?

MURAKAMI

I don’t want to persuade the reader that it’s a real thing; I want to show it as it is. In a sense, I’m telling those readers that it’s just a story—it’s fake. But when you experience the fake as real, it can be real. It’s not easy to explain.

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.