I wanted to talk to Haruki Murakami about metonymy and spaghetti. Metonymy is the inverse of metaphor, a type of figurative language in which the link between signifier and signified is one of contiguity rather than, as in metaphor, similarity. For example, "the pen is mightier than the sword" contains two metonyms: "the pen" is related to the act of writing for which it stands because pens are used in writing; "the sword" is related to war by the same logic. Neither are similar to their metonymic signified (as, say, the world is like a stage in that all men and women "have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts"); they are related by a practical connection. Metaphor jumps from figurative to literal, while metonymy takes a baby step.

I began to read Murakami's work quite recently after being struck by a story he published last fall in the New Yorker entitled "The Year of Spaghetti." The plot is unusually simple for Murakami, whose novels seem to delight in bizarre conceits and extraordinary events: a man lives alone in 1971 and cooks spaghetti every day. One day he receives a phone call from a girl he knows, looking for a friend of his. He does not help her.

The story's most memorable feature is a metonymy: spaghetti for the loneliness of the protagonist (note that there is no similarity between spaghetti and loneliness—the connection is made because the man in the story cooks spaghetti while lonely). The story concludes with a beautiful and shattering question that drove me, headlong and breathless, to Murakami's novels: "Can you imagine how astonished the Italians would be if they knew that what they were exporting in 1971 was really loneliness?" The connection is wholly idiosyncratic and at the same time utterly mundane. This is Murakami's genius.

Murakami's novels are preoccupied with the weird, the extraordinary, and the supernatural. His most recent English publication, Kafka on the Shore (2005), is focused around the search for a mystical "entrance stone" and the unraveling of a quasi-magical transformation that took place during World War II. Its characters include a man who speaks to cats, an evil, suicidal Tokyo power player, and soldiers who have not aged since the war years. Fish fall from the sky, parallel worlds open and close, and time seems to have no meaning. One can get an idea of the sheer strangeness of his imagination by the titles of his most recent novels: Sputnik Sweetheart (1999), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994), and South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992). It is no wonder that Murakami is sometimes, though unjustly, thought of as a science fiction or fantasy author.

For all their fantastic elements, Murakami's novels are not fantasies. Balancing his tendency to tell stories of escape from the ordinary is an intense concentration on the real and the concrete. Murakami fills his stories with details of the mundane—descriptions of daily routines, of frustrated searches, of long car-rides. Two of Kafka 's most enigmatic characters have names familiar from everyday commerce: Johnnie Walker and Colonel Sanders. No matter how bizarre the surrounding events, we can always count on hearing what the characters ate and drank, when they went to the bathroom, and how they passed the long hours waiting for the next extraordinary occurrence.

"The Year of Spaghetti," though it does not include any supernatural events, shows Murakami's constant linkage of the alien with the everyday. The everyday, quite literally, is spaghetti: "From Sunday to Saturday, one Spaghetti Day followed another. And each new Sunday started a brand-new spaghetti week." Spaghetti is metonymically related to loneliness—to a continual lack of stimulation: "As a rule, I cooked spaghetti, and ate it, by myself. I was convinced that spaghetti was a dish best enjoyed alone. I can't really explain why I felt that way, but there it is."

The weird enters, as often in Murakami, through the phone ( Wind-Up, in fact, begins with a man cooking spaghetti and being interrupted by the phone). The girl on the line comes from a mysterious world, alien to the protagonist; it is the world of social interaction, of relationships between men and women. Whether out of fear or conviction, the protagonist wants no part of it and returns to his comfortable world of spaghetti. Through a series of contiguous relationships, we follow Murakami from spaghetti to loneliness and back to spaghetti, to the phone call interrupting and the girl's desperation, and back to loneliness. Murakami juxtaposes ordinary and extraordinary without hierarchy or portent. The world we know and the world we imagine are connected at discreet points where the two meet, where one moves from literal to figurative by a barely perceptible step. Murakami's storytelling functions by extended metonymy.

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Murakami was born in Kyoto , Japan in 1949, and published his first novel in 1979. At the time, he owned a jazz club in Tokyo , the Peter Cat, but soon gave it up to write full time. He has spent a great deal of time working in the US since his Norwegian Wood (1987) made him so popular that he chose to leave his native country. In 1991 he came to Princeton, following the trail of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and then moved to Tufts and became acquainted with the Boston area. Following the Kobe earthquake and terrorists attacks on the Tokyo subway, he returned to Japan in 1995 and published two books of nonfiction dealing with those events. In addition to his novels and nonfiction, Murakami is a prolific writer of short stories (collected in The Elephant Vanishes and After the Quake , among others) as well as a translator of English works into Japanese. I met him for a conversation at Harvard's Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, where he is spending the 2005-2006 year as Artist-in-Residence.

