At 1:30 in the afternoon on April 1, 1978, a twenty-nine-year-old jazz bar owner named Haruki Murakami sat alone in the outfield bleachers of Jingu Stadium in Tokyo, watching the Yakult Swallows play their opening game. He had a beer. The sun was warm. A journeyman American outfielder named Dave Hilton — who had failed to distinguish himself in either the American or Japanese leagues, a man stranded, you might say, between two countries and two careers — stepped to the plate and slammed the first pitch into left field for a clean double. The crack of the bat resounded through the stadium. Scattered applause. And in that instant, for reasons he has never been able to explain, Murakami was seized by a conviction that would rearrange the remainder of his life: I think I can write a novel.
He had never written anything. Not a poem, not a journal entry, not a letter of consequence. He was, by his own reckoning, a man who made very good sandwiches and passable cocktails, who spent his days and most of his nights in a tiny jazz club called Peter Cat, near the center of Tokyo, where a grand piano barely fit alongside the bar and a quintet could be squeezed in only if everyone held their breath. He had borrowed money from every bank that would have him. His wife, Yoko — whom he had married while still at Waseda University, before either of them had graduated, reversing the conventional Japanese order of school-then-work-then-marriage — ran the business end of things with an intuition he freely admitted he lacked. He was exhausted. He was going nowhere. And then Dave Hilton hit a double, and something fluttered down from the sky, and Murakami caught it.
After the game, he walked to a stationery store and bought a fountain pen and some manuscript paper. That night, after closing the bar at two in the morning, he sat down at his kitchen table and began to write. Six months later, he had a manuscript. He submitted it, almost absent-mindedly, to a new-writers contest. It won. He was, abruptly and without preparation, a novelist.
The Yakult Swallows — the perennial losers of Japanese baseball, a team Murakami had chosen precisely for their air of noble futility — won the championship that year. Dave Hilton hit over .310. And Haruki Murakami, the most unlikely candidate for literary fame in a country that has produced Mishima and Kawabata and Ōe, began a career that would, over the next four and a half decades, sell tens of millions of books in more than fifty languages, rewrite the grammar of Japanese fiction, and turn a pathologically private man into one of the most recognized writers on earth.
Part IIThe Playbook
Haruki Murakami is not a business executive, a startup founder, or a venture capitalist. He is a novelist who has sustained an extraordinarily productive career for over four decades, selling tens of millions of books worldwide while maintaining an almost monastic personal discipline. What follows are the principles — extracted from his own words, his habits, and his decisions — that have enabled this sustained creative output. They apply far beyond literature.
Table of Contents
1.Start from the body, not the mind.
2.Fix the process, and the output fixes itself.
3.Sell the jazz club.
4.Go down, not up.
5.Write the ten pages. Stop.
6.Ignore the literary establishment.
7.Let the Automatic Dwarfs work.
Use translation as cross-training.
In Their Own Words
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
— Norwegian Wood
Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.
— Kafka on the Shore
And once the storm is over, you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.
— Kafka on the Shore
It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine.
— Kafka on the Shore
You need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a lifetime, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.
If possible, I would like my readers to savor that same emotion when they read my books. I want to open a window in their souls and let the fresh air in. This is what I think of, and hope for, as I write—purely and simply.
— Novelist as a Vocation
You need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much.
— Norwegian Wood
It's a dark, cool, quiet place. A basement in your soul. And that place can sometimes be dangerous to the human mind.
There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.
I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It's a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you.
When I start to write, I don't have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.
Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us.
Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that's how we've got to live.
Stories lie deep in our souls. Stories lie so deep at the bottom of our hearts that they can bring people together on the deepest level.
He still can't explain any of it. "Maybe I'd drunk too much beer," he says. "I don't know."
By the Numbers
The Murakami Phenomenon
50+Languages into which his work has been translated
6M+Copies of 1Q84 sold in Japan alone
2M+Copies of Norwegian Wood sold in Japan
15Novels published (1979–2023)
4:00 AMDaily writing start time during novel drafts
1,600English words written per day, without variation
40+Years of daily running since 1982
The Kitchen Table and the White Canvas
There is a mythology that accretes around origin stories, and Murakami's baseball epiphany has become, through decades of retelling, something close to a parable. But the thing about parables is that they compress. They leave out the years of trudging.
The jazz club had been a kind of refuge — from the corporate "company life" that most Japanese of his generation submitted to, from the lingering revolutionary fervor of the late-1960s student protests that Murakami had watched from a sympathetic but detached distance at Waseda. He had studied Greek drama, of all things, spending seven years earning a degree that should have taken four, working side jobs to pay for it, marrying Yoko Takahashi in 1971 when they were both still students. Peter Cat opened in 1974, first in Kokubunji — a student hangout in western Tokyo that still retained the counterculture fumes of the fading protest era — and later, after the building closed for renovation, in a location nearer the city center. It was a café by day and a bar by night, with live jazz on weekends performed by young musicians who were happy for the exposure and the small fees. Some of them became famous. Murakami sometimes runs into them in jazz clubs around Tokyo even now.
The work was brutal. Morning to midnight. The money was barely enough. On one occasion, he and Yoko were walking home late at night, trudging with their heads down, when they literally found money lying in the street — exactly the amount of the bank payment due the next morning. "Strange events like this have happened at various junctures in my life," he has written, with the peculiar equanimity that characterizes both his prose and his self-regard.
When he sat down at the kitchen table after that first baseball game, he had no model for what he was attempting. No mentor, no literary friends, no writing teacher, no workshop. His parents — both teachers of Japanese literature — had saturated his childhood with the classics, but Murakami had drifted toward foreign writers: Chandler, Fitzgerald, Dostoyevsky, Kafka. His grandfather was a Buddhist monk. The family had moved from Kyoto, where Murakami was born on January 12, 1949, to Kobe — a bustling port city full of American sailors and foreign influences — when he was two. As an only child with no siblings, his companions were books, cats, and records. He played piano as a boy but lacked talent. When Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers came to Japan in 1964, the fifteen-year-old Murakami went to the concert and was converted instantly. He has been collecting jazz records for over fifty years. His wife, he reports, is always complaining about this.
The first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, came out in 1979 and won the Gunzo Literature Prize for new writers. It was slight — barely a novella — and Murakami has spent decades wincing at it. A beautiful girl once approached him on a Tokyo train. "I'm a great fan of your books," she said. "I loved your first book the most — that's the best one." Murakami thanked her. She added: "You have been getting worse." He tells this story often, with visible relish, as a man who has learned to hold criticism at arm's length by cradling it like a joke.
