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
Okay, let’s put it this way. I would like to sleep with you. But it’s alright if I don’t sleep with you. What I’m saying is I’d like to be as fair as possible. I don’t want to force anything on anybody, any more than I’d want anything forced on me. It’s enough that I feel your presence or see your commas swirling around me.
You're afraid of imagination and even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the resposibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep and dreams are a part of sleep. When you're awake you can suppress imagination but you can't supress dreams.
And her sleep was too long and deep for that:so deep that she left her normal reality behind.
Certain kinds of knowledge rob people of their sleep.
Even if you don't acknowledge it, people die, and guys sleep with girls. That's just how it is.
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.
I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But it was not until much later that I was able to get any real sleep. In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.
Hatsumi had a pretty good idea that Nagasawa was sleeping around, but she never complained to him. She was seriously in love with him, but she never made demands. 'I don't deserve a girl like Hatsumi,' Nagasawa once said to me. I had to agree with him.
two people can sleep in the same bed and still be alone when they close their eyes
To sleep with a woman: it can seem of the utmost importance in your mind, or then again it can seem like nothing much at all. Which only goes to say that there's sex as therapy (self- therapy, that is) and there's sex as pastime.
A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way.
Original manuscripts are private information. Like personal letters, there are parts I don't want other people to see.
This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don't get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can't do anything, don't get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it's ready to come undone. You have to realize it's going to be a long process and that you'll work on things slowly, one at a time.
It's physical. If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong.