List $57.98

Haruki Murakami - Audio book performed by Rupert Degas - Unabridged Fiction - 8 COMPACT DISCS - 9 hours, 35 minutes

Publisher, Naxos Audiobooks (July 2006)

Listen to an MP3 audio clip.

About Haruki Murakami - High Quality - 9.1 MB MP3 audio clip.

About Haruki Murakami - Low Quality - 4.5 MB MP3 audio clip.

A Wild Sheep Chase is one of Murakami’s most fantastical novels. An advertising executive, infatuated with a girl who possesses the most perfect ears (an erotic charge for him) uses a picture of a sheep with a star on its back. This catapults him into a weird adventure to find the mythical sheep up in the wilds of Hokkaido, Japan’s northern island. There are strange encounters, a hotel with an extra disappearing floor, and other oddities. A Wild Sheep Chase is an early Murakami work, but its remarkable and individual voice makes it one of the most thrilling of his books.

About the Performer: Rupert Degas can be heard reading True History of the Kelly Gang, PS I Love You, If You Could See Me Now, Lord Loss, Demon Thief, Slawter and The Saga of Darren Shan. He is also the voice of Pantalaimon in Philip Pullman's Northern Lights. He has lent his voice to numerous cartoons, including Mr. Bean, Robotboy and Bob the Builder and has performed in over thirty radio productions, including The Gemini Apes, The Glittering Prizes and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He spent eighteen months in the West End performing in the comedy Stones in his Pockets.

About the Author: On 18 November Haruki Murakami, (Visiting Artist in Residence, at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard May 2005–May 2006) gave a lecture at the First Parish Church in Cambridge, Boston. The church was full – so oversubscribed that it was relayed by video into two overflow rooms.

Murakami, dapper in a suit and tie, and looking fit as befits a regular marathon runner, sat quietly while he was introduced by Jay Rubin, one of his principal translators, and then spoke for about forty-five minutes. He was informative, entertaining and above all sincere but light-hearted. Here are edited highlights:

‘The first time I did a book signing was in Princetown. Fifteen people came. It was a most peaceful hour of my life. I spent the time trying to remember all the train stations in Tokyo.

I want to talk about short stories. When I spoke at UCLA ten years ago I spoke about novels, so this time I will talk about short stories. ‘I write a novel every few years, and I write short stories in between novels. As well as essays and translations. I love writing. If I had to choose one format I would choose the novel, because it is so effective. But it takes a long time to write. You have to toughen yourself for a long journey. That is why I run marathons.

But I write short stories for my enjoyment. A single line of dialogue may come into my mind and I sit down and start to write. I don’t need a plot. I just write that line and then see what happens. It is not easy, it takes concentration and imagination. It generally takes me a few days to write a short story. Then I will re-write and polish over a three-month period.

Scott Fitzgerald wrote short stories quickly. Raymond Carver worked in many jobs to maintain his family. He never had time to write a novel, so he decided only to write short stories. He would write the outline of a short story in a single setting. I met him in 1983 and he told me that the short story is closer to poetry than to a novel. I think that is a very interesting remark.

So, in my short stories, I have the first line and the story then makes its own way.

“I’m in the kitchen cooking spaghetti when the woman calls.” This was my first line from The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women. It raises questions. Who was the woman who called and what will happen to the spaghetti and why was he cooking spaghetti at noon? The story developed from there.

I did think: maybe the spaghetti gets mad and attacks the man. But I dropped the idea and decided to keep the story straight. Well, almost straight.

Later, I found that the story had potential to expand beyond that short piece, and some years later it became A Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. At first, that line didn’t seem much, but this tiny fragment turned into the longest novel I have written and I think one of my best. Four novels have started this way : Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Norwegian Wood, Sputnik Sweetheart and Wind-up Bird.

In a short story you can test anything. Things you overhear from the next table in a restaurant, or a dream that you had last night. I was in Honolulu and I came across a yellow T shirt which said ‘Tony Takitani’. Who was this Tony Takitani? What did the T-shirt mean? This was before the days of the internet so I couldn’t find out. But it inspired me to write his life story.