His second book, Pinball, 1973, arrived the following year. Both were written in snatched half-hours after the bar closed, exhausted fragments of prose composed at the kitchen table while the rest of Tokyo slept. They were inventive, fresh — and, Murakami knew, insufficient. "With this scattered approach I was able to write some interesting, fresh things," he later reflected, "but the result was far from a complex or profound novel." He was coasting on latent talent. He needed to change his life.
Against the advice of everyone — friends, family, business associates — he sold Peter Cat and became a full-time writer. The jazz club was doing well. Nobody understood. But Murakami had decided that he would write a big book, and to do that he needed to sit at a desk without watching the clock.
My whole body thrilled at the thought of how wonderful — and how difficult — it is to be able to sit at my desk, not worrying about time, and concentrate on writing.
— Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
The big book was A Wild Sheep Chase, published in 1982, and it was the true beginning. Where the first two novels had been loose, impressionistic sketches — the literary equivalent of jazz noodling — A Wild Sheep Chase was a full-length adventure, strange and propulsive, blending detective fiction, comedy, and fantasy in a way that bore no resemblance to anything in the Japanese literary canon. The narrator from the first two books returned, alongside his friend the Rat, but the scale had expanded enormously. Murakami had found his register: the deceptively casual voice, the quotidian details that curdle into the uncanny, the lonely protagonist drawn into a mystery he barely understands.
"When I wrote A Wild Sheep Chase, I was very excited, because I didn't know what was going to happen next," he has said. "I couldn't wait for the next day to come so that I could find out what would happen next. I wanted to turn the pages but there were no pages. I had to write them."
The Butter-Smelling Outsider
To understand what Murakami did to Japanese literature, you have to understand what Japanese literature was doing before he arrived.
The dominant tradition — the watakushi shōsetsu, or "I-novel" — was confessional, interior, concerned with the emotional and aesthetic refinements of a recognizably Japanese sensibility. It prized psychological depth over plot, restraint over spectacle, and the kind of cultural specificity that made a novel unmistakably a product of its national tradition. Writers like Ōe Kenzaburō, who would win the Nobel Prize in 1994, represented the serious end of this continuum: politically engaged, intellectually rigorous, deeply rooted in Japanese cultural soil.
Murakami's characters ate steaks and pasta. They listened to Ella Fitzgerald and Rossini. They wore sharp suits and Oxford broadcloth shirts, whistled "Danny Boy" in elevators, drove Alfa Romeos. The title of his biggest bestseller, Norwegian Wood, referred to the Beatles song. There is a Japanese word for this kind of thing: batakusai — literally, "stinking of butter." It described Japanese who adopted Western styles too self-consciously, who smelled, metaphorically, of the milk products that traditional Japanese did not consume.
Murakami reeked of butter. And he knew it.
"I was an outsider — a black sheep, an intruder in the world of mainstream, traditional Japanese literature," he told Deborah Treisman at the 2018 New Yorker Festival. "Some people said that I was a new voice in Japanese literature, and some people called me a punk." The literary establishment was hostile. Ōe dismissed his early work as entertainment. Critics found his perceived lack of political or intellectual stance irritating. But young Japanese readers — bored with the self-confessions that formed the mainstream, craving the cool detachment and ironic energy of Murakami's voice — devoured his books.
The paradox that nobody quite acknowledged was that Murakami's apparent Westernization was itself a deeply Japanese act. Japan has a long history of cultural absorption — of taking foreign forms and metabolizing them into something unmistakably domestic. The jazz that Murakami loved was itself a product of this process: American music filtered through Japanese sensibility, played in Tokyo clubs for Japanese audiences, producing something that was neither American nor traditionally Japanese but a third thing, alive in the gap. Murakami's prose operated the same way. He wrote his first novel, he has explained, by composing the opening passages in English first — in stumbling, simplified sentences — and then translating them back into Japanese, stripping away the ornamental complexity that characterized literary Japanese prose. The result was a new kind of Japanese sentence: spare, rhythmic, with the off-kilter clarity of a translation.
"I learned three important elements from music about writing," he has said. "Rhythm, harmony, and free improvisation. I learned these things from music, not from literature. And when I started to write, I tried to write as though I were playing music."
The Norwegian Wood Problem
In 1987, Murakami did something unexpected: he wrote a realistic novel. No phantom sheep, no surreal passages, no wells leading to other dimensions. Norwegian Wood was a coming-of-age story, a tender and melancholic account of young love and loss set against the backdrop of late-1960s Tokyo, and it sold more than two million copies in Japan. Overnight, Murakami went from a cult figure admired by cool young readers to a literary megastar — the de facto "voice of his generation," Japan's J. D. Salinger.
He hated it. Not the book — though he would return to the bizarre milieu of his earlier work almost immediately, with Dance Dance Dance in 1988 — but the fame. "People hated that book in Japan," he told the New Yorker audience, and then corrected himself with a wry twist: "It sold more than two million copies, but people hated me." The literary establishment was scandalized. The public was obsessed. Murakami was trapped in the particular hell of Japanese celebrity culture, where writers occupy a strangely elevated social position — flashy, visible, more akin to pop stars than to the cloistered figures of Western literary life.
So he left.
First to Italy and Greece, where he spent two or three years writing. Then to the United States — Princeton University from 1991 to 1993, Tufts University from 1993 to 1995. "Princeton is a boring place," he has said, with the flat directness that passes, in his register, for devastating criticism. "Beautiful, but boring." Boston was better. There was Fenway Park.
The exile was productive. At Princeton and Tufts, he wrote The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, published in Japanese between 1994 and 1995 — his most ambitious novel to that point, a sprawling narrative that departed from his usual themes by confronting Japan's military brutality in Manchuria during World War II. It was the first of his books to reckon directly with Japanese history, to use the machinery of his surreal imagination in service of a national reckoning. The protagonist, the quintessential Murakami Everyman, searches for his missing wife and descends — literally, into a dry well — through layers of reality into a nightmare where Japanese militarism and personal trauma are inextricably fused.
It was also, perhaps not coincidentally, the first book he wrote at enough distance from Japan to see the country clearly.
Underground
The phone call that brought him home came from the television.
