Even at a time like this, the street is bright enough and filled with people coming and going, people with places to go and people with no place to go; people with a purpose and people with no  purpose; people trying to hold back time and people trying to urge it forward. The date is just about to change. I think about the old days a lot. Memory is so crazy. You know what I think, she says, that people’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.

 

Haruki Murakami grew up in the 1950s in a country fueled by the very darkest memories, memories of a shameful war, of devastation, humiliation and defeat. The cult hero of Japanese literature when Murakami was growing up was Yukio Mishima, a nationalist, a militarist, a writer obsessed with Japan’s past and traditions, who ended up committing hara-kiri, in the ultimate act of devotion to his samurai ideals. Murakami despised everything Mishima stood for. He wrote, all I could think about when I began writing fiction in my youth was how to run as far as I could from the Japanese condition. I wanted to distance myself as much as possible from the curse of Japanese.