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JB: I'd like to talk about your story from the New Yorker , "The Year of Spaghetti," and the different things that spaghetti means in your work.

HM: I wrote that story more than twenty years ago, when I was much younger. I was in my early thirties at the time. That is one of my favorite stories. I remember how it was when I wrote it. I like spaghetti myself, very much. And I lived in Italy for a couple of years, so I ate spaghetti every day, as a meal. I just wanted to write some story about spaghetti, about making spaghetti every day. It's just an idea. And when I remember cooking spaghetti I remember other things, what happened as I was cooking spaghetti. It's strange, but many things can happen when you are cooking spaghetti. I don't know why.

JB: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle also begins with someone cooking spaghetti.

HM: Yes, that's right. The same thing. I cook myself, and I cook spaghetti very often. And it takes time to boil the water, so many things happen.

JB: It's funny that both of them are about cooking spaghetti and being interrupted.

HM: While you are cooking spaghetti, you think about many things. So many things happen in your mind while you are cooking spaghetti. And you are getting kind of philosophical while you are cooking spaghetti.

JB: In the story, spaghetti is also related to loneliness, and it's a similar scene in Wind-Up.

HM: Before I was married, I cooked spaghetti just for myself. It's a very lonely task, to cook spaghetti for yourself. So I think its kind of natural that you think about loneliness when you cook spaghetti for yourself. You know, when you're making a sandwich for yourself you don't think about loneliness so much. But when you cook spaghetti, it's different.

JB: Because of that waiting...

HM: That's right. And eating a sandwich by yourself is not so lonely, but eating spaghetti by yourself is different. You have to be conscious about your loneliness when you cook and when you eat spaghetti alone. It's a fact.

JB: How does being conscious of your loneliness come up in your works? It seems like a recurrent theme—men alone.

HM: A writer is very lonely. Its very lonely work to write. You have to be by yourself, on your own. And when you write something, you are by yourself, and you cannot go out and nobody can come in. And the loneliness is an essential thing for writing. That is one of the reasons I am pursuing loneliness, men alone. It is very important for a writer to be lonely. You have to look into yourself. You have to look deep. And you have to get used to the loneliness all the time. I have been writing fiction for close to thirty years, and loneliness is the essential part of myself.

JB: Could you talk about your process of writing? When and where do you write?

HM: I get up early in the morning—four o'clock. And I write. I just write, sitting at my desk for five hours every day. And nobody will disturb me when I'm writing. And I go to bed early, of course. I don't do much socialization. I just like to be myself.

JB: And what do you do when you're not writing?

HM: I run. And I listed to music. I am an enthusiastic vinyl collector, so I go to the used record shops to buy LPSs, and I listen to those.

JB: Music seems very important to your works. What do you listen to?

HM: All kinds. Mostly jazz, and classical, and rock and roll. Old rock. Almost everything.

JB: Do you listen to music while you're writing?

HM: No. When I write fiction, I don't listen to music. It's disturbing. But when I'm writing something different—essays, or translations, I listen to music.

JB: It sounds like you spend a lot of your day alone.

HM: Yeah. And, you know, walking around by myself is very natural for me. And I enjoy being alone. I'm an only child, I don't have any brothers or sisters, so it was natural for me to be alone in the house. I'm not tired of being alone.

JB: And you can take care of yourself—that also seems to be a theme of your works. Not relying on anyone—being self-sufficient, cooking for yourself, occupying your time.

HM: I like to be a man who can do everything—cooking, cleaning up, washing, Everything. I like to be alone completely in myself. I don't want to depend on anybody for anything. But sometimes you have to. But basically, I want to be independent in my life.

JB: In your works, characters often have to be self-sufficient because they go away from the world. Do you do that?

HM: No. In one way, to write a fiction is to go to the other world. And it happens every day. Its an ordinary thing to go through the wall and go to the other place, the other world. And its totally different, that world, from this one. And I'm an observer of that world. And I observe everything in that world, and I write it down. So that is the thing which is called fiction. I guess

if you don't have the feeling you can go through the wall, you can't be a writer.

JB: What about observing this world? How do you observe in day-to-day life? Are you always thinking and observing for your books?

