Murakami Interview
I’ve never spent $17 on a magazine except once: the January 2007 issue of GQ Korea. I was in a Korean bookstore in Los Angeles, looking for Yi Sang’s fiction (I’ll talk about Yi Sang in detail later, such a weird, beautiful writer) when I saw the magazine, with Matt Damon on the cover. Anyways, I bought the magazine because it had a 10-pp interview with the elusive Haruki Murakami, who shuns interviews in general. Perhaps the fact that the interviewer was not a professional literary critic, but a journalism student at University of Hawaii, made Murakami warm up to her – I’ve never read any other Murakami interview in which he is as relaxed as he is in the GQ Korea interview. The interviewer’s name is Jin Young Lee, and I have no idea how she tracked Murakami down in Hawaii. I’ll be posting segments from her interview in three parts or so, in my hasty and imperfect translation.
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