The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Sinda Gregory, Toshifumi Miyawaki, and Larry McCaffery, "It Don’t Mean a Thing, If it Ain’t Got That Swing: An Interview with Haruki Murakami"It Don’t Mean a Thing, If It Ain’t Got that Swing:
An Interview with Haruki Murakami
Sinda Gregory, Toshifumi Miyawaki, and Larry McCaffery
The Japanese author who has best captured the odd combination of consumerist abundance and spiritual emptiness that has characterized Japanese life during the past twenty-five years is Haruki Murakami. Born in 1949 in Kyoto and raised in Kobe in an academic family setting (his father taught Japanese literature at a nearby high school), as a teenager Murakami shared with many Japanese youths a fascination with the Western cultural artifacts—television shows, rock music and jazz, films, and fiction; by the time he entered Tokyo’s Waseda University in the late sixties at the height of student activism (which he witnessed but did not actively participate in), Murakami had deliberately turned his back on Japanese literature in favor of the sort of hip, new, fabulist American writings by Vonnegut, Brautigan, and other postmodernists whose works were beginning to appear in Japanese translation. Convinced that he wasn’t yet ready to embark on a career as a fiction writer, Murakami spent the next six or seven years running a jazz bar in Tokyo—an experience which provided him with ideal perspective on the evolution of Tokyo’s bored-but-hyper youth culture that was then emerging. Starting in the late seventies, Murakami began publishing a series of coming-of-age novels—including Pinball 1973 and his enormously popular Norwegian Wood (which sold several million copies)—which vividly portrayed central characters aimlessly drifting through life in a brave new Japanese world like some latter day equivalents of Holden Caulfield. Presented in a lyrical (though often affectless) style that lingered obsessively on the surface features of Japanese life, full of casual sex, references to Western music, film, and other forms of pop culture, and often dripping with nostalgia, these early novels made Murakami an instant celebrity—a role he felt uncomfortable enough with that during the late eighties, he embarked on a several-year period of self-imposed exile in Europe and the United States.
If Murakami was embraced by his younger readers as their spokesperson, the popularity of his novels was viewed by most Japanese literary critics at the time with suspicion and often harsh condemnation. Murakami quickly became a flashpoint within Japanese intellectual circles in much the way (and for many of the same reasons) that Brett Ellis and Jay McInerney were in America during the 1980s. Blaming the messenger for the message, these critics frequently voiced their displeasure with precisely those features of Murakami’s fiction that so successfully and poignantly captured the blankness, spiritual emptiness, and confusion of the emerging shinjinrui (literally, "New Human Race") generation of Japanese youths from that period, who found themselves unable to find any sense of personal satisfaction from a life of empty consumerism and mindless commitment to job—and equally unable to envision any means of effecting a change or even expressing their dissatisfactions.
However, beginning with A Wild Sheep Chase Murakami began to develop innovative narrative strategies that successfully integrated paraliterary elements (most notably those drawn from detective and SF formats), cultural and political criticism, and metaphysical and psychological investigations in a manner that allowed him to present the struggles of ordinary Japanese citizens to remain human in a world that seemed increasingly unreal and inhuman. No longer merely passive victims, the main characters in Murakami’s major novels during this period—which include Sheep Chase and its sequel, Dance Dance Dance and (perhaps his masterpiece to date) Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World—were now presented as questors seeking not merely romantic and nostalgic connections to the past but also a more active means of making sense of their lives and the bewildering plurality of hyperrealities around them. No longer content, as he had been in Pinball 1973 and Norwegian Wood, to tell a story about the conflict between self and environment in terms of daily, surface reality, Murakami devised a kind of "simulation approach" in which the conflicts existing within his protagonists’ personal consciousnesses were simulated and then projected into the surreal, labyrinthine regions of dream and personalized, Jungian unconsciousness. Fully aware of the confusing, often banalizing impact that hyperconsumerism was having on Japan, these novels are all cautionary parables about the dangers of life under late capitalism—dangers which included information overload, the irrelevance of human values and spirituality in a world dominated by the inhuman logic of postindustrial capitalism, and the loss of contact with other human beings.