HM: It doesn't mean much—this world. You are living in this world, you are observing many things of course. I am doing the same thing. I and you are doing the same thing. I am a writer, and probably you are not. And we are doing the same thing exactly. But you dream. And when you dream, you are in the other world. And when I am writing fiction, the same thing happens. It's just like a dream for the writer. If you are a writer you can make up your own dream consciously.

JB: How much of your observing your dream is watching and how much of it is creating?

HM: It's very difficult to answer. But, you know, you have to make up something sometimes. But mostly you are just following a dream. You are very spontaneous. And what you have to do is just to follow it.

JB: And do you ever come to a point where it doesn't go any further, and you have to push it?

No. If you're a good writer, it always flows to the end. You have to let them go, and if you push them, they will stop. You are just observing, so they are doing their own thing.

JB: And as you're observing, do you just write down exactly what they do?

HM: To write down what you see is a technique. But with a technique you can't be a writer. You have to have your technique and your imagination.

JB: Is the technique something you can learn?

HM: When I started writing, I was twenty-nine years old. I hadn't taken any course. I had no experience. So I had to make up something by myself. I have no idea what's happened to me, but something happened to me and I became a writer. I think I am a kind of natural writer. I had something from the start. I didn't learn anything.

JB: And was it a change when you decided that you were going to be a writer?

HM: All of a sudden one day, I got a kind of hunch that I could write. So I sat down and started writing.

JB: Do you think your work has changed over time?

HM: Technically, I have improved much. I began to be able to see more clearly what I wanted to write. It gets easier and easier for me year by year.

JB: Has your imagination changed, or is it mostly in your technique?

HM: My imagination has changed of course. But it is more or less the same. I have many things in my mind that attract me—say, spaghetti, wells, refrigerator, elephant, beer—cold beer. Things like that. War. Darkness. Music. I have so many things which attract me, and I don't know why.

JB: You come back to these themes—spaghetti, wells, music—again and again. Do they change over time?

HM: I don't write about spaghetti much these days. I don't know why. I have written about spaghetti too much. I have written about wells too much. I just need something else, something new.

JB: What is it now?

HM: Underground is a very big thing in me. Other than that, tunnels. These things are very attractive to me. I wrote Under Ground , which is a non-fiction book about subway trains, and I wrote about riding the subway in The End of the World and Hard Boiled Wonderland , and I wrote about the Tokyo subway. And many parts of that fiction was underground. I am so interested in these underground things. My new novel is named After Dark , and the background is Tokyo , downtown after dark. From midnight to 4 A.M.. And people have strange experiences before the morning. In that novel, I jut wanted to write about the darkness. The darkness outside of those people and the darkness inside those people. And the time from midnight to 4 o'clock in the morning is a metaphor for the darkness inside them. So I guess underground and darkness is a big thing to me.

JB: Is that in response to the subway attacks?

HM: I was always interested in the subway, the underground. And when the sarin gas attack happened, I just wanted to write what happened in the underground in Tokyo . So I interviewed many people, and I just wanted to know what happened to them in the subway attacks. But at the same time I wanted to know, what is the darkness, what is underground?

JB: When we think of darkness, we often think of evil. What else is darkness?

HM: Darkness is not bad and not good. We are living in this world of daylight, consciousness. But darkness is subconscious, unconscious. In the daylight you can see clearly and consciously. But in the darkness you have to experience many things that don't make sense. And it is difficult to accept those things in the darkness. I just wanted to write about this darkness. I have a feeling that darkness is a mutual thing between people. And when I write about my own darkness, if its good, you could feel the same feeling. My darkness and your darkness are mutual things. Mostly they come from unconsciousness, subconsciousness. I think that is the work of a fiction writer. If you're a scientist—a biologist or something like that, you have to be logical. You have to make everything clear. But if you are a fiction writer, you don't have to do that. You have to see what should be there. You go down into yourself, into the darkness, and in that darkness you find something. Only the writer can see that something, and write it down. Ordinary people can't do that, it's too dangerous to go deep down in their darkness. There are evil things in that darkness. But we get accustomed to be there, so we can see something and we can capture them, and we can write them down. That is a privilege for the writer. That is my version of fiction writing.

JB: You said that people's darknesses are similar—so it's only the writer who can see them?

HM: Everybody has his own or her own darkness inside. It's the same—yours and everybody's. But the writer is an explorer. He or she can explore the darkness in everything. So I wake up at four o'clock in the morning and I sit right down at my desk and go down, deep, into my darkness. I do it every day, and I'm a veteran explorer. It's very close to madness, I guess. Some people could go mad when they reach the darkness—it's dangerous.

