An interview with Haruki Murakami in the Prague Post. Notable excerpt includes a comment by Murakami who feels his best work is yet to come. Considering how wonderful The Wind Up Bird Chronicle (and Kafka on the Shore) are, this is something that really titillates me as a fan and reader! In the interview, Murakami also touches on his writing process and purpose:
Each book he writes represents a journey inside himself, he says. “I’m just sketching what I saw in the darkness,” he says. “Sometimes it’s fun, [but] sometimes it’s dangerous, so I have to protect myself. That’s why I’m running every day. You have to be physically strong to survive that darkness.”
Having ditched what he calls the “irresponsibility” of his youth, Murakami says he has become more aware of the kind of literary legacy he would like to leave. “You know, I don’t have children, and that’s why I feel a responsibility to the next generation,” he says. And, in a Japan still unsure of how it should confront its wartime past, Murakami believes that fiction can be a powerful tool to educate. It was through A Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, he says, that many Japanese learned about their country’s brief war against the Soviet Union at Nomonhan on the Manchuria-Siberia border in the summer of 1939.
The older he gets, he says, the more careful he becomes about what he writes. But, relating how Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote some of his finest work right at the end of his life, Murakami is optimistic about the four or five books he thinks he can still write. “The best is yet to come,” he says, before stealing a glance out of the window at the foreboding clouds camped over the city.
Writing Under a Pseudonym 