About Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami is an award-winning Japanese writer well-known for works such as Norwegian Wood (1987), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95), Kafka on the Shore (2002), and 1Q84 (2009–10).
Haruki Murakami Writing
To get a taste for Haruki Murakami‘s writing with relatively minimal investment of time and money, I recommend you start by reading his personal history ‘Abandoning a Cat’ Memories of my father that appeared in The New Yorker magazine.
Needless to say, my father’s recounting of this cold-blooded beheading of a man with a sword became deeply etched in my young mind. To put it another way, this heavy weight my father carried—a trauma, in today’s terminology—was handed down, in part, to me, his son. That’s how human connections work, how history works. It was an act of transference and ritual. My father hardly said a word about his wartime experiences. It’s unlikely that he wanted to remember this execution or to talk about it. Yet he must have felt a compelling need to relate the story to his son, his own flesh and blood, even if this meant that it would remain an open wound for both of us.
…..
I am the ordinary son of an ordinary man. Which is pretty self-evident, I know. But, as I started to unearth that fact, it became clear to me that everything that had happened in my father’s life and in my life was accidental. We live our lives this way: viewing things that came about through accident and happenstance as the sole possible reality.
To put it another way, imagine raindrops falling on a broad stretch of land. Each one of us is a nameless raindrop among countless drops. A discrete, individual drop, for sure, but one that’s entirely replaceable. Still, that solitary raindrop has its own emotions, its own history, its own duty to carry on that history. Even if it loses its individual integrity and is absorbed into a collective something. Or maybe precisely because it’s absorbed into a larger, collective entity.
Abandoning a Cat, Memories of my father. By Haruki Murakami
The New Yorker, September 30, 2019
Note this is a translation from Japanese. If the translation reads so beautiful, I wonder how the original might read.
Haruki Murakami Quotes
Here are a few thought-provoking and soul-searching quotes about love, life, relationships, and self-awareness. And, of course, memories. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I do.
Norwegian Wood Quotes
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
Nobody likes being alone that much. I don’t go out of my way to make friends, that’s all. It just leads to disappointment.
But who can say what’s best? That’s why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.
Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it’s time for them to be hurt.
Letters are just pieces of paper,” I said. “Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.
No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.
What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for and to do it so unconsciously.
People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.
Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene, I hardly paid it any mind. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that eighteen years later I would recall it in such detail. I didn’t give a damn about the scenery that day. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about the beautiful girl walking next to me. I was thinking about the two of us together, and then about myself again. It was the age, that time of life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a boomerang, to me. And worse, I was in love. Love with complications. The scenery was the last thing on my mind.
Things like that happen all the time in this great big world of ours. It’s like taking a boat out on a beautiful lake on a beautiful day and thinking both the sky and the lake are beautiful. So stop eating yourself up alive. Things will go where they’re supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course.
Kafka on the Shore Quotes
Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.
Listen up – there’s no war that will end all wars.
Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time.
Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.
Adults constantly raise the bar on smart children, precisely because they’re able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense of accomplishment they innately have. When they’re treated like that, children start to crawl inside a shell and keep everything inside. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them to open up again. Kids’ hearts are malleable, but once they gel it’s hard to get them back the way they were.
1Q84 Quotes
I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.
That’s what the world is , after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.
If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life. Even if you can’t get together with that person.
When he woke up the next day, the world was still there, and things were already moving forward, like the great karmic wheel of Indian mythology that kills every living thing in its path.
“Komatsu’s view is that there are always two sides to everything,” Tengo said. “A good side and a not-so-bad side.”
The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. Depending on the nature and direction of the problem, a solution could be suggested in the narrative.
“If that’s true, life is pretty dark.” “Maybe so.” “But if you can love someone with your whole heart—even if he’s a terrible person and even if he doesn’t love you back—life is not a hell, at least, though it might be kind of dark. Is that what you’re saying?” Ayumi asked. “Exactly.”
Sputnik Sweetheart Quotes
I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.
The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.
Why do people have to be this lonely?
What’s the point of it all?
Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves.
Why?
Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Quotes
Spend your money on the things money can buy.
Spend your time on the things money can’t buy.
Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage Quotes
No, forget wasn’t the right word. The pain of having been so openly rejected was always with him. But now, like the tide, it ebbed and flowed. At times it flowed up to his feet, at other times it withdrew far away, so far away he could barely detect it. Tsukuru could feel, little by little, that he was setting down roots in the new soil of Tokyo, building a new life there, albeit one that was small and lonely. His days in Nagoya felt more like something in the past, almost foreign.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
But talent only functions when it’s supported by a tough, unyielding physical and mental focus. All it takes is one screw in your brain to come loose and fall off, or some connection in your body to break down, and your concentration vanishes, like the dew at dawn.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Other Quotes
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It’s important to combine the two in just the right amount.
After Dark
Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.
Dance Dance Dance
Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It’s like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven’t seen in a long time.
I’m not intelligent. I’m not arrogant. I’m just like the people who read my books.
I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It’s a kind of fuel.
My ideal for writing fiction is to put Dostoyevsky and Chandler together in one book.
And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.
Haruki Murakami Books and Preview
1Q84 – Books One and Two
India | International
1Q84 – Book Three
India | International
Norwegian Wood
India | International
Kafka on the Shore
India| International
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Amazing…..
Thanks!