Ryu Murakami (RM): Well, I was pretty much surprised that a writer like you had come out from America. The way you see things is very unique. But first of all, I would like to ask you how you usually start a new novel. What kind of process do you go through?

SE : I would be thinking about the novel for a while before I start. I feel the need to, what we call in the United States, "build up a head of steam," to gather my energy for the work, which is not to say that I spend too much time thinking it out exactly. I want to have a sense of the work, I want to have a sense of the characters. I have a general map in my head where I'm going to go, but at the same time, I want to leave room for the surprises, the accidents. And then I usually write a book relatively quickly, within somewhere between eight and twelve months. As I go along, I revise intensely.
Reading a book like "Coin Locker Babies" (1980, English trans.1996) for instance, I found myself wondering how much of it came out of the conscious and how much of it came out of the subconscious. Because it is, on the one hand, a very dreamlike book in certain ways, but on the other hand, the scope of it is so large and the sense of narrative detail within that scope is so intricate. I could imagine that the book just came into you in flashes, but on the other hand, it was easy to imagine that the book might have been outlined very meticulously.

RM : In the case of "Coin Locker Babies", the way I wrote it was very much like yours. Ever since I made my debut as a writer, I had always been interested in movie making. Before writing this book, I was preparing some scripts for a certain director, and actually this book was the result of three of these scripts combined together. So naturally, before writing this book, I had a sense of place and characters. But while actually writing this book, every time I set back and started writing, there occured a certain change, consciously as well as subconsciously. Even though the book had come out of a script for a movie, I unconsciously wanted to make something different, something that you could not depict in a movie. Probably the dreamlike or illusionary parts were for the book, not for the movie. It took me ten months to finish this.

SE : That's very fast for a novel of this length. One thing that I was struck by was that, for all of the wide ranging nature of what happens narratively in this book, and for all of the different ongoing adventures of the various characters, the book never loses track of the single defining trauma which comes at the very beginning, and the book always finds a way to refer back to the beginning. It always finds a way for that beginning to have a resonance in everything else that happens.

RM : Actually, several years before I started writing this book, there were several cases in Japan where babies were abandoned in coin lockers. Most of these babies were already dead. The parents or whoever would throw away the corpse in coin lockers. However, some of these babies were still alive. Some would even survive. Now what if these babies grew up and found out that they had been cast away in a coin locker. Wouldn't it be easy for them to build up a tremendous hatred for the world? Wouldn't it be easy for them to want to destroy it?
Now when I found out about these babies who survived, I wondered. What words, what kind of philosophy would be useful enough to quench this hatred, to stop them from wanting to destroy the world? This triggered me into writing this book.

SE : The characters are suffering the most profound kind of alienation, which is to say, they are alienated from their own birth. The greatest holocaust of their lives has come on the very first day of their birth. Nothing else that happens to them can really be as terrible as that. And they know that.

RM : Also there was another hint. Before writing this book, I read an article about a certain way of treatment for emotionally unstable children. I think it was in America where they make them listen to a recording of the mother's heartbeat from within the body. Just the way you would hear it if you were in the womb. It seems that the sound of the heartbeat has the power to make people calm down and relax.
Now maybe I am going too far to say this, but this means that if you have heard this heartbeat sound from the womb (and of course everyone has), and if this heartbeat is so powerful, you should be able to overcome whatever trauma you are to experience. In other words, you can't use a trauma as an excuse to hate and want to destroy the world.

SE : I wasn't familiar with that technique. Of course in this book, if these characters were listening to the heartbeats of their mothers, they would be hearing the heartbeat of the person who betrayed them the most. It would calm them and enrage them at the same time.

RM : But important things do calm us and enrage us at the same time, don't they? That's the way it is. Now I would like to change the subject and ask another question. Are you making a record of your dreams, writing down your dreams?

SE : I did, for a novel that I wrote a couple of years ago, called "Amnesiascope" (1996). I wrote down my dreams partly because I'm now getting old enough that I don't remember anything. And I've never been really good at remembering my dreams to begin with.
It was during a period of time when I was having some unusual dreams; dreams that I sensed were perhaps important. I put some of the dreams in the novel, although I've always tended to wonder if people don't find other people's dreams a little boring, if dreams only have much resonance or metaphorical importance to the people who have them.
Nevertheless I think probably all of my work has been informed by my dreams. Even when I don't remember exactly what happens in the dreams, I remember the sense of the dreams. The echoes of the dreams stay in my head.

RM : I read "Tours of the Black Clock" (1989) and "Rubicon Beach" (1987) almost at the same time. But especially after reading "Rubicon Beach", I started to write down what I saw in my dreams. This is a very interesting task but also a very difficult one. First of all, since I'm a writer, I tend to make my dreams more interesting than it should be. Because of this I tend to forget the original version.
However, whenever it is written down precisely, I can read the record and re-experience the dream, even if, for example, half a year has passed since I really saw it. Your books are similar to this. They depict a world in which people can live or experience only through dreams. The strangeness, the wonder, the pleasure... it is impossible to see or feel or live in the world you depict when you are awake. It's not about a dream. It IS a dream. So, as I writer, I thought it would be a shame not to make a record of my dreams. It's been almost an year since I started. It has become quite a volume.
In "Tours of the Black Clock", where the protagonist rows a boat to an island where the Chinese live.... The mist and fog surrounding him, the girl in blue who suddenly appears.... It's so dreamlike. It is as if you were dragged into somebody else's dream, and that's the very pleasure of reading it. Even when a dead man or a dead body pops into the story, the reader is not at all surprised, because he knows he has wandered into a dreamworld. I find this very unique and I think that no other writer has done this before.

