When I was younger I wanted to be like him. “When I was younger, I wanted to be a quiet person and live a quiet life” I wanted to stand at the same level as my characters. I tried a couple of times to do the third person (it took me 20 years: the first was Kafka on the Shore) – and every time, I feel uncomfortable, like I’m looking down from above.
Since then, I’ve written every novel in the first person. “I feel uncomfortable writing in the third person: it’s like looking down on your characters” NOTE: even if there was very limited time for the session and therefore for squeezing in as many of your questions as we would have liked, many of your queries were answered during the event anyway, so hopefully this summary will satisfy a good amount of your curiosities. Here we offer you the main points of the session, in quotes, including his answers to some of your questions. “It was published 20 years ago and I haven’t read it since then!” he said of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, around which the event centred. “Really?” and “I don’t remember that” were two of his most frequent answers, and he had the audience laughing at his frankness every time. The author of 13 novels and many short stories admitted to having completely forgotten what he has written – or indeed why – when asked about specific plot points, without seeming bothered at all. However, a translator was on hand to help out – a woman who, he revealed, was once upon a time a waitress at a bar he and his wife Yoko ran in Tokyo. It’s a master class in cohesion-and restraint.Rarely seen in public or in the media, Murakami was cheerful, relaxed and very funny as he answered all the questions in English (“I’ve lived in Hawaii for a while, so my English is different than yours”, he warned).
Each story offers a fortified shot of literary enrichment, a dose of characters and genres and settings we didn’t even know we needed, but that now feels vital and enlivening.
Everything one could possibly need is dispensed via dense, tiny, mysterious pellets.
Rivka Galchen’s debut collection (which follows her critically lauded novel, Atmospheric Disturbances) is like a multivitamin. Reading short story collections-no matter how cohesive, how gracefully threaded together, how substantive-has always left me feeling like I recently housed some Chinese food: disgustingly overwhelmed for a short time, and then starved for more nutrients. It happened last year with George Saunders’s masterful, much-feted Tenth of December, but the last (and only) time before that may have been college, when a knowing instructor passed me Haruki Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes. Typically it takes bribery to get me to read straight through a short story collection.
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