Description

Due to rights issues, the audio of this interview is not available online. Please contact San Diego State University, Special Collections and Archives if you wish to be granted access to the original audio. Larry McCaffery, Sinda Gregory and Toshifumi Miyawaki interview Haruki Murakami at a café in Boston. The conversation begins with a brief discussion of a (never-completed) project that would entail different adaptations of the short stories in Raymond Carver’s collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The interview then focuses on Murakami’s books. Murakami explains how his writing has a rhythm to it and that the books usually spring from a single idea. Murakami discusses his writing as compared to Japanese expectations of what fiction should be. He explains the politics involved with the novel he is currently writing, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Murakami answers questions about the current state of fiction and what he reads. The conclusion of the interview deals with Murakami’s use of memory in his fiction. Portions of the interview are conducted in Japanese between Toshifumi Miyawaki and Haruki Murakami which Miyawaki then roughly translates for McCaffery and Gregory. An edited version of this interview appears on pages 111-127 of Review of Contemporary Fiction Vol. 22 (2), Summer 2002 as “It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing: An interview with Haruki Murakami.”