Murakami

Haruki Murakami was in town. I didn't join the worshipping throng, but it turns out that if I had gone to my favourite record stores the previous weekend, I might have run into him in the vinyl jazz section. Oh, well. Yesterday, a brief interview with him was published in the local paper. Excerpts:

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching. Sometimes it's not easy. You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o'clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that's enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue. You cannot do that while you are asleep. When the dream stops, it stops forever. You cannot continue to dream that same dream. But if you are a writer, you can do that. That is a great thing, to keep on dreaming while you are awake.

[...]

We are living in the future now, in a kind of science fiction - 9/11 itself was kind of unreal to me, those images of planes diving into the buildings. I felt like I stepped into the wrong world.

I have a feeling that if people like my stories, they are feeling the same way. Many people are feeling trapped. That is what I'm doing in my writing every day. I'm stepping into a dark room. There is a secret door in my mind. I step inside and I don't know what I'm going to find. Darkness. I describe what I see and I return to this world. My job is to just see and to write it down. I'm just an observer of what's happening.