Books / Haruki Murakami Interview
Just finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I didn't understand it fully, but all that weirdness makes me feel alive and delirious.
It is quite astonishing.
Found here, his interview on Salon.com.
An excerpt:
Q: You say that imagination is very important in your works. Sometimes your novels are very realistic, and then sometimes they get very ... metaphysical.
A: I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much. Myself, I'm a very realistic person. I don't trust anything New Age -- or reincarnation, dreams, Tarot, horoscopes. I don't trust anything like that at all. I wake up at 6 in the morning and go to bed at 10, jogging every day and swimming, eating healthy food. I'm very realistic. But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird. When I want to write about the reality of society and the world, it gets weird. Many people ask me why, and I can't answer that. But I recognized when I was interviewing those 63 ordinary people -- they were very straightforward, very simple, very ordinary, but their stories were sometimes very weird. That was interesting.
posted by isaiah_sg @ 6/30/2005 02:40:00 PM
1 Comments:
Bro. Check out the part when the writer meets an old soldier who describes the traumas of seeing a man skinned alive. Man, I tell you, that scene alone is worth the whole book. The vividness sticks in my mind even now. Yeah, Cinnamon is one hell of a genius. To me, Wind Up Bird is one of Murakami's best works despite its obvious imperfections. To me, the greatest imperfection was the part when he was sitting around, doing nothing, watching the world go by. Then after that he suddenly disappears from the novel almost entirely without any coherent explanation, becoming some sort of spiritual psychic almost overnight, much to the consternation of the reader. It seems to magnify the mystical process he underwent in becoming a spiritual healer, or goodness, I mught even say, a spiritual warrior engaged in spiritual warfare.
S Tan
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