By the mid-nineties (when this interview was conducted in Boston, where Murakami was then living), Murakami was in the process of completing another ambitious novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which focused on another loss—that of history and historical perspective generally, and in particular the ongoing difficulty of the Japanese people to come to grips with their collective responsibility for what occurred during WWII. Moving freely back and forth between dream and reality, the past and the present, and mixing together elements of the Gothic romance, war novel (key sections of the novel deal with the horrific violence inflicted on the Chinese during its invasion of Manchuria during the 1930s), and hard-boiled detective fiction, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle vividly describes a hypermediated world in which the actualities of reality and history become transformed into hyperconsumerist by-products. (Toshifumi Miyawaki)
Larry McCaffery: Most of your biographical statements mention that you owned a jazz bar for a number of years. And of course references to jazz appear frequently in your works. Did jazz have any influence on your writing in any way?
Haruki Murakami: Not consciously. Jazz is just my hobby. It is true that I was listening to jazz for ten hours a day for several years, so maybe I was deeply influenced by this kind of music—the rhythm, the improvisation, the sound, the style. Managing that jazz club did have some direct effect on my decision to write, though. One night looking down the bar of the club I saw some black American soldiers crying because they missed America so much. Up until that point, I had been so immersed in Western culture ever since I was about ten or twelve—not just jazz but also Elvis and Vonnegut. I think that my interest in these things was partly due to wanting to rebel against my father (he was a teacher of Japanese literature) and against other Japanese orthodoxies. So when I was sixteen I stopped reading Japanese novels and began reading Russian and French novelists, such as Dostoyevsky, Stendhal, and Balzac, in translation. After studying English for four years in high school, I began reading American books at used-bookstores. By reading American novels I could escape out of my loneliness into a different world. It felt like visiting Mars at first, but gradually I began to feel comfortable there. But that night I saw those American black men crying I realized that, no matter how much I loved this Western culture, it meant more to these soldiers than it ever could for me. That was really why I began to write.
LM: My sense is that in the sixties in the United States, many of the postmodern writers—Thomas Pynchon, for example, and many other writers—were very influenced by jazz, especially jazz’s reliance on improvisation. In your own case, would you describe your writing as being improvisational at all?
HM: Rhythm is more important to me than notions of improvisation. When I’m writing, I always thinking of rhythm. "It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing."
LM: Do you work from an outline when you start your books when you start? Do you know where they’re going to go?
HM: No, not often. Usually I have just begun something whose story I don’t know how to make progress with. So I just write one chapter, then the second chapter, and just keep going. I don’t know what is going to happen; it just seems to come out automatically.
Sinda Gregory: The first scene in Norwegian Wood shows us the man on the airplane, and then the whole rest of the novel is a flashback. So that must not have been the first scene that you got you started with the novel?
HM: Yes, that scene on the airplane was not actually the first scene I started with. The real first scene is an earlier short piece that started with the fireflies. Norwegian Wood was an extension of that short story; writing the novel let me discover what happened to those six characters in that book. Three of them die and three of them survive, but I didn’t know who was going to survive or know who is going to die. One of my great pleasures in writing is to find out what happens next. Without that pleasure, it doesn’t mean anything.
SG: Several of your other books also grew out of short stories. When you finished those stories, were you then already aware that you had not finished something, that there was something more to be written? Or did time go by and somehow or another you went back to that story and thought, "Hmmm, now that I think about it, maybe there is more I could do with this material"?
HM: It takes time for me to recognize that it’s not finished—three, four years, sometimes even six, seven years. It’s only then, when I recognize that it’s not finished, that I write a longer version. But not all my books start this way. For example, I started A Wild Sheep Chase as a novel.
LM: Of course, several years later you began writing a sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase—Dance, Dance, Dance. Was that something you knew you would do when you finished A Wild Sheep Chase, or did you think it was over?
HM: When I finished A Wild Sheep Chase, I wasn’t thinking about writing a sequel. I thought it was over. But after four, five or seven years, I realized that I wanted to know what had happened to the sheepman. I knew that the sheepman in Sheep Chase was a very important figure to me, and so I wanted to know more about what he meant. That’s why I started to write Dance, Dance, Dance.
SG: You adopt an interesting version of the hard-boiled style in your novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland. What about the hard-boiled style appeals to you?
