1. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. XXII, no. 2, NEW JAPANESE FICTION, published in 2002

In an interview in this issue (Sinda Gregory, Toshifumi Miyawaki, and Larry McCaffery, “It Don’t Mean a Thing , If it Ain’t Got That Swing: An Interview with Haruki Murakami”) he is asked if jazz has had “any influence on your writing in any way?”

Haruki Murakami: Not consciously. Jazz is just my hobby. It is true that I was listening to jazz for ten hours a day for several years, so maybe I was deeply influenced by this kind of music–the rhythm, the improvisation, the sound, the style

And he is also asked if he would “describe your writing as being improvisational at all?”

HM: Rhythm is more important to me than notions of improvisation. When I’m writing, I always thinking of rhythm. “It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing.”

2. In the introduction to his book of short stories Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, 2006, he “likens short-story writing to jazz improvisation, each story taking him in unknown directions.”

And, after more googling, and to return to the question of Surrealism, I find that in his essay called “Hot Jazz” (first published in Negro: An Anthology, in 1934) Robert Goffin writes that jazz was the “the first form of surrealism,” going further to say that “what Breton and Aragon did for poetry in 1920, Chirico and Ernst for painting, had been instinctively accomplished as early as 1910 by humble Negro musicians.”

His strange literary riffs and the extraordinary, unpredictable development of his narratives seems to me to be more closely connected to the improvisational nature of jazz. He doesn’t try to be ‘out there’, he just knows how to improvise.

You are right: there is a difference between the Surrealist methodology of automatic writing and starting a novel with a premise and then letting it unfold…You speak of “logical and even practical steps” to “unravelling” a narrative, but I don’t think that was what Murakami was saying about his own process. The worlds he depicts in novels such as Hard Boiled Wonderland… or Kafka on the Shore are anything but “logical,” and this seems to me to be an indication of the way in which Mr. Murakami writes. While he is not a Surrealist in the “classical” sense, I do find that his stories meander into places completely unexpected, and that they go there only because he allows them to move freely into those strange and often “illogical” areas, into “the darkness” so exquisitely exemplified by the well in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (also pertinent is his comment about not editing/reworking whatever comes out, no matter how bizarre). So, in that sense, at least, I consider him a Surrealist, though his narratives are more “cohesive” because his influences are people like Carver and Salinger, rather than Duchamp and Breton…

~m

About darkness, I am reminded of Coetzee’s adorable (yes, for me she is!) character Elizabeth Costello who wonders whether a novelist can return “unscathed” from “venturing into the darker territories of the soul” to write about them. He’s talking about Paul West’s novel about “the Nazi forrest of horrors”. (Elizabeth Costello, Viking, 2003, p160.) Costello believes a writer cannot return from the darkness “unscathed.”

You know, Murakami-san has been saying this for years. I have to agree that it helps to be physically strong to ward off the demons that drive one to write (and, boy, what a masochistic activity to engage in!). What I find to be so intriguing about Murakami’s process is that he begins to write without more than the faintest inkling of what any given story/novel is going to be about and just intuitively trusts in the act of writing itself. In the interview from which you quote, it says:

He starts with no blueprint or master plan, just a vague notion of how the first few pages might look. As if he were turning on a faucet, the ideas begin to flow. “For instance, when I wrote Kafka on the Shore … I had an image of the first three or four pages,” he says. “I didn’t know what was going to happen next, but, as I was writing those three or four pages, I had the next idea.” Having never experienced writer’s block, his faith in the process, he says, is such that he never reworks or rewrites.

I think we can all learn something from this. Is it safe to say that Murakami is a sort of modern-day proto-Surrealist? I know that he dislikes labels, and that his fiction has a broader appeal than the fictions of a Breton or of a Lautreamont, but process-wise this seems fairly close to the mark.

Thanks for posting this.

Best,
~m

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“The deeper I go, the darker it gets”
Peter Gabriel: “Darkness”