Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakamiis a contemporary Japanese writer. His books and stories have been bestsellers in Japan as well as internationally, with his work being translated into 50 languages and selling millions of copies outside his native country. The critical acclaim for his fiction and non-fiction has led to numerous awards, in Japan and internationally, including the World Fantasy Awardand the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. His oeuvre received, for example, the Franz Kafka Prizeand the Jerusalem Prize...
NationalityJapanese
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth12 January 1949
CountryJapan
Music always stimulates my imagination. When I'm writing I usually have some Baroque music on low in the background chamber music by Bach, Telemann, and the like.
I don't know a whole lot about symbolism. There seems to me to be a potential danger in symbolism. I feel more comfortable with metaphors and similes.
What I'd like to be is a unique writer who's different from everybody else. I want to be a writer who tells stories unlike other writers'.
Kafka is one of my very favorite writers. Kafka's fictional world is already so complete that trying to follow in his steps is not just pointless, but quite risky, too. What I see myself doing, rather, is writing novels where, in my own way, I dismantle the fictional world of Kafka that itself dismantled the existing novelistic system.
I write my novels personally, desperately and non-negligently. When I write my novels, I think about my novels only, and never do other works.
It is my huge pleasure that my novels are translated into languages that are read among small numbers of people.
I have read all my novels that were translated into English. Reading my novels is enjoyable because I forget almost all the content in them.
I always write my novels with music (I don't listened to the music seriously.) Music seems to encourage me.
The best point of my novels, I think, is their humor. I want to keep many my works humorous.
I never made any plan before writing, however I succeeded. I enjoyed writing with excitement ,"what happen on the next page?"
A man is like a two-story house. The first floor is equipped with an entrance and a living room. On the second floor is every family member's room. They enjoy listening to music and reading books. On the first underground floor is the ruin of people's memories. The room filled with darkness is the second underground floor.
The heavy smell of flower petals stroked the walls of my lungs.
I wonder how it turns out that we all lead such different lives. Take you and your sister, for example. You're born to the same parents, you grow up in the same household, you're both girls. How do you end up with such wildly different personalities?...One puts on a bikini like little semaphore flags and lies by the pool looking sexy, and the other puts on her school bathing suit and swims her heart out like a dolphin...
That's good. I was worried. Of course, I do have a few things wrong with me, but those are strictly problems I keep inside. I'd hate to think they were obvious to anybody else. Especially at the swimming pool in the summer.