HM: Its authenticity. But I wasn’t really interested in writing a hard-boiled mystery; I just wanted to use the hard-boiled mystery structure. I’m very interested in structure. I’ve been using other pop structures in my writing as well—science fiction structures, for example. I’m also using love story or romance structures. But as far as my thinking about the hard-boiled style, I’m interested in the fact that they are very individualist in orientation. The figure of the loner. I’m very interested in that because it isn’t easy to live in Japan as an individualist or as a loner. I’m always thinking about this. I’m a novelist and I’m a loner, an individualist. I think that’s why I came to this country. It’s my dream to write hard-boiled mysteries.
SG: One of the conventions of the hard-boiled style is having the individualist/loner who at some point had a very bad pain; you typically get the feeling that this guy is trying to deal with this pain somehow, but he doesn’t talk about that pain. You can see this in the work of somebody like Raymond Chandler: you don’t know exactly what happened to Philip Marlowe to make him be what he is in the present—you only have this general sense that something bad happened to him that he is trying to live with. And I thought that might be part of why it’s a good structure for you because so many of your characters are suffering from a similar sense of angst. So you can create characters whose lives in the present are very much a response to that pain without going into all the messy details of all the specifics of the pain. The pain is still there, but you’re not wallowing in it.
HM: I think you’re right. When I was younger I was very attracted to the hard-boiled fiction of writers like Chandler and Ross Macdonald, maybe because their detectives seemed to be so individual. No matter what happened to them, they were always able to live their own way, working in a way they like and never complaining about their misfortunes. I love that. I myself don’t write directly about those kinds of pains and sufferings and everything. Of course, I have those pains and sufferings, but I don’t talk so much about myself, generally. And I don’t write about this because I have read so many books that care about those pains and pains and pains—I’m tired of it! So I don’t write about it.
LM: I think just about all of your novels are in first person. Have you ever thought about not writing in first person?
HM: Yes, for a short time I tried to write in the third person, but it didn’t work out.
LM: What’s the problem? Is it not as interesting? Is it the voice?
HM: When I tried to use third person, I just felt like I became a god. But I don’t want to be a god. I don’t know everything. I can’t write everything. I’m just myself. I would write something just as myself. I don’t mean that I really am the protagonist but that I can envision what my protagonist sees and experiences. Writing lets me enter my own subconscious; that’s the process I use to tell my stories. It’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever done. For me telling a good story is like what happens when I walk down the street. I love the street and so when I’m walking I’m watching everything, hearing and smelling everything. When you do this, the world changes—you’re experiencing everything in a new way. The light and the sounds and your emotions. That’s the way writing is for me. I’m forty-six and married, but when I’m writing I can become twenty-five and unmarried. I can walk around in somebody else’s shoes—and feel those shoes. Writing becomes your second life. That’s good.
LM: In fairly recent novels such as Hard-Boiled Wonderland and Dance, Dance, Dance, you’re highly critical of the rise of hyperconsumer capitalism. I’m interested in the point you make in Dance, Dance, Dance that back in the sixties artists and people generally had a pretty clear sense of who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. So at least you had a direction or focus for rebelliousness. But all these clear demarcations seem to be lost to artists today. Even the quality of "opposition" or rebelliousness has become coopted by the System as a kind of marketing device for what is really the mainstream. The question, then, has to do with whether or not the whole notion of oppositional art or avant-garde has been destroyed by the ability of capitalism to appropriate forms of opposition.
HM: To a large extent, I think it has. The period around 1968 was a kind of turning point for the Japanese people, especially the younger, idealistic ones. We felt if we could do right in this time, there would come a good time. A kind of utopia. So a sense of rebellion or opposition seemed to matter, because we believe we could actually change things. But now I’m not so sure. I myself have been saying no all the time since I started to write. I didn’t believe anything at all when I started writing. I didn’t believe in mystery—I hated that—so I had to make up a literary structure for myself to write that would let me say no to that. When I was young, Mr. Oe was a hero. He’s very oppositional and seemed very avant-garde. But I thought he was a mystery. I thought I had to say no to him, so I did. I don’t know right now if I belong to the mainstream or not, but I do think of myself as an outcast who is still saying no.
SG: Did you talk part in the student uprisings that were occurring in Tokyo during the late sixties?
HM: No, I didn’t become a student activist myself. I felt something new was coming, and I was excited, but I don’t like organizations and groups, and that’s why I didn’t join. But I did sympathize with these student radicals. I was seeking for something new, a better way of life, in my own way, but I couldn’t find it. I was just eighteen or nineteen years old, a boy, and I knew nothing.