On January 17, 1995, a catastrophic earthquake struck Kobe — Murakami's hometown, the city where he had spent his adolescence hunting for cheap paperbacks in used bookstores, hanging out in jazz cafés, watching Art Theatre Guild films. His parents' house was destroyed. The entire city was flattened. He watched the footage from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was living with Yoko, and felt the axis of his life creak.
Two months later, on March 20, 1995, members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin nerve gas on five lines of the Tokyo subway during the morning rush hour. Thirteen people died. Thousands were injured. The two events — the earthquake and the gas attack, nature's violence and human malice, separated by sixty-two days — shattered something in the Japanese national consciousness. They also changed Murakami.
He responded to the earthquake with fiction: After the Quake, a collection of six short stories exploring the psychological aftershocks of the disaster. Kobe was too raw, too personal for journalism. "If I had interviewed those people, I would have been so depressed, so sad," he explained. "But in fiction I could make up my own world, so it was easier for me."
The subway attack was different. Murakami read everything he could find about it — newspaper reports, magazine articles — and couldn't find what he needed. He wanted to know what it had actually been like. What it smelled like. What ordinary people had experienced on an ordinary morning when plastic bags of nerve gas were punctured on a packed commuter train. So he did something a novelist almost never does: he became a journalist.
Over the course of a year, he interviewed sixty-four victims of the attack. One by one, face to face, asking them his own questions. What had happened. What they had felt. Who they were. The interviews were published in 1997 as Underground — a work of nonfiction that remains, alongside his novels, one of the most remarkable books he has ever produced. He also interviewed members of the Aum cult, seeking to understand how ordinary, serious young people had been recruited into an organization that committed mass murder. He found the cult members "very pure people" — serious, sincere, far from the commuters on the train — but felt no sympathy for them. "I got the impression that they lost something very important."
After I interviewed those people, I didn't know how to feel, because I got the impression that they are different, but they are I. I was feeling some empathy for them, but at the same time, I hate them. That's a very complex feeling, the mixture of love and hate.
— Haruki Murakami, New School conversation with Jonathan Lethem, November 2000
The year of interviews changed him. He didn't write a word of fiction during that time. He just listened. "The voices are still in me," he told the New Yorker in 2018, more than two decades later. "I trust those voices, those real voices." The experience taught him something about the relationship between the ordinary and the surreal that his fiction had been circling for years: that the most terrifying disruptions happen to the most mundane people, that violence can drive a hole through reality and open a passage to something else, that the ground beneath your feet — which you always assumed was solid — can turn soft and unpredictable in an instant.
He came home to Japan. Not for the country, he was careful to say. Not for the nation, not for society. "For my people." What was the difference? "People buy my books. The country doesn't."
The Daily Machine
Every profile of Murakami eventually arrives at the routine, because the routine is the thing. It is the engine, the discipline, the almost monastic framework within which the dreaming occurs.
When writing a novel, he wakes at four in the morning. He brews coffee — real coffee, in the real world, he is always careful to specify — and writes for five to six hours. In the afternoon, he runs ten kilometers or swims fifteen hundred meters, or both. He reads. He listens to music. He goes to bed at nine. He keeps to this routine every day without variation for the six months to a year that a novel requires. "The repetition itself becomes the important thing," he told the Paris Review in 2004. "It's a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind."
His daily output is fixed: ten Japanese manuscript pages, roughly sixteen hundred English words. On days when he wants to write more, he stops. On days when he doesn't feel like writing, he forces himself. "I punch in, write my ten pages, and then punch out, as if I'm working on a timecard," he has written. "That's not how an artist should go about his art, some may say. It sounds more like working in a factory. And I concur — that's not how artists work. But why must a novelist be an artist?"
The question is not rhetorical. Murakami has spent decades dismantling the image of the writer as a tortured bohemian — the Baudelairean figure, ravaged by vice, producing art from the wreckage of a self-destructive life. "Writers and artists are supposed to live a very unhealthy, bohemian kind of life," he has said. "But I just wanted to do it differently." He has never had writer's block. He doesn't drink to excess. He goes to bed early unless the baseball game is still on. He has been running daily since 1982 — full marathons every year for more than two decades, his personal best around three hours and twenty-five minutes — and has completed at least one triathlon. He does not socialize.
The running began when he sold the jazz bar and became a full-time writer. "Once I was sitting at a desk writing all day I started putting on the pounds. I was also smoking too much — sixty cigarettes a day. My fingers were yellow, and my body reeked of smoke." He decided to run every day to see what would happen. "I think life is a kind of laboratory where you can try anything." What happened was that he became, in his own word, tough.
I sometimes write very unhealthy things. Weird things. Twisted things. I think you have to be very healthy if you want to write unhealthy things. That's a paradox, but it's true.
— Haruki Murakami, The New Yorker, 2018
The paradox is central. Murakami's fiction descends regularly into darkness — into wells, underground passages, psychic labyrinths where identity dissolves and the boundary between the real and the unreal vanishes. His characters encounter talking cats, phantom sheep, two-foot-high samurai, little people who emerge from paintings, worlds where clocks have no hands and shadows live independently of their hosts. To sustain this kind of imaginative excavation, day after day, month after month, for four decades — to go down into the underground every morning at four and come back by nine — requires, he insists, a physical stamina that most people associate with athletes rather than artists. "To write one book is not so difficult," he says. "But to keep writing for many years is very close to impossible. You need the power of concentration and endurance."
The three qualities essential to a novelist, as Murakami sees them, are talent, focus, and endurance. Talent cannot be taught or controlled. But focus and endurance can be cultivated, strengthened, maintained — like muscles. This is what the running is for. Not inspiration. Not meditation. Not thought. "When I'm running, I'm just running. I empty my mind." The running is the structural support for the dreaming. It is the scaffolding around the well.
Through the Door
The process of writing, as Murakami describes it, is less composition than expedition.
He begins with almost nothing. A sentence or two. A title. A strange image. Killing Commendatore started with one or two paragraphs that he jotted down and put in a desk drawer, then forgot about for months. He had the title before he had a story — borrowed, with deliberate strangeness, from the opening scene of Mozart's Don Giovanni — and found the mismatch between the word "commendatore" and the Japanese literary landscape irresistible. "There is no such thing as a 'Commendatore' in Japan, but I felt the strangeness of the title and I appreciated that strangeness very much."
