Haruki Murakaki filled the Casino de Santiago last night to present De que estou a falar cando falo de correr , published by Galaxia. It was his second event of the day because the first one, an hour earlier, took place at the Rosal\u00eda de Castro Institute, where the Japanese writer had his first contact with the students who awarded him the San Clemente prize for his novel After Dark, published by Tusquets.<\/p>
-The book that Galaxia has just published, “De que estou a falar cando falo de correr”, insists on the idea that writing novels is like running a marathon. Are one thing and the other so parallel?<\/strong> If a novelist is a marathon runner, would a short story writer be like a hundred-metre runner?<\/strong> -In this same book, you explain that in human behaviour the physical is more important than the intellectual, that it is necessary to adapt the body to any activity.<\/strong> -But do you think that the emotional aspect is more important than the intellectual aspect?<\/strong> -However, he says in the book that while he runs he doesn’t think of anything concrete.<\/strong> -Do you think people in Europe still read Japanese literature as if it were something exotic?<\/strong> “Tokyo is a very different place from this one, although there is also squid and octopus there”. This is how Haruki Murakami explained his feelings on arriving in Compostela. “In Tokyo, moreover, there is much more noise”. The writer explained in the Casino that his story was simple: “I had a jazz club in Tokyo and I was happy because I could listen to music every day and at all hours”. When the writer turned 33, there was a change: “I had never written before, but I felt like it and I got published. It was that easy. With the same simplicity he took up marathon running: “It’s a sport that you have to face alone, I like to be alone and that’s why I took up running, naturally, in the same way that I took up writing, although I don’t know if I have a gift for it”. For the author of After Dark, these are quiet days because he has just delivered a new book to his Japanese publisher. He does not explain its content, but assures us that “it is a long work, written over the last two years”. It will be published in Japan in May and, according to the writer, there is still no date for the translation into Galician, “because it is a very long work and I don’t know how long it will take to translate it”. The writer said he was happy because he had finished his two years’ work and explained that, otherwise, “I couldn’t be here, I would lose my precise concentration, but now [the work] is finished and delivered”, and Murakami can enjoy “being in Santiago”. The Japanese writer, together with Luis Landero, Molina Foix and Anxos Sumai, will participate throughout the day in the activities that the Rosal\u00eda de Castro is developing around the San Clemente. <\/p>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Except jazz and The Beatles, there are few coincidences between Murakami and the author of the interview. Murakami passed through Santiago in 2009 and this was the conversation in which, if I remember correctly, we did not get to sit down. We didn’t go running either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":378254,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[90],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-378570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview"],"acf":[],"post_template":"entrevista","post_subscription":"no","pretitle":"","content_extract":"Haruki Murakaki filled the Casino de Santiago last night to present De que estou a falar cando falo de correr , published by Galaxia. It was his second event of the day because the first one, an hour earlier, took place at the Rosal\u00eda de Castro Institute, where the Japanese writer had his first contact...","reading_data":{"word_count":"1102","reading_seconds":"264","reading_time":{"minutes":4,"hours":0,"seconds":24},"reading_string":"4'24''","reading_human":"4 minutos"},"announcement":{"finishdate":"","finishdate_text":""},"opinion":{"subject":"","subject_info":[]},"event_info":{"startdate":"","starttime":"","enddate":"","endtime":"","entertainer":null},"interview":{"interviewed":"Haruki Murakami"},"phototext":{"text_author":"","text_photo":""},"video":{"video_source":""},"promotion":{"action":"default","action_data":""},"categories_list":[{"name":"Interview","id":90,"slug":"interview","parent":0,"template":"default"}],"visible_author":"Camilo Franco","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378570"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378570"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":378637,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378570\/revisions\/378637"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/378254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
-Writing a novel is something that needs preparation and training. You can’t do it without previous work. In that sense, I would say that they are parallel activities that need similar preparation: they need concentration and continuous effort. For two years I have been getting up at four in the morning and writing for five hours straight, seven days a week and four weeks a month. This cannot be done spontaneously, nor can running a marathon or a series of kilometres a day. A novel requires preparation, training and concentration, because without concentration it is not possible to write. On the other hand, in practice I started writing novels almost at the same time as I started running the marathon. For me they go hand in hand.<\/p>
-Not in my case. Books of short stories are written faster, but I keep more or less the same habits in one case or the other. In that sense, the relationship with literature doesn’t change whatever the genre.<\/p>
-I’m not much of a believer in that idea. As a writer, what I really do is to go deeper into myself. In a way I use myself because I don’t have many other options if I want to talk about things I know about. I delve into myself and from that I draw conclusions that are transformed into the stories I tell. In the case of this book there are more direct conclusions because I talk about things, such as running, which is an activity that I have done for many years, which has given me good results in more than one way and from which I have learnt to know better or to understand some things better.<\/p>
-I think both are important. It depends on the person and I think that one and the other go together and interact in such a way that it is not always easy to separate one from the other. For me, and as far as literature is concerned, they are even circumstances because it is very difficult to manage only one of the two. I don’t think it’s possible that life and literature can be possible if one of them is missing.<\/p>
-I say that I don’t think of anything in particular, that if you ask me I can’t say exactly what I think of when I run. But running has an effect that helps to clarify what you think about. It’s a way of accustoming the body to the concentration needed for writing.<\/p>
-I don’t think you can speak of one single Japanese literature. There are many types of Japanese literature. Some of it may be exotic for European readers. There is literature that is more local and literature that has a more international storyline or character.
<\/p>In Tokyo there is also squid and octupus<\/h3>\n\t\t\t\t
Murakami explained in the Casino that he had just arrived from Tokyo, where a curious story had happened to him when he was travelling in the underground. “At the back of the carriage there was a pretty girl who was looking at me for a while, then she came up to me and asked me if I was Murakami, I said yes while thinking: there are good days. Then she told me that the book she liked the most was my first book and that since then it had been getting worse. Then I thought there are bad days,” he said. The writer warned the audience that his next book “will be the best” of all those he has written. Maybe there will be more good days.<\/p>