Haruki Murakami at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Auditorium

The past few weeks have found me returning several times to memory-laden UC Berkeley; once for a Sigur Ros concert at the Greek theater, once for a visit to campus with an old friend on homecoming day, and several visits to its surrounding cafes and restaurants to meet with friends. My most recent trip to UCB was to Zellerbach Auditorium for a lecture by renowned author Haruki Murakami, and the event fit nicely with the feeling of being back there: a kind of disconnected familiarity. It felt perfectly natural to be there--I knew my way around without thinking--but distant; something from the past, exhausted of the potential for agency or motivation in my present life. Like moving around a Pac Man board from which all of the white dots have been eaten.

Murakami's writing is full of these kinds of dichotomies, examining the strange or missing in the present and familiar--the abstruse subtext of the everyday (you can put last that sentence in a blurb on the back of one of your books, Mr. Murakami). Often in a Murakami story we find a protagonist who is at first glance thoroughly ordinary, at least for all outward appearances: a homebody, 9-5 job, spends his free time reading classic literature on the couch, drinking beer, or ironing shirts--kind of a more fastidious, scholarly version of Raymond Carver's TV-watching alkie. This protagonist usually finds himself suddenly caught up in an extraordinary situation or, you could say, more deeply thrust into his present situation. The ordinary is split open, and he is confronted with the subtle extraordinary within. Emotions, personality traits, and thoughts are externalized, projected as objects and people in dreams or the material world; which, when you think about it, isn't too far off from reality. For example, a person might bring out a feeling of love in you, and if you were looking in on your own life as a story, paying extra close attention, you might say that a particular person symbolizes love for you, another lust, a cup of coffee pleasure, or whatever.

I kind of expected Murakami to be divorced from these characters and worlds he creates, with intellectual distance from them at least, and I guess he must have such distance; but he seemed to be just like them, his world not unlike his fictional worlds. Dressed in khakis, a light sweater, white socks, and casual shoes, he cut a less-than-imposing figure. In opening remarks, he spoke in a matter-of-fact manner, and talked about himself and his entrance into writing. His life story seems to be like one of his fictions (or is it the other way around?)--he suddenly decided, at age 29, that he could write a novel after seeing Dave Hilton, an American ball player, hit a double at a Yakult Swallows baseball game an Jingu Stadium in Tokyo. He explained how after this he started writing just for fun while running a jazz club in Tokyo, how he has a great fondness for Russian literature (and has read The Brothers Karamazov four times), and talked about his poor critical reception in Japan, where his work was totally unlike anything else in contemporary literature. He and host/scholar Roland Kelts then read the Murakami story "The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes"--a story which discusses a character who, like Murakami, goes against the 'old guard' in Japan--in Japanese and English, resp.

In a Q&A session with Kelts following the readings, Murakami revealed his writing process and daily routines as well as some other interesting tidbits. He gets up really early every day, about 5 am, and goes to bed around 9 pm every night. He spends his first few hours awake at his computer, writing, a process he described as "going to a dark place" and a creative exploration that often begins with a singe word or scene; he called this process "a joy" and compared his keyboard to a musical instrument, one he has proved to play with virtuosity. He mentioned that he needs to be strong in order to visit this dark place, and one way he finds strength is through running; he follows up his writing sessions with a good, long run. After running, he runs errands and satisfies engagements, driving around town. During this period, he likes to listen to rock music and sing in his car (he mentioned that Radiohead is one of his favorite bands and that he missed a chance to meet with Thom Yorke in Tokyo in order to do the speaking engagement at UC Berkeley); at other times in the day, he listens to classical and jazz. One of the most fun parts of the Q&A was Murakami's discussion of writers' obsessions. He explained that all good writers are consumed to some degree by obsessions, his own being cats, sofas, and elephants. Writers and readers of his work shouldn't have been at all surprised by this revelation (all of those things make frequent appearences in his work) but I think all representatives of both groups in the audience were delighted by this affirmation of weirdness as a way of life.