村上國際村

What Haruki Murakami talks about

Heidi Benson, Chronicle Staff Writer／Sunday, October 26, 2008

Before he decided to became a writer, award-winning Japanese author Haruki Murakami, 59, owned a jazz club in Tokyo. He still collects American jazz on vinyl, so when he came to town recently - as part of the 50th anniversary celebration of UC Berkeley's Center for Japanese Studies, which included a symposium on Murakami's work and an evening with the author at Zellerbach Hall, co-sponsored by Cal Performances - he and his wife, Yoko, spent a few hours prowling record stores on Telegraph Avenue. We caught up with him afterward for a brief chat in the new East Asian Library on campus.

Q: Your first memoir, "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running," was recently published by Knopf. What compelled you to write a memoir ?

A: I just wanted to write something about running, but I realized that to write about my running is to write about my writing. It's a parallel thing in me.

Q: Readers are very passionate about your work. Why do you think fiction matters to people so much?

A: That's a big question. I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching. Sometimes it's not easy. You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o'clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that's enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue. You cannot do that while you are asleep. When the dream stops, it stops forever. You cannot continue to dream that same dream. But if you are a writer, you can do that. That is a great thing, to keep on dreaming while you are awake.

Q: Were both your parents teachers of Japanese literature?

A: Yes. My mother quit after I was born, but she was a teacher. My father died this August. He was 90 years old. There was a funeral and 100 students came. They said he was a very good teacher. But I don't know anything at all about his teaching, because I was not his student.

Q: As a writer, what did you want to do differently from the Japanese literature you were exposed to?

A: I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else. So I read Kafka and Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and I loved it very much. Dostoyevsky is still my hero.

Q: It has been said that history has loomed larger in your recent writing. Do you agree?

A: Yes. I think history is collective memories. In writing, I'm using my own memory and I'm using my collective memory. I like to read books on history and I'm interested in the Second World War. I was born in 1949, after the war ended, but I feel like I'm kind of responsible for that war. I don't know why. Many people say, "I was born after the war, so I'm not responsible at all - I don't know about the comfort women or the Nanking massacre."

I want to do something as a fiction writer about those things, those atrocities. We have to be responsible for our memories. My stories are not written in realistic style. But you have to see reality. That is your duty, that is your obligation.

Q: Do you follow American politics closely?

A: Yes. The American political situation is very connected to other countries. Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like now if 9/11 had not happened.

Q: What do you imagine a world without 9/11 would be like?

A: Maybe Al Gore would have been president. There would be no Iraqi war, no Afghanistan invasion. We are living in the future now, in a kind of science fiction - 9/11 itself was kind of unreal to me, those images of planes diving into the buildings. I felt like I stepped into the wrong world.

I have a feeling that if people like my stories, they are feeling the same way. Many people are feeling trapped. That is what I'm doing in my writing every day. I'm stepping into a dark room. There is a secret door in my mind. I step inside and I don't know what I'm going to find. Darkness. I describe what I see and I return to this world. My job is to just see and to write it down. I'm just an observer of what's happening.

＊ 原文網址：
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/24/RVL713GP8T.DTL