LM: As you know, in the United States in the sixties, you have the beginnings of what people now call postmodernism. This was associated partly with literature (for example, the writings of Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, Vonnegut, Robert Coover, and so on) and other art forms, but it was rooted in larger cultural issues as well—the social unrest, the Vietnam War, and a general sense of the need to overhaul conventional ways of thinking about nearly everything. Was there something similar that began to happen in Japan in the late sixties? In other words, did your generation of writers share a sense of community about a new generation rising?
HM: I don’t think so. At that point we simply didn’t have such writers. As I told you, Mr. Oe was a hero of mine when I was younger. He’s a very uplifting writer, very critical, very avant-garde, but eventually I found that I didn’t like his work because I wanted something else. When I was a student, I didn’t get very high marks in English but I loved reading English. When I was college student at Waseda University I studied a lot of Western literature, everything from Greek drama to Dickens and hard-boiled writers. And about that time, when I was nineteen or twenty years old, I wanted kind of a hip, cool kind of novel—my heroes were Richard Brautigan and Kurt Vonnegut. For me they seemed to be great—they were hip and cool in ways that seemed different from anything I could find in Japan. I decided that I wanted to be one of these hip, cool writers, and so that’s when I decided I wanted to be a writer. But by the time I was twenty-two or twenty-three, I gave up trying to write. I just couldn’t do it—I had no experience. And so I just walked away for a while. I didn’t want to be a salaryman or join some company, so I started that jazz club. I wanted to do something by myself, with myself, and owning that club for seven years let me do this. One day I discovered that I wanted to write something again. So I began writing at nighttime, very late, after the club was closed, on my kitchen table. But it was a good feeling.
LM: Some critics, both in the U.S. and Japan, have said that your work is not really Japanese. Do you yourself think of yourself as having a distinctly Japanese sensibility—or as writing specifically about Japanese experience versus just writing about universal experiences?
HM: The opinion that my books are not really Japanese seems to me to be very shallow. I certainly think of myself as being a Japanese writer. I write with a different style and maybe with different materials, but I write in Japanese and I’m writing for Japanese society and Japanese people. So I think people are wrong when they are always saying that my style is really mainly influenced by Western literature. As I just said, at first I wanted to be an international writer, but eventually I saw that I was nothing but a Japanese writer. But even in the beginning I wasn’t only borrowing Western styles and rules. I wanted to change Japanese literature from the inside, not the outside. So I basically made up my own rules.
SG: Could you give us some examples of what you mean?
HM: Most literary purists in Japan love beautiful language and appreciate sensitivity rather than energy or power. This beauty is admired for its own sake, and so their styles use a lot of very stiff, formal metaphors that don’t sound natural or spontaneous at all. These writing styles get more and more refined, to the point where they resemble a kind of bonsai. I don’t like such traditional forms of writing; it may sound beautiful but it may not communicate. Besides, who knows what beauty is? So in my writing, I’ve tried to change that. I like to write more freely, so I use a lot of long and peculiar metaphors that seem fresh to me.
LM: I think that sense of freshness is one thing that makes your books appeal to Western readers; and I suspect that American readers may also be drawn to your works because they’re familiar with many of the literary and pop-cultural references you make—which are usually to Western works. On the other hand, it also strikes me that when people in non-Western countries receive our pop-culture, it often means something very different.
HM: Yes, of course such things mean something different when they’re taken out of their original context. For a long time I made many references to Western culture in my books because that’s the culture that surrounded me and that I liked. I am of the generation of Elvis Presley, the Beach Boys and television shows like Peter Gunn. Most Japanese people during the sixties were impressed by American culture because of what we saw on TV. When I was a boy, I was especially impressed when I saw American TV shows like Father Knows Best. The lifestyle of those people seemed almost unimaginably rich to the people in Japan of that time. These Americans had big cars and TVs and so many other gadgets. It was like heaven. Jazz, detective fiction, television, rock musis—these were part of the world I am most familiar with, and so when I began writing, I naturally made references to them. But such references in my book are not really very complicated. When I write, it’s just like a Bruce Springsteen tune—there’s a certain sense in which the meaning is right on the surface, so you know what it means. It hurts. But to be honest with you, I’m finding that I don’t need these sorts of pop references in my writing any more. I can do without those things. So I have changed my ways.
