dehumanize us in many ways
The conflict between individuals and the System has always been the most important theme for me. The System is something that must exist, but it can also dehumanize us in many ways… How much freedom we have is something that we need to constantly keep asking ourselves.
the cds vanishes
A whopping 6,000 orders have been made for the “Sinfonietta” CD of Czech composer Leos Janacek in just one week after the release of “1Q84,” according to Sony Music Japan International Inc. The CD contains the version conducted by George Szell and performed by the Cleveland Orchestra — the same classical piece that the novel’s protagonist listens to.
The record company says it had shipped the same number of copies of the CD over the past 20 years since the album’s conversion into a CD in 1990 as following the release of “1Q84.”
Haruki Murakami
The role of writers, I believe, should be to create a story that can counter fundamentalism and certain kinds of mystique.
hoist
In any heavy storm, there are always writers who hoist a torchlight in front of people. Murakami has been, and will be, taking that role. Whatever happens in the world, I will watch his light.
murakami on receiving the Jerusalem Prize
If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg.
Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system” which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals.
I have only one purpose in writing novels. That is to draw out the unique divinity of the individual. To gratify uniqueness. To keep the system from tangling us. So – I write stories of life, love. Make people laugh and cry.
We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it’s too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us – create who we are. It is we who created the system.
(link)
will it be jay, philip or alfred?
SFBG.com, 22nd October 2008:
To the delight of the audience, Murakami announced that he had finished his latest novel the previous week.
what i talk about when i talk about running by haruki murakami
vi – If you don’t keep repeating a mantra of some sort to yourself, you’ll never survive.
vii – Here it is: Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
5 – I stop every day right at the point where I can feel I can write more. Do that, and the next day’s work goes surprisingly smoothly.
10 – What’s crucial is whether your writing attains the standard you’ve set for yourself.
10 – Basically a writer has a quiet, inner motivation, and doesn’t seek validation in the outwardly visible.
10 – I’m at an ordinary—or perhaps more like mediocre—level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday.
19 – So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets.
i am not optimistic
Variety reports that Norwegian Wood is coming to the big screen.
10 questions for haruki murakami
Time (via the fat platypus):
Submit your question for Novelist Haruki Murakami
***
my favorite question so far is from a Frederic Turner in Cambridge who asked:
Why are your novels so awful?
i couldn’t resist submitting my own:
How would you own funeral be like?
If you had children, how would you raise them?
What types of limitations are good? (in my excitement, i typed why instead.)
10 things you need to know about Haruki Murakami
Ten things you need to know about Haruki Murakami:
His protagonists are usually transformed by exquisitely tender physical unions with unusual, beautiful and often confused or mysterious women. He describes love with delicate wonder, and his hero is driven by passionate need once the woman of his life is revealed. “I have to talk to you,” Norwegian Wood’s Toru Watanabe tells the emotionally troubled Naoko. “I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.”
my relationship with them is a conceptual one
Haruki Murakami in the New Yorker:
I don’t see my readers’ faces, so in a sense my relationship with them is a conceptual one, but I’ve consistently considered it the most important thing in my life.
Haruki Murakami, Doctor of Letters
His literary spiderwebs remind us that, though we may not be fully aware of it, something profoundly disturbing lies at the heart of what we take for everyday reality. With his surreal imagination grounded in down-to-earth experience, his novels, short stories, essays and even his memoir juxtapose the uncanny with the ordinary to capture the loneliness and uncertainty at the heart of modern life. His protagonists may be disaffected young Japanese men and women, but their experience of ennui and loss, and their search for love and certainty, speak to us all. Amid the alienation, flickers of hopefulness spring from seemingly random human interactions and connections, reminding us that the race is well worth running.
Haruki Murakami on decency
I get the feeling that what I want to write are stories that raise the level of decency. No matter how dark, how forlorn circumstances may be, some sort of decency offers a glimmer of light and suggests that there is something about that can save you.
Haruki Murakami makes an important point
What I fear more than anything else is ‘psychological enclosure’ imposed by those who are pushing a particular cause. Most people need some sort of boundary, and it becomes unbearable if their boundaries disappear… there are lots of cages, or enclosures, and some people get caught up in these and find themselves unable to get out if they’re not careful…
Stories must exist to work against those psychological enclosures. A good story is not something you can see, but it should give depth and width to people’s minds. And a broad, deep-thinking mind is not something that likes to be shut off in a narrow space.
murkami’s latest
murkami’s latest novel will be the longest yet. he’s writing in the third person (a “fateful shift”) and it will be
“set against a background of the turmoil that has arisen in the post-Cold War world.”
Haruki Murakami considers Dostoevsky the greatest
Haruki Murakami considers Dostoevsky the greatest:
“If I personally had to pick one writer who I consider the greatest of all time, I would choose Dostoevsky… What works like ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ or ‘The Possessed’ mean for me is the scope of their stories for a novel. It’s just really special.”
The three most important books he has read:
The Great Gatsby, The Long Goodbye and The Brothers Karamazov
an off-camera interview with the master
BBC1 arts strand Imagine has lined up profiles of Japanese author Haruki Murakami…
… returns at the end of May (2008).
… presenter Alan Yentob travels to Japan to meet Murakami, the notoriously publicity-shy author… who has agreed to an off-camera interview.
In the impressionistic film, Yentob will go in search of Murakami’s muse in Tokyo and Kobe, where he delves into the social and political background of the author’s work and encounters his fans, critics, translators and a talking cat.
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