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1997 |
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Salon.com |
The heroes in Haruki Murakami's dazzling, addictive and rather
strange novels ("A Wild Sheep Chase," "Hard-Boiled Wonderland
and the End of the World") don't fit the stereotype of conformist,
work-obsessed Japanese men at all. They're dreamy, brainy
introverts, drunk on culture (high and pop), with a tendency
to get mixed up with mysterious women and outlandish conspiracies.
Toru Okada, the narrator of Murakami's latest opus, "The Wind-Up
Bird Chronicle," spends a good portion of the novel in luxuriant
unemployment -- cooking, reading, swimming and waiting for
a series of peculiar characters to pop by and tell him their
tragic stories. Since Murakami doesn't hide his identification
with his heroes, it's no surprise to learn that he has long
felt like an odd man out in his native land, even among other
writers. What's more remarkable is the novelist's recent rapprochement
with Japan and his countrymen, culminating in the year he
spent interviewing victims of the Aum cult's poison gas attack
on a Tokyo subway in March 1995..
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Murakami says this reassessment began during the four years
he spent at Princeton, writing "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle."
Besides giving him an impressive command of English, Murakami's
sojourn in America had an emotional impact that he finds difficult
to articulate even today, two years after his return to Japan.
With Wanderlust editor Don George, who stepped in to translate
at a key moment, I met with Murakami during his brief West
Coast book tour to promote "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle." The novelist's
slow, careful responses to our questions seemed more the result
of a rare, utterly unself-conscious sincerity (he seldom gives
interviews) than any language barrier.
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How did you get the idea for "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle"?
When I started to write, the idea was very small, just an
image, not an idea actually. A man who is 30, cooking spaghetti
in the kitchen, and the telephone rings -- that's it. It's
so simple, but I had the feeling that something was happening
there.
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Are you always surprised by what happens in the story, almost
as if you were reading it yourself, or do you know where it's
going after a certain point?
I have no idea. I was enjoying myself writing, because I
don't know what's going to happen when I take a ride around
that corner. You don't know at all what you're going to find
there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially
when you're a kid and you're reading stories. It's very exciting
when you don't know what's going to happen next. The same
thing happens to me when I'm writing. It's fun.
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You deal with some topics in this book that are new to you.
You have one character describe some truly horrible experiences
from World War II. Why did you decide to explore that?
I'd been trying to write about the war, but it wasn't easy
for me. Every writer has his writing technique -- what he
can and can't do to describe something like war or history.
I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because
I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing. I have
drawers in my mind, so many drawers. I have hundreds of materials
in these drawers. I take out the memories and images that
I need. The war is a big drawer to me, a big one. I felt that
sometime I would use this, pull something out of that drawer
and write about it. I don't know why. Because it's my father's
story, I guess. My father belongs to the generation that fought
the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories
-- not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know
what happened then, to my father's generation. It's a kind
of inheritance, the memory of it. What I wrote in this book,
though, I made up -- it's a fiction, from beginning to end.
I just made it up.
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Continue reading at |
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http://www.salon.com/
books/int/1997/12/cov_si_16int.html |