Murakami's Writing Style

"He wrote "Kafka" in six months, starting, as he usually does, without a plan. He spent one year revising it. He follows a strict regimen. Going to bed around 9 p.m. - he never dreams, he said - he wakes up without an alarm clock around 4 a.m. He immediately turns on his Macintosh and writes until 11 a.m., producing every day 4,000 characters, or the equivalent of two to three pages in English.

He said that his wife has told him that his personality changes when he is writing his first draft, and that he becomes difficult, nontalkative, tense and forgetful.

"I write the same amount every day without any day off," he said. "I absolutely never look back and go forward. I hear Hemingway was like that."

Unlike Hemingway, Mr. Murakami leads a healthy lifestyle. In the afternoons, to build up his stamina to keep writing, he works out for one or two hours. Whenever he is in Tokyo, he also visits old-record stores, especially ones in the youth mecca of Shibuya, which appears to be the unnamed setting of "After Dark," published last fall to relatively little attention here."

A Rebel in Japan Eyes Status in America
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
New York Times
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