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.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.