Frank Galati Quotations

Murakami's characters sense the potential liquification and destruction of everything. The aftershocks are psychological, and can be seen in characters who are some distance from the epicenter of the chaos in both time and space. The rifts, the fissures -- and those words are repeated often in the text -- are inside them now: there are separations and openings in their hearts, wounds and cracks in their psyches.

Murakami has said that what always fascinates him most are the things he doesn't understand. And his work is filled with people who are in that somewhat inchoate state of being on the threshold of knowing, but not quite knowing -- which can be maddening, but which can also make you giddy.

For years I would turn to James Joyce's short story collection, The Dubliners, in the Performance of Fiction course I teach at Northwestern University,

the deck of the ship which Grace captains, to the court of Queen Elizabeth I where the two remarkable women once met.

They were celebrities, and if anyone thought it was strange that these two women who were so strange were a couple, they didn't say anything.

I'm sad to sense that she may be evaporating into obscurity, because she's enormously important as a writer and as an influence on other writers and other artists.

I hear this production very much as a kind of chamber music work. And as it happens, Murakami ia a great music lover and even ran a jazz club in Tokyo.