I had the opportunity to see Murakami speak this past weekend.

What interested me most is that he doesn’t seem to consider his work to be particularly artistic, instead he sees himself as just a guy telling stories, doing what he does. He compared himself to a taxi driver at one point, saying he sees himself “as a guy just doing what he has to do.” Craft of writing more than art of writing.

Also he said that when he writes he never/rarely has a destination in mind. That what he enjoys in writing, is seeing “what’s next, what’s next.” “If you know the end, the fun is spoiled.” He will start writing with just an opening scene or image which he may have had in mind for weeks or months, then make things up from there.

He claims to never dream while sleeping, and that instead he does his dreaming while he writes, almost comparing it to lucid dreaming without ever actually using that term. he did say though that it is fun to be able to “stop, start, stop start.” He writes every day in the early morning, usually goes to sleep at 8 or 9pm and wakes at 3 or 4am. As he said, and I totally agree, there is something special about the hours or the early morning. I love the way the light is during dawn and pre dawn hours, and if I really wanted I could see it all the time, yet instead every single day I and most other people sleep through it, dream through it. There is something in Murakami’s writing which is dream like, simple and calm, I find it reassuring almost that he is writing his stories while I am sleeping.

Additionally, he said that he does read the english translations of his work and is very satisfied with them. Repeatedly questioned on this by the audience, each time he claimed the Japanese and English versions of his books are “basically the same” and couldn’t seem to think of any even minor differences between the two.

about his musical taste: he has somewhat of a rotation. In the morning he listens to baroque music, while driving always rock (REM, Beck and Radiohead are a few artists he mentioned), and in the evenings always jazz.

And about his open ended writing style, not having a plan or destination in mind for a story, he compared knowing when he is done to making love. “Somehow you just know.” a puzzling thing about this is that he seemed to say it is a subtle, vague thing, that somehow you just sort of know when you are done writing/making love. When making love though, knowing you are done is not so subtle…

he concluded the talk with a couple anecdotes. One, “Life is good sometimes” about a fan who might love one of his books but dislike the recent ones, or vice versa.

and his last line “Please buy my next book”