SG: What’s been the reaction of American readers to your work? I’m wondering especially about younger readers.
HM: I found it very interesting when I visited universities in the U.S. that many students are interested in Japanese literature and culture. What I noticed was that they seemed to be reading contemporary Japanese books simply as novels rather than as "Japanese novels." They’re reading my books or ones by Amy Yamada or Banana Yoshimoto the same way they had begun to read García Márquez and Vargas Llosa and other Latin American novelists a few years ago. It takes a while for this kind of a change to take place. Writers from different countries are changing each other and finding global audiences more easily nowadays; it’s a small world and a world which is getting smaller. I think that’s a great thing.
SG: When we were in Japan in 1992, we noticed that everyone seemed wanted to talk with us about the Persian Gulf War; after so many years of being apathetic or cynical about political change, suddenly people—including most of the young writers—seemed to want to talk about these things again. That seems like a hopeful sign.
HM: Yes, the Persian Gulf War created a lot of discussion among younger people. When the war began, people kept asking me what I thought Japan would do in the Gulf War. I didn’t have an answer—and neither did the Japanese government or the people—and so I found myself thinking about this for quite a while. Of course, it is possible that there could be another Persian Gulf War and if that happened, what would Japan do? We simply don’t seem to have any sort of principles that would guide us in making such a decision. That seems very dangerous—very interesting and exciting, but also kind of scary. All the political scandals and the economic uncertainly, along with the defeat of the LDP have undoubtedly contributed to this sense of confusion; but this has also given Japan a chance to go back to the questions that were being asked back in the sixties.
LM: Asking those questions would seem to be the key link between the sixties generation of Japanese and the new one. You mentioned earlier that back in the sixties there wasn’t really a coherent literary movement that reflected the kinds of radical political attitudes of younger people. Has that changed—is there now a recognizable younger generation of writers that you feel any kinship with?
HM: Yes, there is a new generation of writers that includes writers who are changing the style and content of the Japanese novel. Books by writers like Banana Yoshimoto, for example, or Ryu Murakami, are written in a new style that is recognizably different from what you found in Japan even just ten years ago—and almost totally different from the earlier writers who appeared after the war, like Oe. They are mostly young writers, and I don’t like everything they write; but they seem to be writing very honestly, with their minds and hearts, about what they feel they have to write about—which is write about the new world the Japanese are living in. When they were teenagers, Japan was rich, and they are not sure things are getting better. They are worried that something wrong could happen. Obviously Japanese readers like this approach because many of them are choosing this new style. I’m really a little bit older than most of these writers, but I feel young; and I can relate to what they are trying to do.
LM: Your early books up through Norwegian Wood all concerned themselves with that sixties generation of young people. There’s a sense of idealism and lack of jadedness in your descriptions of these people that seems anachronistic today, that’s been replaced by irony or cynicism.
HM: As I said earlier, things were much simpler in the sixties. It was easier to be idealistic. I belong to a generation of Japanese people who grew up during the counterculture era and the revolutionary uprisings of 1968, 1969 and 1970. The Japan when I was a child was poor, and everybody worked hard and was optimistic that things were getting better. But they are not. When we were kids we were a poor country but very idealistic. That began to change in the sixties; some people just got rich and forgot their ideals while other people struggled to save idealism. Many of us were very political during that time and for a while everything seemed to be changing; there was a lot of promise and optimism. Then, very quickly, all that simply disappeared. The uprisings were all crushed by the cops and the mood became bleak. The whole sense of a counterculture rebellion seemed finished.
SG: It’s difficult to sustain a revolutionary spirit during economically good times like Japan began to enjoy in the seventies. Beginning with A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance, you seemed to begin writing less about the sixties era and more about what’s been going on in Japan in the aftermath of the success of late capitalism. Overall, you portray what’s going on very negatively—you tend to suggest that all this money and prosperity and information and hyperstimulation have a very sinister, corrupting effect. Everybody’s idealism been bought off. And yet people in your books are still lonely; all the consumer goods they own don’t make them happy and there’s a tremendous sense of nostalgia for the sixties.