He does not plan. He does not outline. He does not know where the story is going. "If you have a plan — if you know the end when you start — it's no fun to write that novel." A painter, he says, may draw sketches before beginning a canvas, but he does not. "There is a white canvas, I have this paintbrush, and I just paint the picture."
The characters emerge unbidden. Once created, they "move automatically," and Murakami's job is to watch. "I'm a writer, and I'm writing, but at the same time I feel as though I were reading some exciting, interesting book." He calls the process "the Automatic Dwarfs" — a name borrowed from his experience of driving automatic-transmission cars after years of stick shift. He imagines tiny workers inside the gearbox, each operating a separate gear, laboring away in his unconscious while he sits at the desk and transcribes what they produce. "All I do is diligently copy it down."
This is, of course, partly a performance — the constructed modesty of a man who has been polishing his image of artlessness for four decades. But the testimony of his work supports the claim. His novels have the quality of dreams reported with unusual fidelity: the associative logic, the recurring images, the sense that something enormously significant is happening just beneath the surface but cannot be captured by rational analysis. "When I'm writing a novel, I wake up around four in the morning and go to my desk and start working," he told the New Yorker. "That happens in a realistic world. I drink real coffee. But, once I start writing, I go somewhere else. I open the door, enter that place, and see what's happening there."
The underground — it is always the underground for Murakami, always descent — is where the work happens. Wells, subway tunnels, subterranean passageways, caves. "When I write novels, I have to go down into a very deep, dark, and lonely place," he told an interviewer as early as 1999. "And then I have to come back, back to the surface. It's very dangerous. And you have to be strong, physically and mentally strong, in order to do that every day." The protagonists of his fiction undergo the same process, though more literally. They climb down into dry wells and find other worlds. They descend emergency staircases from elevated highways and enter alternate realities. They fall into holes in the ground and encounter spirits.
"Coming back is important," Murakami says. "If you cannot come back, it's scary. But I'm a professional, so I can come back."
Does he bring anything back with him? "No, that would be scary. I leave everything where it is."
The Missing and the Sought
The driving force of his fiction, Murakami has said, is "missing and searching and finding." His characters are almost always looking for something that has been lost. Sometimes it is a woman. Sometimes a cause, a purpose, a cat. The protagonist of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle searches for his wife and his cat simultaneously. The narrator of A Wild Sheep Chase pursues a phantom sheep of mystical significance across the mountains of Hokkaido. The two interlocking heroes of Kafka on the Shore — a fifteen-year-old runaway and a simpleminded old man who can talk to cats — spiral toward each other through layers of mythology, metaphor, and meteorological impossibility. (Sardines fall from the sky. Leeches rain down on suburban Tokyo. "Maybe it's a metaphor?" one character suggests. "Maybe," his friend replies. "But sardines and mackerel and leeches raining down from the sky? What kind of metaphor is that?")
But the searches, Murakami insists, do not resolve happily. "When the character finds it, there will be some kind of disappointment. I don't know why, but that is a kind of motif in my fiction — looking for something and finding it, but it's not a happy ending." This is the wound at the center of his work, the thing that distinguishes it from genre fiction despite its genre trappings: the recognition that the thing you have lost cannot be recovered in its original form, that the act of searching transforms both the seeker and the sought, that the underground passage leads somewhere but never back to where you started.
His protagonists are, almost without exception, men who are "somehow lost, emotionally or existentially," who "don't seem very at home in the world." Murakami's response to this observation, when it was put to him, was brisk: "You know, if the protagonist is happy, there's no story at all." But the alienation runs deeper than narrative necessity. These are men who have been emptied out — by loss, by modernity, by the particular loneliness of a society in which, as Murakami sees it, individuals are constantly at risk of losing their personal narratives and becoming hollow inside. The greatest danger in a Murakami novel is not death but vacancy. The wells and tunnels and underground chambers are frightening not because monsters live there but because the self might dissolve in the dark.
"In Japan, I think that other world is very close to our real life," he has said. "And if we decide to go to the other side it's not so difficult. In the Western world it isn't so easy to go to the other side; you have to go through some trials to get to the other world. But, in Japan, if you want to go there, you go there."
The Translator's Mirror
There is another Murakami, one the public rarely sees: the translator. He has rendered into Japanese the works of Raymond Carver (the complete short fiction), Raymond Chandler (all the novels, including The Long Goodbye, which he has read five or six times), F. Scott Fitzgerald (including The Great Gatsby, whose Japanese translation sat atop the bestseller list for seven weeks), Truman Capote, J. D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye), John Irving, Grace Paley, Tim O'Brien, Ursula K. Le Guin, and, most recently, the short stories of John Cheever.
He translates what he loves. The choices reveal a map of his sensibility more precisely than any interview. Chandler's hard-boiled style, Fitzgerald's doomed lyricism, Carver's minimalist precision, Cheever's suburban melancholy — these are the cardinal points of Murakami's literary compass. "I love F. Scott Fitzgerald — and I have translated many of his books — but his style is so different from mine, so beautiful and complex," he has said. "Still, I have learned so many things from his writing — his attitude, I suppose, his way of looking at the world."
Of The Great Gatsby specifically, he has gone further: "Had it not been for Fitzgerald's novel, I would not be writing the kind of literature I am today (indeed, it is possible that I would not be writing at all, although that is neither here nor there)."
The act of translation, for Murakami, functions as a form of cross-training — the literary equivalent of his afternoon swim. It uses a different part of the brain than creative writing. It keeps his prose limber. It provides companionship during the solitary months of novel-drafting. And it serves a larger cultural purpose: bringing the American vernacular tradition that shaped his own imagination to Japanese readers, many of whom are encountering these writers for the first time.
The Cheever project is characteristic. Murakami knows that Cheever is "not popular in Japan" — "too American, too nineteen-fifties, too middle-class" — and suspects that Japanese readers will not appreciate the stories. He doesn't care. "I love them, so it's a challenge." This is the translator's version of the novelist's stubbornness: the insistence on following personal obsession rather than market logic, the willingness to labor for years on a project whose audience may be tiny.
The Wall and the Egg
In February 2009, Murakami travelled to Jerusalem to accept the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. Israel was in the midst of its military operation in Gaza. Many writers and intellectuals urged him to boycott the ceremony. He went anyway, and delivered a speech that became, against all expectation, the most widely quoted statement of his career.
"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg," he told the audience, which included Israeli President Shimon Peres. "No matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg."
