Why I Read Haruki Murakami

Murakami writes because writing is a form of expression and he is going to keep writing the same book until he captures that “something” and fills in that void.

Murakami is fighting the different ways that society regulates our desires, our responses to trauma. That’s why I think Murakami is primarily an author of memory, much like Kazuo Ishiguro. We rarely reckon with our personal and cultural pasts, yet everything we touch, the music that we listen to, and even the food we eat is pregnant with memory.