Hello, mister, what’s the matter, lost your guidebook?

 

Do you speak English?

 

Enough. Where are you staying?

 

Shibuya,

 

Yeah, you really are lost. Follow me, I’ll take you somewhere you can get a cab.

 

How come you can talk?

 

How come you can understand me?

 

Something tells me that looking for Murakami isn’t going to be, well, straightforward. For a start, he doesn’t do TV or radio. But for the first time ever, he did agree to meet up with the producer and answer some of our questions off camera, and on condition that his own voice wasn’t heard. We asked him first if the inspiration to write came easily.

 

Sometimes it comes, and sometimes it stops coming. I don’t know why, but you know, writing fiction, writing novels is just like searching for something in the dark places, so you need every help, every help you can get. Sometimes it’s cats; sometimes it’s wells. And in the dark places, there are small things waiting to help you.

 

Over and over again, I’ve heard people react to reading Murakami as though something has happened to their brains. I mean, they actually, I think without being prompted, they talk about their minds being played with, or their brains having been turned inside out, whether one thing or another, I mean, just over and over again. And I can vouch for that myself, it’s very, it’s almost a physical sense of something going on inside there. It changes you. It makes you see time differently; it makes you feel differently.

 

Tall and tan, and young, and lovely, the girl from Ipanema goes walking. But each day as she walks to the sea, she looks straight ahead, not at me. The tune always brings back memories of the corridor in my high school, a dark, damp high school corridor. Whenever you walked along the concrete floor, your footsteps would echo off the high ceiling.