I Loved This Interview With Harumi Murakami
On September 12, The Guardian featured an indepth interview with renowned author, Harumi Murakami. I thoroughly recommend it to you if you have not read it already:
The Guardian: An Interview With Harumi Murakami
‘ “Strange things happen in this world,” Haruki Murakami says. “You don’t know why, but they happen.”
…’
The interview is wide-ranging, but the parts that really resonated for me were when Murakami spoke about the writing process. Here are a few examples :
‘ “I like to write. I like to choose the right word, I like to write the right sentence… in the right place. That kind of engineering is exhausting, though: a daily trip to the “basement of the mind” and back up again. “…You have to dedicate yourself to that work. You have no extra space to do something else.” ‘
Also:
‘ “I take time to rewrite,” he explains. “Rewriting is my favourite part of writing. The first time is a kind of torture, sometimes. Raymond Carver [whose work Murakami has translated into Japanese] said the same thing. I met him and I talked with him in 1983 or 84, and he said: ‘The first draft is kind of torture, but when you rewrite it’s getting better, so you are happy…” ‘
And this:
‘ “I don’t like deadlines …when it’s finished, it’s finished. But before then, it is not finished.” ‘
No doubt other parts of the interview may resonate for you, but when I read these sections in particular I thought: Yup, I hear you!
Yup. Thanks for sharing this.
I feel it is one out of the box on so many different levels: the writer, the work, the processes, the influences…
I loved that interview too – one of my favourite parts was this bit:
Novels in general, he thinks, benefit from a certain mystery. “If the very important secret is not solved, then readers will be frustrated. That is not what I want. But if a certain kind of secret stays secret, it’s a very sound curiosity. I think readers need it.”
Which fits his work so perfectly!
And is also, I feel, true of all great art–it always retains an element of possibility rather than everything being cut and dried.
Yeah – room for the reader, huh?
That’s part of what makes a work so memorable, when you can walk away still thinking about it, about what was not resolved perhaps. I remember doing that with ‘A Wild Sheep Chase’ of Murakami’s especially
I think if everything is perfectly cut and dried then we lose mystery — and also any pretense that the fiction in any way resembles that chaotic, messy, and frequently unresolved business we call “real life.”