HM: That is one of the reasons I think Norwegian Wood sold so many copies. Japanese readers still year for that kind of world where there could be idealism. But after that book, I decided I wanted to write about a character who is lonely and alone in this big, very sophisticated and very complex society of information and money—which is what you find in A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance. People in Japan today are taught to believe that having a BMW and a new computer will make you feel happy and not isolated; that’s not true but this is not spoken about truthfully. So everyone retreats into cynicism and hypocrisy. The big problem is that this new society seems so big and powerful that it is difficult to know where to even begin to attack it. But things are changing.
LM: Your works have always had political subtexts but have not been directly connected to politics. This seems to be changing a bit— I felt Hard-Boiled Wonderland and especially Dance Dance Dance were a bit more overtly "political" in the sense that they were offering suggestions about how to resist the ways economic and political power (which seem synonymous in Japan) influence people. It seems to us that some of your contemporaries—like Gen’ichiro Takahashi, Kensio Kasai, and maybe especially Masahiko Shimada—are now writing from more of an overtly political stance. Anyway, the question is: do you see your writing being more directly interested in politics?
HM: I don’t write political novels—or at least when I write I don’t think of politics except subconsciously. But I agree with you that all my books, even the early ones, have all involved political factors; it’s just that these factors were never treated directly. So these political issues were present in my books only in the background; even though it is undeniable that politics and economics have helped produce the circumstances that my characters find themselves in, I have never been interested in writing about such things directly. I suppose my earlier books were responding to that sense of disappointment and frustration that my generation went through; they probably reflected the fact that it just didn’t seem possible that political change was really possible, and so providing any sort of political analysis in my fiction seemed boring, a waste of time. As I said earlier, though, the political change that seems to be happening in Japan may be encouraging writers to write more directly about politics.
LM: When we lived abroad—we lived in France for a year, and we lived in China for a year— it always seems that being exposed to these other cultures actually makes us think about our own country even more. Have you found that to be true? Is there a way that being away from your country lets you see it even better.
HM: To a certain extent, yes. Living abroad has let me test Japanese culture from the outside. Many Americans have asked me why don’t I write about this country, but the truth is that I’m not really interested in writing about this country. I want to write about Japan. I’ve been living in this country for several years now— mainly at universities like Princeton and now Harvard, which I need to do for my visa, but I don’t have any real obligations—and I have really enjoyed life here. But somehow I am so impressed with this country that I don’t want to write about it. I would rather write about Asia. So I am now writing a book (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) about what the Japanese people did in China in 1930. I began writing this while I was in the library at Princeton. I read a great many books about the war, and I was wondering at that point about who the Japanese people really are. What did we do there? That’s a very big question. I’d like to know what my father did in China. He was there in the thirties and when I was a little kid he used to talk about the war. There were some scary stories that shocked me—not big stories but very bloody. Now, about forty years later, I found that I wanted to write about this.
LM: One of the stereotypes that Americans have is that the Japanese haven’t completely come to grips with what took place in the war. This business about China is a good example. Of course, what took place in Japan with the U.S. bombing of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, all of that, is horrible, but what led up to that—the Japanese invasion of China and the bombing of Pearl Harbor—is also horrible. Anyway, the usual view is that the Japanese—especially the political leaders but also many ordinary citizens—refuse to acknowledge what took place. And just now some of this is starting to come out.
HM: The Japanese people want to be victims of war. We like to think that since we were bombed, so we are victims. The bad guys aren’t ourselves but the government, the emperor, and Tojo. The fact is that the Japanese people were the aggressors in the war and thus we are responsible for our many atrocities. The past and the present in Japan are very connected. But people don’t want to think that way.
LM: You mentioned that with A Wild Sheep Chase you wanted to write about people’s lives in the seventies and eighties rather than about the sixties. But there was also a change in your style with this book—you also appeared to turn away from the basically realistic approach you used in your first couple of novels. Was that a conscious shift— a desire to find a way of writing that gave you more freedom, or something like that?
