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
One impossible day, of an impossible month, of an impossible year.
I'm an average person. Is just that I like reading.
Now for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn't stop it. I was going to sleep.
Having an object that symbolizes freedom might make a person happier than actually getting the freedom it represents.
I'm not a fast reader. I like to linger over each sentence, enjoying the style. If I don't enjoy the writing, I stop.
It’s precisely because of the pain, the we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive—or at least a partial sense of it.
They put up with such strenuous training, and where did their thoughts, their hopes and dreams, disappear to? When people pass away, do their thoughts just vanish?
This uneasiness comes over me from time to time, and I feel as if I've somehow been pieced together from two different puzzles.
Math is like water. It has a lot of difficult theories, of course, but its basic logic is very simple. Just as water flows from high to low over the shortest possible distance, figures can only flow in one direction. You just have to keep your eye on them for the route to reveal itself. That’s all it takes. You don’t have to do a thing. Just concentrate your attention and keep your eyes open, and the figures make everything clear to you. In this whole, wide world, the only thing that treats me so kindly is math.
Being alive, if you had to define it, meant emitting a variety of smells
Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren't you just in another, larger one?
I used to think the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time. But it's not like that. It happens overnight.
When I was fifteen, all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody’s reach. A place beyond the flow of time.” - But there’s no place like that in this world. - Exactly. Which is why I’m living here, in this world where things are continually damaged, where the heart is fickle, where time flows past without a break.
I'd made it back to the land of the living. No matter how boring or mediocre a world it might be, this was it.