Steve Erickson (SE): I would like to break the ice by saying thank you for the kind and generous comments you gave to my most recent novel "Days Between Stations" (1985) here in Japan. I really appreciate them. You're endorsement means a lot and I imagine it will be very helpful, too.

Ryu Murakami (RM): Well, I was pretty much surprised that a writer like you had come out from America. The way you see things is very unique. But first of all, I would like to ask you how you usually start a new novel. What kind of process, what kind of emotions do you go through?

SE : I would be thinking about the novel for a while before I start. I feel the need to, what we call in the United States, "build up a head of steam," to gather my energy for the work, which is not to say that I spend too much time thinking it out exactly. I want to have a sense of the work, I want to have a sense of the characters. I have a general map in my head where I 'm going to go, but at the same time, I want to leave room for

the surprises, the accidents. And then I usually write a book relatively quickly, within somewhere between eight and twelve months. As I go along, I revise intensely.

Reading a book like "Coin Locker Babies" (1980, English trans. 19 ) for instance, I found myself wondering how much of it came out of the conscious and how much of it came out of the subconscious. Because, it is, on the one hand, a very dreamlike book in certain ways, but, on the other hand, the scope of it is so large and the sense of narrative detail within that scope is so intricate. I could imagine that the book just came into you in flashes, but on the other hand, it was easy to imagine that the book might have been outlined very meticulously.

RM : In the case of "Coin Locker Babies, " the way I wrote it was very much like yours. Ever since I made my debut as a writer, I had always been interested in movie making. Before writing this book, I was preparing some scripts for a certain director, and actually this book was the result of three of these scripts combined together. So naturally, before writing this book, I had a sense of place and characters. But while actually writing this book, every time I set back and started writing, there occured a certain change, consciously as well as subconsciously. Even though the book had come out of a script for a movie, I unconsciously wanted to make something different, something that you could not depict in a movie. Probably the dreamlike or illusionary parts were for the book, not for the movie. It took me ten months to finish this .

SE : That's very fast for a novel of this length. One thing that I was struck by was that, for all of the wide ranging nature of what happens narratively in this book, and for all of the different ongoing adventures of the various characters, the book never loses track of the single defining trauma which comes at the very beginning, and the book always finds a way to refer back to the beginning. It always finds a way for that beginning to have a resonance in everything else that happens.

RM : Actually, several years before I started writing this book, there were several cases in Japan where babies were abandoned in coin lockers. Most of these babies were already dead. The parents or whoever would throw away the corpse in coin lockers. However, some of these babies were still alive. Some would even survive. Now what if these babies grew up and found out that they had been cast away in a coin locker. Wouldn't it be easy for them to build up a tremendous hatred for the world? Wouldn't it be easy for them to want to destroy it?

Now when I found out about these babies who survived, I wondered. What words, what kind of philosophy would be useful enough to quench this hatred, to stop them from wanting to destroy the world? This triggered me into writing this book.

SE : The characters are suffering the most profound kind of alienation, which is to say, they are alienated from their own birth. The greatest holocaust of their lives has come on the very first day of their birth. Nothing else that happens to them can really be as terrible as that. And they know that.

RM : Also there was another hint. Before writing this book, I read an article about a certain way of treatment for emotionally unstable children. I think it was in America where they make them listen to a recording of the mother's heartbeat from within the body. Just the way you would hear it if you were in the womb. It seems that the sound of the heartbeat has the power to make people calm down and relax.

Now maybe I am going too far to say this, but this means that if you have heard this heartbeat sound from the womb (and of course everyone has), and if this heartbeat is so powerful, you should be able to overcome whatever trauma you are to experience. In other words, you can't use a trauma as an excuse to hate and want to destroy the world.

SE : I wasn't familiar with that technique. Of course in this book, if these characters were listening to the heartbeats of their mothers, they would be hearing the heartbeat of the person who betrayed them the most. It would calm them and enrage at the same time.