Novelist Haruki Murakami spoke about his creative process and revealed he is currently writing a new book during an appearance at the Barbican Centre in London on October 11, [asahi.com] reported.
Tickets for the event sold out quickly, filling the roughly 280-seat venue with British fans eager to hear the author speak. Murakami appeared alongside British actor and director Simon McBurney, who previously staged theatrical productions based on Murakami’s work.
The appearance opened with the two men alternating readings of a passage from Murakami’s 2023 novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls in Japanese and English. Following the reading, a roughly 40-minute conversation took place almost entirely in English without the aid of an interpreter.
McBurney opened the discussion by describing his initial reaction to reading Murakami’s work, noting that extraordinary events were portrayed as fully accepted parts of reality where the ordinary and the strange coexisted without conflict. He asked whether the world actually appeared that way to the author.
“I am an ordinary, a very ordinary person,” Murakami replied, describing a daily routine that involves sleeping at 9 p.m., waking at 5 a.m., jogging, working, and taking buses or subways.
However, he added that once he sits at his desk to write, he feels much less ordinary.
“Stories come to me,” Murakami said, explaining that he starts writing without any overarching plan. “When I write a story, I have no big picture at all. I have no idea what happens next, what is waiting around the next corner. It is like turning the pages, and I am both the writer and the reader.”
He further described stories as living entities that resist human control.
““Stories are living things,”” Murakami said, adding, ““You cannot control stories. You have to be controlled by stories.””
McBurney pointed out that Murakami’s characters frequently find themselves lost, pressing forward as though wandering were simply part of human existence, and asked if that reflects the author’s view of human nature.
Murakami agreed, noting that most figures in his fiction are lost and unaware of their exact location.
““And the writer is lost in the story, too,”” Murakami said.