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Haruki Murakami: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)

Haruki Maurakami

Are you one of the thousands of writers struggling to get an agent and a publishing house behind you?  Well, perhaps it's time to take a page from Haruki Murakami's book.

While a self-styled surrealist writer, Murakami deliberately wrote Norweigen Wood in the realist style so to break into mainstream publishing.  Otherwise, he would have remained a "cult writer," as he calls it.

Still, surrealist and magical realism techniques are what capture his imagination.  Here are some of his thoughts on magical realism -- and how he subverts it for his own purpose:

Interviewer:

One of the cardinal rules of magical realism is not to call attention to the fantastic elements of the story.  You, however, disregard this rule: your characters often comment on the strangness of the story line, even call the reader's attention to it.  What purpose does this serve?  Why?

Murakami:

That's a very interesting question.  I'd like to think about it . . . Well, I think it's my honest observation of how strange the world is.  My protagonists are experiencing what I experience as I write, which is also what the readers experience as they read.  Kafka or García Marquez, what they are writing is more literature, in the classical sense.  My stories are more actual, more contemporary, more the postmodern experience.  Think of it like a movie set, where everything -- all the props, the books on the wall, the shelves -- is fake.  The walls are made of paper.  In the classical kind of magic realism, the walls and the books are real.  If something is fake in my fiction, I like to say it's fake.  I don't want to act as if it's real.

Interviewer:

To continue the metaphor of the movie set, might the pulling back of the camera intend to show the workings of the studio?

Murakami:

I don't want to persuade the reader that it's a real thing; I want to show it as it is.  In a sense, I'm telling those readers that it's just a story -- it's fake.  But when you experience the fake as real, it can be real.  It's not easy to explain.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers offered the real thing; that was their task.  In War and Peace Tolstoy describes the battleground so closely that the readers believe it's the real thing.  But I don't.  I'm not pretending it's the real thing.  We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news.  We are fighting a fake war.  Our government is fake.  But we find reality in this fake world.  So our stories are the same; we are walking through the fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through these scenes, are real.  The situation is real, in the sense that it's a commitment, it's a true relationship.  That's what I want to write about.

Murahami's work includes Norwegian Wood (2000), Sputnik Sweetheart (2001), and the upcoming 1Q84 (2011).  His interview with The Paris Review was published in 2004.