The wall, he explained, was the system — any system: political, military, ideological. The egg was the individual soul, fragile and irreplaceable. The novelist's job was to stand with the egg, to write stories that affirmed the irreducible complexity of individual experience against the crushing uniformities of state power, ideology, and collective identity.
The speech distilled something that had been implicit in Murakami's work since Underground — a conviction that literature's deepest function is not aesthetic but ethical: to create, through the act of storytelling, a "secret passageway" between writer and reader, a subterranean connection that bypasses the walls of nationality, language, and culture. "When I write a good story, we can better understand one another," he told the New Yorker. "If you are a reader and I'm a writer, I don't know you, but in the underground world of fiction there is a secret passageway between us: we can send messages to each other subconsciously."
The wall metaphor returned, with deepened urgency, in his 2023 novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls — a book whose origins stretched back four decades, to a novella he had written in 1980, at thirty-one, and had never allowed to be republished because he knew it was immature. The novel imagines a town surrounded by high walls, where clocks have no hands, people have banished their shadows, and a man works in a library "reading" old dreams. The protagonist must choose: stay within the walls, safe and tranquil but drained of desire, or venture beyond them into a world of pain and contradiction and vitality.
Murakami began rewriting the novella in March 2020, as the pandemic locked down the world and literal walls — quarantine barriers, border closures, the psychological fortifications of fear — rose everywhere. He finished in December 2022, as Russia's invasion of Ukraine entered its tenth month. "The two big events combined and changed the world in dramatic ways," he said. The book's central question — whether to shelter behind walls or risk the chaos beyond them — had become, without Murakami planning it, the defining question of the age.
"Going to the other side of the wall requires determination, belief and physical strength," he said. "You have to squeeze out all your might, or you can't go to the other side of the world."
The Wife's Post-its
There is one collaborator Murakami acknowledges without reservation, and she is the one most readers know nothing about.
Yoko Murakami — née Takahashi, the fellow Waseda student who married him in 1971, whose family's business sense helped keep Peter Cat afloat, who has been with him through every phase of his career from the kitchen-table scribbling to the six-million-copy phenomenon — is his first reader. When he finishes a manuscript, he passes it to her. She reads it. She returns it covered in Post-it notes. Two hundred of them.
"I hate Post-its very much," Murakami says.
She tells him to rewrite certain passages. He rewrites them. He hands the manuscript back. She reads it again. This time, one hundred Post-its. "Fewer Post-its — that's good." The process continues until the Post-its dwindle to an acceptable number.
She is not, she has informed him, his biggest fan. She does not consider him her favorite writer. But her criticism is, by his account, the most serious and consequential editorial input his work receives. In a career defined by solitude — by a man who has built an elaborate fortress of routine around the act of descending alone into his subconscious every morning — the Post-its are a tether. Someone is reading. Someone is paying attention. Someone is unimpressed enough to be honest.
Murakami's public statements about Yoko are few and characteristically oblique, but they reveal a partnership of unusual structural importance. She ran the business side of Peter Cat. She managed the financial intuition he lacked. She has accompanied him through every voluntary exile — Italy, Greece, Princeton, Tufts — and every reluctant return. When he describes his ideal life — "a quiet place with a lot of records and, possibly, cats. And cable TV, to watch the baseball game" — the listener hears a man describing a life organized by someone else, someone who has created the conditions in which this peculiar and specific form of productivity can flourish.
"Ask my wife," he says, when questions about his inner life become too probing. It is his most reliable exit.
The Harukists and the Prize
Every October, a ritual unfolds in Tokyo. The Nobel Prize in Literature is announced in Stockholm, and Murakami's most ardent fans — the Harukists, as they have come to be called — gather in bars and bookstores, clutching copies of his novels and framed photographs of the author, drinking wine and beer and waiting for the news. Television networks air special segments. Oddsmakers in the UK adjust their odds. Chinese readers, Korean readers, Australian readers weigh in. The Harukists are a global phenomenon, a readership united not by nationality or language but by the experience of having discovered, in Murakami's fiction, a sensibility that seems to speak directly to their private selves.
The Nobel has not come. Year after year, the Harukists sigh. In 2012, when China's Mo Yan won, a female Harukist told the Mainichi newspaper, "I'm very happy the winner was someone from Asia," and walked home. Polite to the end.
Murakami himself has established, with characteristic preemptive humor, that the Nobel is off-limits: "A gentleman novelist doesn't think about the Nobel Prize for Literature." He has won virtually every other major prize — the Tanizaki Prize, the Yomiuri Literary Prize, the Jerusalem Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award, the Princess of Asturias Prize — and in December 2024, Waseda University awarded him an honorary doctorate, its highest honor, at a ceremony attended by a thousand people in Okuma Auditorium. "If I hadn't come to Waseda University," he told the audience, "I feel like I might never have written novels."
His influence extends beyond the page. Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's film Drive My Car — adapted from a story in Murakami's collection Men Without Women — won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 2022, introducing Murakami's sensibility to millions of viewers who had never read his novels. The three-hour film, about a theater director processing grief through a production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, captured something essential about Murakami's aesthetic: the long silences, the slow accumulation of meaning, the sense that the most profound truths emerge not through dramatic confrontation but through patient, almost accidental proximity.
Jonathan Lethem, introducing Murakami at the New School in November 2000, offered what remains perhaps the most precise critical assessment of his achievement: "It's been clear that Haruki Murakami is the one contemporary writer who, if he'd failed to exist, we would have failed utterly to invent for ourselves. What chance was there that the most persuasive synthesis of American vernacular forms would emerge in translation from the Japanese?"
What chance indeed. The man who makes very good sandwiches, who follows three or four neighborhood cats on his morning jog, who goes to bed at nine unless the baseball is still on — this man has become, improbably and without quite meaning to, one of the defining literary voices of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Not by claiming importance, but by insisting on ordinariness. Not by explaining his themes, but by descending into the well every morning and reporting, with deceptive simplicity, what he finds.
Four A.M. in Tokyo
He is seventy-seven years old now. The routine continues. The alarm sounds at four. The coffee brews. The desk waits.