After many years my editor found Tony Takitani. It turned out he was the Japanese representative in the House of Hawaii – a lawyer. I don’t know whether he is a good lawyer or not. But at least he was a Democrat. A writer can experiment with the short story. Only one story out of ten is truly wonderful. The short story is made to fail. The rest may be okay – it is okay if it is not too bad. Writers shouldn’t worry about failures.

Like a surfer, what the writer had to do is to catch the wave at the highest point. Surfers know that the best waves come in threes. One has to get the rhythm of the wave, to find the natural rhythm of the waves. In the haiku tradition, writers would be given a theme, and they would have to turn out many poems on that poem. Only a few were really good.

After the earthquake in Kobe in 1995, I decided to write six stories. I did them in just eight weeks. When I started I set myself three rules.

They all had to be written in the third person.
They had to be connected with the Kobe earthquake.
They had to avoid actually being involved in the earthquake or even scenes in Kobe.

The reaction of readers was very interesting. The most popular seemed to be Superfrog saves Tokyo. It wad a weird plot – the situation is quite fantastic, but it seemed to stand out. It became the central story of the collection. I believe I reached the top of the wave when I wrote that story. The other stories supported and surrounded it.

The worst thing a writer can do is to plan everything in a short story. If you do that, it will never find its own way. In January and February I wrote five stories. Five stories in just five weeks. It was an exhaustive and a feverish time. They became Five Strange Tales from Tokyo. I used an old Japanese technique. I had one theme – strangeness and weirdness. They had to be unusual but intentionally, this time. I made a list of certain words and ideas that popped into my head, like a staircase and a female tightrope walker and kidney stones. There were twenty of them that just came to me independently. There was no apparent connection between them. I used three items for each story – fifteen items in all. The rest I threw away. I am sorry – please forgive me. Writing is a game – a tough game but a game! I have to have some fun when I write. If I don’t have any fun as a writer, it is a lonely and hard job, writing all day by myself! Writing is like a making a video game and playing it at the same time. Your left hand is playing the game and your write hand is writing the programme at the same time. There is a feeling of a split in oneself. I have never tried to write stories this way and I wasn’t confident that it would work. But I found I could write the stories more quickly. Working from these key words seemed to unlock the door to certain areas of my brain that I hadn’t used before. I was able to create something different. I am not saying that I could write stories out of any twenty ideas given by someone else. It wouldn’t work. The twenty items, though spontaneous, are linked through me. They are intertwining with each other in a deep place. They had a reason to come to the surface of my mind in the first place, and half the work was done. I just had to hold on to my horse. I knew if I held on tight, the horse would bring me to the end.

In some ways, a narrative is like a dream. You don’t analyze a dream – you just pass through it. A dream is sometimes healing and sometimes it makes you anxious. A narrative is the same – you are just in it. A novelist is not an analyst. He just transforms one scene into another. A novelist is one who dreams wide awake. He decides to write and he sits down and dreams away, then wraps it into a package called fiction which allows other people to dream. Fiction warms the hearts and minds of the readers. So I believe that there is something deep and enduring in fiction, and I have learned to trust the power of the narrative.’

Having spoken fluently in good English, Murakami then took questions:

Question: Why are you interested in ears.
Haruki Murakami: At some point in my life I was interested in ears. But not now. Those ears are gone.

Q: He was asked about the cultural differences between Japan and the West in his novels.
HM: I don’t write about cultural differences but about cultural icons which relate to everyone across the world.

Q: Dreams?
HM: I don’t dream at all. I use all those things in writing so I have no stock to draw on for my dreams.

Haruki Murakami commented:

Writing novels is like holding to a wild horse. You have to be physically strong and go to the end of the road. That is why I run.

I don’t read critics. It is mostly for my health. I don’t want other people to analyse my books! But I like analysing other people’s books. Other writers I like: Kim O’Brien, Raymond Carver, Russell Banks.

When I write about someone eating a cucumber or drinking beer, I want the reader to feel that they want to eat a cucumber or go to the refrigerator for a beer. And the same when I write about sex...