HM: By the time I was writing A Wild Sheep Chase, I knew that I wanted to be a storyteller. That’s the most important thing that happened to me as a writer. The first two books are shorter and didn’t require a story; there were both really collections of fragments. But as I developed as a writer, I began to see that stories have many possibilities—so much so that I now think that the most important question I ask myself now when I am writing is whether my story is alive or not. I also understand better now that there are many different kinds of stories; sometimes just creating a metaphor can wind up telling a kind of story. Anyway, by the time I began A Wild Sheep Chase I knew I wanted to tell a continuous narrative—a big, long story. And when I tried to write this story, I found that I needed some supernatural power to tell a story. I wasn’t interested in writing a realistic story but one that was a supernatural, fantastic story. In these days it’s not easy to tell a story using traditional realistic methods of storytelling. Somehow you need something else—something supernatural or fantastic— to make it become truer. I know that in A Wild Sheep Chase the story seemed to become more realistic when the sheepman appeared, even though the sheepman himself is not realistic. I like that.
LM: Philip K. Dick is somebody who seems to have influenced your recent work, especially Dance Dance Dance. Was he somebody you were reading early on, or did you come to his work more recently?
HM: Actually I’m not a big reader of Philip K. Dick’s. Everyone says he’s great. But I have read just two or three of his works. I prefer Vonnegut and Stephen King. I also like many other American writers such as Tim O’Brien and John Irving, as well as some Latin American authors like García Márzquez and Borges.
SG: When I read most novels that have sex scenes, I find that when you come to a scene about sex, there’s a seam there, a break where the book seems to become something else while the sex is being described, and then it goes back to what it was before. But with Norwegian Wood, the sex scenes fit in with everything else. It’s very natural. And convincing.
HM: Oh, thank you, very much! Some readers were bothered by all the sex in Norwegian Wood. I don’t know why, but the sex there seemed disturbing to many readers, even in Japan. So some people think of me as very pornographic—even as a sex maniac! [Laughs.] But I’m not. I’m just interested in writing those scenes because sex is a very important part of life. It’s just like a child with a new toy—when he gets a new toy, he’d like to use that toy. But in my new book I haven’t written anything about sex because I’m not interested in that toy anymore.
LM: You’ve translated a number of works by American authors—for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Irving, Tim O’Brien and Raymond Carver—who are very different. Do your think the translations you’ve done have influenced your own work? For instance, there were several of the stories in The Elephant Vanishes that occasionally reminded me of Carver’s stories—the fact that so many of the characters in your collection have the kind of boring jobs that Carver’s characters so often have.
HM: That’s just a coincidence. My translation work has been a great teacher. Sometimes I have selected a book to translate because I want to learn something from it; translating it is the best way to do this because you have to read and think about every detail on every page. But I’m not very influenced by Carver. Before I read him I already understood what it means to have a boring job because I was a hard worker before I began writing. In many ways, I was one of those people. I was not an artist. I was just a common man. So when I am thinking about what to write about I think about those people, not artists.
LM: Could you talk a little bit about what prompted you to come to live in the United States?
HM: I was living in Europe for three years, mostly in Greece and Italy, with one year in Japan in between. I had left Japan because the success of myself novels soon made it difficult for me to live and write there. I had become a celebrity, which made me feel very uncomfortable. I found Europe to be a nice place to be living—it’s very beautiful and exciting—but it wasn’t the place for me to work. In Italy most of the people there are Italian, in Greece, they’re mostly Greek, and so I always felt as if I were a foreigner, a stranger, an outsider, an alien. But I don’t feel this way in America. What I like about America is that I’m really free here. I feel like I’m just one of the American people, and it has been easier to meet people and make friends. So it has been easy for me to stay here. I can concentrate on my work because I’m not a celebrity here. Nobody cares.
LM: My friend Yoshiaki Sato says that when he was growing up in the sixties, American culture seemed like a fantasy to him and a lot of other people his age—it was a way to rebel about your parents and traditions, and so forth. Were you shocked or surprised when you arrived over here and began to experience the reality of American life?
HM: Not too much. The worst thing is the crime. You see so much crime and hatred being expressed over here. Of course, there is crime and hatred in Japan, but it is better hidden and not so obvious—there’s so many guns, for example! And yet most Americans seem to accept this as something that is just natural, a part of the life; they see it is scary and dangerous, but it’s just something you have to accept. I also noticed that many Americans want to teach you things. This probably comes about because Americans are used to winning; except for Vietnam, you have always won all the wars and disputes you have been. Americans are very kind personally, but they also believe that what they are doing is always right. This is a problem because it can lead to a kind of arrogance.
Transcribed by Pam Hasman