In October 2023, accepting the Princess of Asturias Prize in Oviedo, Spain, Murakami spoke about walls again — about Gaza, about Ukraine, about a world in which "feelings of suspicion replacing mutual trust" were building barriers faster than anyone could dismantle them. He was careful, as always, to distinguish between the novelist's scope and the activist's: "There is not much a novelist can do." But he believed — still believed, after forty-five years and fifteen novels and the earthquake and the sarin gas and the pandemic and the war — that fiction could help. That the secret passageway between writer and reader, the underground channel that bypasses all walls, was still open. That stories, if they were good enough, could teach people "the wisdom found in refraining from making quick judgments."
He has a radio show now. An FM station in Tokyo asked him to DJ for fifty-five minutes, playing whatever he liked and talking about whatever he wanted, and he said yes. "Why not?" His selections are eclectic: Billie Holiday to Maroon 5. The man who refused public events for decades, who fled his own country to escape celebrity, who built his entire life around the principle of solitary descent — this man now plays records for strangers on the radio, as if he had never left the jazz club at all.
At Waseda, in a building designed by the architect Kengo Kuma, there is now a library — the Waseda International House of Literature, better known as the Haruki Murakami Library — that houses his personal archive: manuscripts, drafts, translations, and tens of thousands of vinyl records accumulated over more than fifty years of collecting. Students browse the stacks. Scholars study the papers. The records play. Murakami donated everything, wanting the materials to be available "for those who want to study my works," wanting the place to have "a positive and open atmosphere."
It is, if you think about it, the jazz club reborn. A space where music plays and people gather and something passes between strangers that cannot quite be named. The circle closes — or rather, spirals. The man at the kitchen table, thirty years old, writing in borrowed time after the bar closed, has become the man whose archive fills a building at his alma mater. But the essential act has not changed. He still sits down. He still opens the door. He still goes through.
"When I'm not writing, I'm a very ordinary person," Murakami insists. "I'm nothing special."
In Jingu Stadium, on an April afternoon in 1978, a mediocre American ballplayer hit a clean double into left field, and a man who had never written a word felt something flutter down from the sky. He has spent the rest of his life trying to describe what it was.
8.
9.Disappoint the audience that wants a sequel.
10.Come back from the underground.
11.Stand with the egg.
12.Keep the Post-its coming.
Principle 1
Start from the body, not the mind.
Murakami's creative method begins not with inspiration but with physical capacity. He started running at thirty-three — within two years of becoming a full-time writer — because he noticed his body deteriorating under the sedentary demands of the work: weight gain, sixty cigarettes a day, yellow fingers. The running was an experiment: "I decided to start running every day because I wanted to see what would happen." What happened was that he built the physical infrastructure to sustain a career that has now lasted four decades without a single episode of writer's block.
The logic is counterintuitive but precise. Creative work — the deep, sustained, daily descent into the subconscious that Murakami's method requires — is physically demanding. It depletes concentration and emotional reserves. Without a body capable of absorbing that depletion and recovering overnight, the work cannot continue at the necessary pace. Murakami treats writing as an endurance sport and trains accordingly: daily runs or swims, early bedtimes, minimal alcohol, no late nights. "Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity," he told the Paris Review.
This is not merely a wellness strategy. It is a competitive advantage. Most writers burn out, slow down, or lose quality over long careers. Murakami has maintained an output of roughly three to four novels per decade — plus story collections, translations, and nonfiction — for forty-five years. The body is the machine that makes the dreaming possible.
Tactic: Treat sustained creative or intellectual work as an athletic event, and build a physical training regimen specifically designed to support the cognitive demands of your primary work.
Principle 2
Fix the process, and the output fixes itself.
Murakami's writing routine is a factory schedule deliberately imposed on an artistic endeavor. Four a.m. wake-up. Five to six hours of writing. Ten manuscript pages — no more, no less. Afternoon exercise. Bed at nine. Repeat for six months to a year without variation.
The discipline is not about willpower; it is about removing decision-making. By fixing every variable — when to start, when to stop, how much to produce, when to sleep — Murakami eliminates the daily negotiation with motivation that derails most creative workers. "The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it's a form of mesmerism." He does not wait for inspiration. He does not assess whether he "feels like" writing. He sits down and writes his ten pages, then stops, regardless of whether the pages were brilliant or terrible.
⏰
The Murakami Writing Schedule
Fixed daily routine during novel-drafting periods, maintained for 6–12 months without variation.
Time
Activity
4:00 AM
Wake, brew coffee, begin writing
9:00–10:00 AM
Stop writing after 5–6 hours / ~10 manuscript pages
Late morning / afternoon
Run 10km and/or swim 1,500m
Afternoon
Read, listen to music, browse record stores
Evening
Light translation work (optional)
9:00 PM
Bed (unless the baseball game is still on)
The key insight is that stopping when you want to write more is as important as forcing yourself to write when you don't. Stopping at ten pages preserves momentum for the next day. Forcing yourself through resistance prevents the accumulation of avoidance. The result is a metronomic consistency — three hundred pages per month, a complete first draft in four to six months — that transforms the impossible task of writing a novel into a manageable daily quota.
Tactic: Set a fixed daily output target for your most important work — one that is sustainable but non-negotiable — and stop when you hit it, even if momentum suggests continuing.
Principle 3
Sell the jazz club.
Murakami's first two novels were written in stolen fragments of time — thirty minutes here, an hour there, after midnight, at the kitchen table, exhausted. The books were inventive but, by his own assessment, insufficient. He knew he needed to go deeper. He also knew that the jazz club, which was doing well financially, would prevent it.
Everyone advised him not to sell. The club was profitable. Writing was uncertain. He sold it anyway.
The decision was not about following a dream. It was about recognizing that a "scattered approach" — however productive in the short term — would lead to a dead end. The deeper work required uninterrupted concentration, and uninterrupted concentration required the elimination of competing demands. Not their management. Their elimination.
This is the hardest principle in the playbook because it requires sacrifice of something that is working. The jazz club was not failing. It was successful, enjoyable, and provided a social life that Murakami would largely abandon for the rest of his career. But it was incompatible with the ambition he had discovered, and he was honest enough to recognize that no amount of time management could bridge the gap between what he was producing and what he needed to produce.
Tactic: Identify the successful-but-limiting commitment that is preventing you from doing your deepest work, and be willing to eliminate it entirely rather than trying to manage it alongside the new ambition.
Principle 4
Go down, not up.
Murakami's central metaphor for creative work is descent — going underground, into wells, caves, subterranean passages. "When I write novels, I have to go down into a very deep, dark, and lonely place." This is not ornamental language. It describes a specific cognitive strategy: the deliberate suppression of the rational, editorial mind in favor of the subconscious, associative mind.
