haruki murakami

Anyway I think I learned quite a few things from my job. A few years ago a book titled "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" became a big bestseller here in the U.S., and in my case the same thing can be said: "All I need to know I learned in my jazz bar." I acquired various knowledge at the schools that I attended, but frankly speaking, this kind of knowledge didn't help me very much when writing a novel. I have no idea of maintaining that the school education is meaningless, but I rarely met a situation when it came home to me how important my school education was. When I was a small boy, my mother told me that "If you don't work hard now, you will have regrets for not having studied harder after having grown up." Her advice gave me a vague feeling that she might be right, but still I can't understand what she really meant. That's because after grown up, I've never regretted that "I should have studied harder when young." It is my twenties that taught me some truth about how I should live, and in those days I was literally engaged in physical labor day after day. I spent every day in my twenties working both physically and desperately hard in order to pay my debts every month. I could not think about anything else even if I tried. But as a result, that kind of hard labor nourished me most. Labor was the best teacher to me and my "true university." For instance, managing a bar, I have a lot of customers every day, and not everybody necessarily likes my place, or more accurately, just a few of themdo. But strange to say, you can manage to carry on your business if one or two customers out of ten really like your place and if they wish to "drop by this bar again." Sometimes you can have a better result when only a few out of ten really love your place rather than when eight, or nine customers merely feel that "it is not bad." This lesson came home to me, while I was running my bar, through the pains as if to have all the bones in my body crushed. Even when many people speak harshly about my book, I can believe, firmly and in the daily sense brewed through my own experiences, that it doesn't matter so long as one or two of them intuitively understand what I want to express. It became an invaluable lesson to me. Without these experiences, it might have been much harder for me to live as a novelist and some malicious comments on my book might have disturbed my own pace. When I talked about these things with Ryu Murakami (one of the contemporary writers in Japan; his novel "Almost Transparent Blue" in 1976 won the coveted Akutagawa Award and the Gunzou Award for New Writers), he was impressed and exclaimed that "You are really great, Haruki. I'll get mad by not being praised by all of the ten critics." But his comment, on the contrary, impresses me because it certainly sounds like himself.Though I have no idea of boasting of myself - it isn't even worth boasting of, I'm not a person to think by using my brain, but rather a person to do so by actually moving my body. I am a person who can learn or write only through the body. That is because I used to make my living by making use of my body from morning till night. That is everything the word 'work' meant to me. This character of mine sometimes makes me feel out of place in "the world of literature." Partly this sense of "out of place" might have urged me to go abroad and live away from Japan for such a long time. The reason I cannot do without my favorite jogging and swimming may have the same origin.

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