Former Tufts professor and renowned Japanese author Haruki Murakami returned to campus Wednesday to speak about his new life as a writer.
The event was set up as a sort of public interview, with Japanese Professor Hosea Hirata speaking with Murakami about his life. The two previously knew each other from time they spent together at Princeton University 15 years ago.
Murakami spoke as if it were easy to become an author. "I went out and bought paper and pen and I wrote [my first novel]," Murakami said about his first book, "Hear the Wind Sing," published in 1979. "I didn't even try to write anything before."
Hirata showed a slideshow presentation of Murakami's works and asked the author to elaborate on the works. One of the first things the audience learned is that the reserved Murakami believes the first step toward successful writing is proper physical fitness.
"First train your body. Then, your writing style will follow," the author said, is a mantra by which he lives. Murakami has run the Boston Marathon six times and will run his 34th marathon this weekend.
"I realized that I needed physical strength [to focus on writing for long periods] and that strength helped to develop my writing style," he said.
Murakami said he had no experience as an author before the publication of his first novel, and that he just wanted to try writing. "I didn't know how to write in Japanese, so I had to develop my own personal style," he said.
Although "Hear the Wind Sing" was published earlier and is now famous, Murakami said his first book as a full-time writer, "A Wild Sheep Chase," published ten years later in 1989, is what he considers his "beginning as a serious writer."
Murakami discussed a common literary component of many of his novels, the doppelganger, where a character exists in multiple places at the same time.
"Right now, I am talking to you at Tufts, but at the same time I might want to be [in another place]," Murakami said. One of his most famous works, "Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World," published in 1985, utilizes the doppelganger technique.
When Hirata asked about Murakami's most famous novel, "Wind-up Bird Chronicle," which took three years to write and was published in three volumes in Japan due to its length, Murakami described his disjointed, on-and-off working style.
"I wrote the first chapter of 'Chronicle,' then took a break to write ['South of the Border, West of the Sun,' published in 1990]," he said. Murakami decided later that the first chapter of "Chronicle" fit better with "South of the Border," so he began to write "Chronicle" again.
"Wind-up Bird Chronicle" was originally intended to be a two volume piece.
"After two volumes I thought it was complete," he said. "After three or four months I realized I had more to say, so I wrote the third volume." Murakami wrote the third volume in the United States, while he was teaching a class at Tufts.
Hirata then selected a series of Murakami's humorous short stories, translated into English, to read aloud. One story involves a girl who carries a wrench with her so she can break the collarbones of men who drive Nissans. Another tells the tale of two people who used the voice of Julio Iglesias to defend themselves against a giant sea turtle.
The program ended with a short question and answer session, which provided a forum for Murakami's wit. When asked about advice he could give to aspiring writers, Murakami kept it simple. "I never got any advice when I started writing," he said.