JB: Where do you think that darkness comes from? Are we all born with it?

HM: Your mind. It comes from your mind. Your mind has brightness and darkness. It should. It's yin and yang.

JB: Do you use the brightness when you write?

HM: Brightness is a factor to control than darkness. If you dominate darkness, it's difficult. So you have to make your own sense of the world with the brightness. It can help you. I'm kind of a mystic person. I have my own darkness, but I think I can control that darkness with the power of the brightness. I think I have to be strong, physically, for that. So I run every day and I go to bed early and get up early. It's a discipline. You have to be physically right and strong.

JB: In order to write...

HM: When I became a full-time writer, I made up my mind to lead a physically healthy life. To run everyday, to get up early, to go to bed early, and eat natural food. So I have been doing that for twenty-five years. I think I am physically fit. My philosophy is that you have to be strong to concentrate on your work. I am kind of different from other writers. Many people go to bed very late and they get up late and drink too much and sometimes smoke too much. My lifestyle is kind of square for them. Many people think I am kind of strange. But I think I have to be strong to write the right things. I think spaghetti comes from my bright side, not my dark side.

JB: Are there things in that story that come from your dark side?

HM: Yes. Some girl calls him, the guy. She brings you a message from Howard and Howard is kind of disturbed, confused. That guy's world is kind of quiet, decent. So the other kind of thing, the yang, comes through the telephone wire. I like telephones. Telephones are strange. So you are here and suddenly someone comes into your world and sometimes you are disturbed, sometimes you're shocked, sometimes you're surprised. Big things could change. I don't like telephones myself, personally, but in my stories I like them very much. These days you have cell phones, and things have changed a lot since the cell phone was invented. So in the new novel of mine, After Dark , the cell phone is a very important thing. It's very strange. It's like a lifeline for some people.

JB: Do you have one?

HM: Yes. I don't like it, but I have to.

JB: Can we talk about interruption? When phone calls come and something interrupts—that happens in a lot of your books. When you write, do you need a lot of concentration?

HM: Yeah. I don't like to be disturbed by anything when I'm writing. When I started writing, when I was twenty-nine years old, I was the owner of a jazz club and I worked until one o'clock in the morning, and I came home around two or three o'clock. And I wrote a novel this way, in the early morning. It was not easy to concentrate. When I became a full-time writer, I was so happy because I could write for as many hours as I wanted. It was just like bliss. I was so happy to think I could write as many hours as I want. So I don't like interruptions.

JB: When you write about spaghetti, you write about waiting, about time. Why is time important to writing?

HM: I guess you need time to write the right thoughts. I always wait for the right time to come. Always. At this moment, I don't write anything—just some essays or translations. I don't write fiction. I have been this way for five or six months. I got a hunch that there will be a time that I want to write something. But that time hasn't come yet. But I know it will come. In the summer, I guess. I know how close they are. For me, the most important thing is to catch the right time. When it comes, I catch it and I start to write a new book. I know how to stop it. So when you finish the book, you rewrite and rewrite. When I know it is time to stop, I stop. And put it away in a drawer and wait for the next right time to come. And when it comes, I take it out, put it on the desk, and rewrite. It takes time to be ready. So I think time is very important to me.

JB: So right now you're waiting for the water to boil.

HM: Yeah. I need a time cooker.

JB: But you have that in you.

HM: In my mind. Nobody asks me to write something, because I am the one to decide.

JB: What about ways you play with time in your books—narratives that go backwards and forwards. How did you become interested in that?

HM: I don't plan anything at all. I write one chapter and I think, "so what's next?" So I write the next chapter. Sometimes it's before that time, or after that time. I don't plan anything. I write just what I want to write. I just know what is going to happen next or before. And after I finish the chapter, maybe I want to write what happened before that, or what happened next to that. It depends on the mind. Chronological order doesn't mean anything to me. I'm just following that rabbit— Alice in Wonderland 's rabbit. I am always chasing that rabbit. I don't know which way he will go.

JB: So the rabbit could lead you to World War II or 1971 or the present.

HM: That rabbit goes anywhere. Vertically, horizontally.

JB: Are there particular time periods you think you're drawn to?

