Haruki Murakami reads at MIT

I was lucky I got to the venue at MIT when I did...6:15 PM. Something told me that I must secure a good seat early. The lecture hall, Room 10-250 was already half-full, with most of the good seats taken. People kept pouring in. It is not everyday that Murakami reads in public. (Of course it is only later I find via Google that he is currently teaching a semester at Harvard and has been at Princeton and Tufts before...in fact while he was finishing up the Wind-up Bird Chronicle).



The MIT lecture hall had an archetypal MIT ambience...lots of geeky looking people floating in...and the blackboard filled with scribblings on Lagrange Equations...lambdas and x-squared and y-squared and theta and other math gobbledygook! But it was oppressively hot in that room and the reason had been spelled out on the blackboard too: "The Cold water pipe is broken. Fixit (must be the MIT handyman) is aware of it." Oh well...fixit was not going to fixit before the Murakami lecture...

People kept trickling in and soon (at about 6:30) there were hardly any seats remaining. So people sat on steps, on the floor by the dais and stood in aisles. So packed was the room that there was almost no room there. Then somehow the MIT polic/fire-dept walked in and they ordered everyone w/o a seat out. This was a heart-rending scene. People did not want to leave, who knows where they had travelled from just to catch a glimpse of Murakami...but rules are rules, in this country and they had to leave. What a shame...I truly wish MIT's Humanities dept. had thought of an eventuality like this...or at least, could have tried arranging this elsewhere on a short notice...

But at any rate, once the excess capacity had been shed, Murakami was introduced and he came forward to make some very lively observations about his own writings, how some people like it, some don't and some just don't care -- and that was ok with him, he took it to be a truism and made it his mantra. He stated the influence of the improvisational nature of jazz on his writing, in the process of which he realized the importance of spontaneity and the unexpected. Apparantly, he had no inclination or desire to write till the age of 29, when out of the blue, he felt he must write, one fine day...

He revealed that he writes a few pages of a story in Japanese and then reads it aloud to himself to get a feeling of the sound of the story. In fact, he bagan reading his "Super Frog saves Tokyo" in Japanese and then read the beginning from the English translation. The rest of the story in English was taken over, in rather animated style, by a professor of MIT (who I did not recognize). The even ended with a round of questions. Murakami's answers as to his style, his deliberate use of surrealism and fantasy was: he uses whatever his imagination comes up with. So he did not admit to any forced, pre-meditated act of constructing any elaborate fantasy.
He also stated, in response to a question, that his "Norwegian Wood" was quite different from all others.