SE : Thank you very much. I don't know if any other writer has NOT done it. Since I am a pretty subconscious writer, I'm not even sure if it was something that I was really aware of. But as a matter of fact, after I wrote and published "Days Between Stations", the best compliment that I got, maybe the best compliment that I have ever got, was... somebody said to me one day, "You know, I was trying to think of this dream I had, and then I realized it wasn't a dream. It was your novel that I had read." So I became more aware of a certain kind of dream logic that I think probably dictates my books... in the same way that cinema can capture that dream logic.

RM : Of course the novel is a very old way of expression. To tell you the truth, it is hard to believe that it still exists. But anyway, all writers must, in one way or another, be aware of or be conscious of other kinds of expression within their own age. For example, the works of writers like Joyce or Proust are different from those of the writers who didn't know movies.
There are these writers known as magic realists who come mostly from South America. They depict what seems like an illusionary world, but as a matter of fact, for them, it is nothing but real.
Now your works...I've been trying to figure out how this type of work has become possible, and came to the conclusion that the secret probably lies in movies and pop culture. For example, you have the style of Mozart or Debussy, and at the same time you use the methods of Charlie Parker or Bob Dylan. And all kinds of culture are mixed up in your work. Not that you were directly influenced by them. It's just that you have a certain kind of resonance of the age that we live in. This is why I said, "No other writer has done this before."

SE : In at least much of American fiction over the last thirty or forty years, the American literary imagination has been usurped by movies and rock'n roll. And since that has not happened to the same extent in South America, the South American writers seem to have a conviction about their illusions that most North American writers don't have.
And part of the problem with most of North American fiction is that, I think, most of the writers have become intimidated by what they perceive to be their obsolescence. I've never really understood what postmodernism is, but I suspect that it is in some part a response to the latent obsolescence of fiction and that it is trying to overcome that obsolescence by making its artificiality its own point. It's an intention of postmodernism that I personally reject. I may be completely obsolete, I may be hundred years behind my time, but I still want to try to draw the reader into the reality of my work.

RM : It's OK not to be postmodern. Why not? And you are not obsolete at all. To the contrary, I think your work is the very new. Reading your books, I hear Bach, Bob Dylan, and also sometimes The Velvet Underground, --I don't know whether you like their music or not--Doors, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane. But at the same time, the music that I hear from your work is so unique. American pop music has not yet been able to produce the content or substance that your world has.

SE : Thank you again. When I was a film student at UCLA, I somehow intuitively decided that I needed to make a choice. I could either be a novelist or a film maker, but from the way I was creatively wired or creatively connected, I wasn't going to be able to do both. I'm struck by the fact that you are. I wonder if you feel a division in your creative psyche in order to do this, or if the literature informs the film and the film informs the literature. And finally I would just like to add that the Velvet Underground is the greatest American rock band of all.

RM : The switches or the channels that I use to write novels and to make movies are of course different. I guess I will have to explain how it is in Japan. Now Japan is a very small, flat, unified world. Everything is very small and very much the same. There are no Others. It intends to be relaxing but it can also be dull. You can't meet with the New, or the Strange.
When you make movies you are able to meet all kinds of people, the actors, the film crew, etc., and all of you are bound by a certain kind of risk. As you know, making a movie is like gambling, you have to take a risk. And these encounters can be very useful in my fiction writing. They produce good feedback.

SE : I assume "Coin Locker Babies" came out before the movie "Tokyo Decadence". Did "Tokyo Decadence" have the same impact in Japan that it had outside of Japan?

RM : In Japan, it was almost neglected. Of course the young people seemed to have liked it but the academic movie critics almost ignored it.

SE : I first saw "Tokyo Decadence" (Japanese title "Topaz",1988) at the 1992 Toronto Film Festival. People lined up for hours in order to see it. It was THE sensation of the film festival. I've now seen it three times. The third time was yesterday in Nagoya. The first time I saw it.... Being squeamish about certain things and worrying about the young woman in the film, I watched it in a state of anxiety. And the second time I saw it I had the reaction that the audience at Toronto had, which was finding the film in some ways outrageously funny, with the emphasis on "outrage." And the third time I saw it, it struck me as a really lyrically beautiful movie. The decadence, and even the depravity at times, had a lyricism about it that I found hypnotic and sometimes very sexy.
But here is the strange fact: I've never seen the ending of it. The first time, I left ten minutes before the end because I had to go to another screening of a film that I'd been assigned to write about by a newspaper. The second time, I was watching it on the video. I was house-sitting at my parent's house and my mother came home early, so I had to hastily turn the video off. And the third time was yesterday in Nagoya where we had to turn the video off because my hosts in Nagoya were determined to take me to see a Buddha shrine.
And each time I have been interrupted at exactly the same place in the movie. Now it's become like a sexual dream that always gets interrupted. You always wake up right before the climatic moment. I suspect that, just for some reason that only the universe understands, I'm not supposed to know what happens at the end of this movie.

RM : Maybe so. Maybe you should tell me where you were interrupted so I can cut the movie there.

SE : It's where the heroine is stoned and out of it, and she has gone to look for the man she is in love with and the police are dragging her off.

RM : Yes, maybe that IS a good place to end the movie.

NOTE : This is an English excerpt of an article which has appeared in the July issue of the literary magazine, "Shincho".