HM: I like history. I like to read about history. I think history is a kind of collective memory. I have my own memory, but if you know about history, it's another, a collective memory. In other words, you can enrich your memory by knowing history. That's a great feeling. So when I wrote The Wind-up Bird Chronicle , I read many books about the war in China in 1939 and it was a very interesting thing to read about and I just wanted something about that war. So when I wrote that fiction, I was trying to forget everything that I'd read. Because it's a nuisance when I write. I made up everything in my mind about the historical acts. But in order to make up your stories, you have to know the details.

JB: You have to have some memory.

HM: To know the details and to write fiction are different. But you have to know about details. After I wrote that story, I went to someplace in China . And I thought, "I know this place." Because I made up the scenery and the details. But I could see those details and scenery actually when I went there, so it was a very familiar feeling when I was there. It's very strange.

JB: So you think you had a collective memory?

HM: That's right. I felt so happy to be a fiction writer at that time, because I could make up things, and there are so many things actually there. That kind of thing happens often. Sometimes you go someplace and you feel a kind of déjà vu . I was there because I wrote about those things. It happens quite often.

JB: Why was 1971 the year of spaghetti?

HM: I was a college student in 1971 and I just felt that way. The way that guy feels—I felt that way. I was alone, and I was cooking spaghetti. Just like that.

JB: What was your life in college like?

HM: I went into university in Tokyo in 1968. Those were days of confusion. There were demonstrations, strikes, the anti-war movement. There was strife between students and police forces and revolutionaries and videos and Jimi Hendrix. And all of a sudden, it's gone. It's a very strange experience. One time, everything is completely boiling. And the next day, it's gone. All the heat is gone and you are left behind in that quiet. 1971 is a kind of days of disappointment. We used to be idealistic and very revolutionary. And we believed that things were going to get better, and there would be a better world. And we viewed it very optimistically. But we were disappointed. That's what happened in my days at university. I think we were kind of naïve. College students these days are very realistic and cool and not so idealistic sometimes. So what I want to say is that in 1971 the days were quiet and there was that disappointment. The idealism gone. We were kind of at a loss. We didn't have any idea what was going to happen to ourselves and to the world. So I think that feeling of loneliness comes partly from that sentiment.

JB: What in particular were you disappointed and idealistic about?

HM: We fought the authorities at the universities, the government, for the socialist system. We were just like a child fighting a dragon with an imaginary sword. We believed we could do something great, something useful, but it was just an illusion.

JB: How do you think that experience influenced your writing?

HM: When I was in my twenties, it was days of freeze. It was so hot, like a volcano, in 1968, 1969. Then came days of freeze. I was kind of frozen in my twenties, and then I started to write when I was twenty-nine. I went through the days of freeze for nine years. And then all of a sudden after those years, I felt I could write something.

JB: So you were waiting for the spaghetti to boil?

HM: You could say that. I wrote this story twenty years ago, and I remember those days of freeze. I forgot that story for a long time. It's just like I encounter an old friend, but he's not an old friend. It's myself. Myself when I was younger. It is good sometimes to be a writer: you write a story more than twenty years ago and you encounter the story now, and you meet yourself again.

JB: If 1968 was hot and 1971 was cool, what is 2006?

HM: I think in Japan, things are getting warmer. I think that people need a new kind of idealism. We have been so busy to get rich, especially in Japan . People have been working so hard, and we got rich somehow. But people are not satisfied with their situation. So I think we need something else. It should be a kind of idealism. In that sense, I think things are getting warmer again. Not hot enough, but warmer. We experienced the economic the economic bubble and it burst, and we lost our confidence, and now we need something else besides getting rich.

JB: Where could that idealism come from? Is it political?

HM: Cultural and political. I think both ways.

JB: Before we finish, two questions: first of all, could you recommend a spaghetti dish?

HM: These days, I like pasta over sea urchin. With a lot of butter. So you boil the spaghetti and put it in the bowl and you add butter. It's going to melt. So you put the sea urchin, raw, in, and you just stir. And you chop parsley. It's simple, but it's good. I like it very much.

JB: And finally, could you recommend a book?

HM: Recently, I read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. I liked it very much.

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As I am walking to class in the morning, I often see him running. His steps are short but purposeful. He does not look to the left or right. Cut off from the world surrounding him by his iPod, he stares down and ahead with a blankness of determination and detachment. He is somewhere else, as if in a dream or the darker parts of his mind. I wonder what he sees there. He looks lonely. Every morning I want to call out to him and every morning I hold myself back, lest I interrupt and force him to return from whatever world he is in.

 

Joshua Billings is still waiting for the spaghetti to boil.