His writing process begins with almost no plan. A title. A sentence or two. A strange image. He then follows the material wherever it leads, without trying to impose structure or meaning from above. "I open the door, enter that place, and see what's happening there. I don't know — or I don't care — if it's a realistic world or an unrealistic one." The structure, the meaning, the connections between characters and events — these emerge from below, through the act of sustained daily writing, rather than being designed from above.
This is the opposite of the outline-first, thesis-driven approach that dominates most professional writing and strategic thinking. Murakami's method trusts that prolonged immersion in the material will produce patterns and insights that conscious planning cannot anticipate. The risk is chaos; the reward is originality. "I think if you're a fiction writer and you're too intelligent, you cannot write. But if you're stupid, you cannot write. You have to find a position in between."
Tactic: When confronting a complex, ambiguous problem, resist the urge to impose structure prematurely; instead, immerse yourself in the raw material daily and let patterns emerge from sustained engagement.
Principle 5
Write the ten pages. Stop.
This principle deserves its own treatment, separate from the broader process discipline of Principle 2, because it addresses a specific and common failure mode: the binge-and-crash cycle.
"It is especially important to maintain a steady pace when tackling a big project," Murakami has written. "That can't work if you write a lot one day and nothing at all the next." The temptation, when work is flowing well, is to ride the wave — to write twenty pages, thirty pages, to push until exhaustion. Murakami refuses. He stops at ten. The unsatisfied creative urge carries over to the next morning, providing a guaranteed starting point. The sustainable pace prevents burnout over the six-to-twelve-month timeline of a novel.
The deeper principle is that consistency trumps intensity for any project measured in months or years. A burst of twenty pages followed by three days of recovery produces less total output — and lower average quality — than ten pages per day, every day, for months. The math is simple: ten pages a day for six months is eighteen hundred pages. That's a complete first draft with room for false starts and discarded chapters.
Tactic: When engaged in a long-duration project, deliberately limit daily output to a sustainable quota and stop before exhaustion — carrying forward momentum is more valuable than maximizing any single day.
Principle 6
Ignore the literary establishment.
Murakami's early career was defined by rejection from the Japanese literary mainstream. He was called a punk, an intruder, an entertainer. Ōe Kenzaburō — the reigning Nobel laureate of Japanese fiction — dismissed his work. Critics found his Western references batakusai. The serious literary world treated him as an anomaly.
Murakami's response was to leave the country entirely. He spent nearly a decade abroad — in Europe, then in the United States — writing, translating, running, and building a global readership that eventually dwarfed the domestic audience that had spurned him. By the time he returned to Japan in 1995, he had become the most widely translated Japanese novelist of his generation. The establishment's opinion had become irrelevant.
The strategic lesson is not that critics don't matter, but that the relevant audience for genuinely original work is rarely the incumbent gatekeeping class. Young Japanese readers embraced Murakami immediately. International readers followed. The literary establishment came around last, and grudgingly. Murakami's refusal to court establishment approval — his preference for solitary work over literary socializing, for foreign residence over domestic networking — freed him to develop a style that no committee would have approved but millions of readers craved.
Tactic: When your work is genuinely original and the traditional gatekeepers reject it, look for the audience that responds naturally — they are your leading indicator, not the incumbents.
Principle 7
Let the Automatic Dwarfs work.
Murakami's metaphor for character creation — the Automatic Dwarfs, tiny workers in the gearbox of his unconscious, assembling characters from fragments stored in the "cabinets" of his brain — describes a creative strategy of deliberate abdication of conscious control.
He does not decide in advance what kind of character a story needs. He does not construct character profiles or backstories. Instead, as he writes, "a kind of axis forms that makes possible the appearance of certain characters, and I go ahead and fit one detail after another into place, like iron scraps attaching to a magnet." The conscious, editorial mind intervenes later, during rewriting — which is "more conscious and logical" — but the initial creation is surrendered to the subconscious process.
This requires an enormous, even irrational degree of trust in one's own unconscious competence. It also requires the sustained daily practice (Principle 2) that keeps the subconscious engaged and productive. The Automatic Dwarfs don't work on demand; they work when the conditions are right — when the writer shows up at the same time every day, sits at the same desk, and begins without an agenda.
The parallel to business strategy is the distinction between emergent and deliberate strategy: the recognition that the most original solutions often arise not from planning but from sustained engagement with the problem, from creating the conditions in which insight can occur rather than trying to manufacture insight directly.
Tactic: Build daily practices that allow your subconscious to work on problems without conscious direction — consistent engagement, minimal distraction, and trust that patterns will emerge.
Principle 8
Use translation as cross-training.
Murakami has maintained a parallel career as a translator throughout his decades as a novelist — rendering Chandler, Fitzgerald, Carver, Salinger, Cheever, and others into Japanese. This is not a hobby. It is a deliberate cognitive strategy.
Translation, he explains, uses "a different part of the brain than creative writing." It is technical, precise, focused on someone else's voice and vision rather than his own. Performed alongside novel-writing, it functions "a bit like stretching before exercising" — maintaining mental flexibility, preventing creative fatigue, and providing a structured alternative to the unstructured descent of fiction writing.
The cross-training metaphor is exact. Just as a runner who only runs develops imbalances and eventually injuries, a writer who only writes fiction risks creative depletion. Translation forces Murakami to inhabit other sensibilities — Fitzgerald's baroque lyricism, Carver's minimalism, Chandler's noir architecture — and these encounters subtly enrich his own work without becoming direct influence. He returns to his own desk refreshed, having stretched muscles he doesn't use in his own fiction.
Tactic: Maintain a secondary intellectual practice that uses different cognitive skills than your primary work — one demanding enough to be engaging but structured enough to provide relief from the ambiguity of creative problem-solving.
Principle 9
Disappoint the audience that wants a sequel.
After publishing 1Q84 — his longest and most commercially successful novel — Murakami understood everything that would happen next. He could have written a sequel. Friends called asking what happened to the characters. The sequel lived in his mind, fully formed. He refused to write it.
