村上春树采访.docx

1Q84, Haruki Murakamis new novel, is 1,000 pages long and is published in three volumes. It took the author three years to write and it is possible, on an 11-hour flight from New York to Honolulu, to get through about half of it. Murakami looks crestfallen on receipt of this news – the ratio of writing to reading time is never very encouraging for a writer – and yet if anything tests a novels power to transport, it is reading it at the back of economy on a full flight over long haul. For those 11 hours, you disappear wholly into Murakami world.We are in the presidential suite of the Hyatt, Waikiki, overlooking an ad-perfect beach framed by mountains. Murakami, who at 63 still looks like an adolescent skateboarder, divides his time between homes in Hawaii, Japan and a third venue he calls Over There. This is where he disappears every morning while writing his novels, a place populated by the kind of characters who have come to define the Murakami style: enigmatic, deadpan, full of big emotions sheared flat by repression and presented with a detachment that, unusually for a novelist who sells in the millions, has given him a cult-like status. Before I leave for Hawaii a friend confesses his enthusiasm for Murakami is partly based on a desire to be the kind of person who likes Murakami.I dont think of myself as an artist, says the author more than once in the interview. Im just a guy who can write. Yeah.Murakamis cool benefits from an un-nerdy background running a jazz club in his 20s, and his equally un-nerdy Ironman routine. As he detailed recently in his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami rises at 4am on most mornings, writes until noon, spends the afternoon training for marathons and browsing through old record stores and turns in, with his wife, at 9pm. As a regime, it is almost as famous as his novels and has the clean, fanatical air of a correction to the mess of his 20s. It is also the kind of discipline necessary to crank out 1,000 co