"I thought it might feel like 'Jurassic Park 4' or 'Die Hard 8,'" he said. "So I kept that story in my mind only, and I enjoyed it very much." The protagonist of the unwritten sequel — Tengo's daughter at sixteen — remains, as of this writing, a character in Murakami's imagination and nowhere else. He has also declined to explain the ambiguities in Kafka on the Shore, despite receiving eight thousand questions from readers when he launched a dedicated website for the novel. He answered twelve hundred; none provided definitive solutions. "Readers should find their own response," he has said. "As the author, of course, I have an interpretation, but it's not necessarily the right one."
This is a principle of artistic integrity that has broader strategic application: the refusal to optimize for the most obvious demand at the expense of long-term originality. The sequel is always the easiest path — it leverages existing audience, existing characters, existing momentum. But it also forecloses the possibility of the genuinely new. Murakami's decision to leave 1Q84 incomplete and move on to entirely different projects ensured that each new book required him to start from zero, to enter the underground without a map, to take the same risk he took at the kitchen table in 1978.
Tactic: Resist the temptation to repeat your greatest success; the willingness to abandon a proven formula is what preserves the capacity for original work.
Principle 10
Come back from the underground.
"Coming back is important. If you cannot come back, it's scary. But I'm a professional, so I can come back."
Murakami's distinction between the amateur and the professional creative worker is not about quality. It is about the ability to control the descent. To go into the dark place where the work happens — into the subconscious, into the well, into the disturbing and often frightening territory where original material lives — and then to return reliably to the surface. To close the laptop at nine or ten in the morning, go for a run, eat lunch, listen to records, and behave like a normal human being until four the next morning.
The writers who destroy themselves — the Baudelaires and the Hemingways, the ones who blur the line between life and art until both become uninhabitable — fail, in Murakami's framing, because they cannot come back. They remain underground. The darkness leaks into their daily lives. The discipline that Murakami imposes on his existence — the running, the early bedtime, the refusal to socialize, the Post-its from his wife — is not about health per se. It is about maintaining the boundary between the two worlds: the underground world where the writing happens, and the ordinary world where a person lives.
Tactic: Build explicit re-entry rituals after periods of deep, intense work — physical activity, social contact, mundane routines — that reliably restore you to a functional baseline before the next descent.
Principle 11
Stand with the egg.
Murakami's Jerusalem Prize speech — "Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg" — is his most explicit statement of ethical principle. The wall is any system that reduces individuals to categories. The egg is the individual in all their fragility and contradiction.
For Murakami, this is not a political position but an artistic one. The novelist's job is to protect the irreducible complexity of individual experience — to resist the simplifications that systems impose, whether those systems are governments, corporations, ideologies, or literary establishments. His fiction does this by centering ordinary, unremarkable people — commuters, portrait painters, bartenders — and placing them in extraordinary circumstances that reveal the depth and strangeness concealed within the mundane.
The broader principle is that the individual perspective — the specific, the granular, the ungeneralizable — is the ultimate source of insight. Systems produce efficiency. Individuals produce meaning. When the two are in conflict, the creator's obligation is to the individual.
Tactic: When facing pressure to conform your work or decisions to systematic categories — market segments, professional norms, institutional expectations — ask whether you are serving the system or the individual, and choose the individual.
Principle 12
Keep the Post-its coming.
Murakami's wife returns his manuscripts covered in two hundred Post-it notes. He hates it. He rewrites. She returns the revision with one hundred Post-its. He rewrites again. The cycle continues until the Post-its dwindle.
This is the final and perhaps most important principle: the willingness to subject finished work to ruthless external critique, and to rewrite rather than defend. Murakami's first drafts — produced by the Automatic Dwarfs, unconstrained by planning, faithful to the subconscious flow — are raw material, not finished products. The rewriting, which is "more conscious and logical," is where the art takes its final form. And the most important editorial input comes not from publishers or agents but from the one person who knows him well enough to be unintimidated by his reputation.
The structural insight is that creative excellence requires two distinct phases — generation and editing — and that most people either generate without editing (producing chaotic, self-indulgent work) or edit without generating (producing polished but sterile work). Murakami's process separates the two phases completely: the morning writing is pure generation; the Post-it revisions are pure editing. Neither phase interferes with the other.
Tactic: Identify a single trusted critic whose judgment you respect more than your own self-assessment, give them unrestricted permission to challenge your work, and treat their feedback as non-negotiable revision targets.
Part IIIQuotes / Maxims
In their words
So many writers write small, shallow things in a complicated, difficult style. I think what I want to do is write serious, complicated, difficult things in a very easy style that is fluid and comfortable to read.
— Haruki Murakami, The New Yorker, 2018
In life, I am myself and I cannot be other people, but in fiction I can be anybody. I can put my feet in other people's shoes. You could call that a kind of therapy. If you can write, you're not fixed.
— Haruki Murakami, The New Yorker, 2018
No matter how mundane some action might appear, if you keep at it long enough, it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act.
— Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
It's been clear that Haruki Murakami is the one contemporary writer who, if he'd failed to exist, we would have failed utterly to invent for ourselves.
— Jonathan Lethem, introducing Murakami at The New School, November 2000
When I'm in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters, then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation.
— Haruki Murakami, Paris Review, 2004
Maxims
Epiphanies arrive uninvited. You cannot plan the moment when your life's work reveals itself; you can only be awake and present enough to catch it when it falls from the sky.
Talent is the floor, not the ceiling. The three essentials are talent, focus, and endurance — and the last two are the only ones you can develop through effort.
Simplicity is not the absence of depth. The most serious ideas should be expressed in the most accessible language; complexity of style is often a substitute for complexity of thought.
The well is not a metaphor. To do original creative work, you must descend into your subconscious regularly, deliberately, and professionally — and you must come back.
Health serves the unhealthy. The more disturbing, strange, or emotionally demanding your work, the more rigorous your physical and psychological maintenance must be.
Kill the sequel. The most profitable extension of past success is often the enemy of future originality; leave the best story unwritten if writing it would prevent you from finding the next one.
Ordinary people are not ordinary. The deepest stories are found in the lives of commuters, bartenders, portrait painters — people who appear unremarkable until violence, love, or strangeness opens a door.
Walls are always being built. Between nations, between individuals, between the self and its shadow — the novelist's job, and perhaps everyone's, is to find the passage through.
The Post-its are a gift. Ruthless criticism from someone who loves you is the most valuable editorial input you will ever receive; learn to hate it and obey it simultaneously.
Stay in the outfield. The perennial losers, the journeyman batters, the people who show up without expectation — they are the ones most likely to be present when something flutters down from the sky.
