RM : But important things do calm us and enrage us at the same time, don't they? That's the way it is. Now I would like to change the subject and ask another question. Are you making a record of your dreams, writing down your dreams ?

SE : I did, for a novel that I wrote a couple of years ago, called "Amnesiascope" (1996). I wrote down my dreams partly because I'm now getting old enough that I don't remember anything. And I've never been really good at remembering my dreams to begin with.

It was during a period of time when I was having some unusual dreams; dreams that I sensed were perhaps important. I put some of the dreams in the novel, although I've always tended to wonder if people don't find other people's dreams a little boring, if dreams only have much resonance or metaphorical importance to the people who have them.

Nevertheless I think probably all of my work has been informed by my dreams. Even when I don't remember exactly what happens in the dreams, I remember the sense of the dreams. The echoes of the dreams stay in my head.

RM : I read "Tours of the Black Clock" (1989) and "Rubicon Beach" (1987) almost at the same time. But especially after reading "Rubicon Beach," I started to write down what I saw in my dreams. This is a very interesting task but also a very difficult one. First of all, since I'm a writer, I tend to make my dreams more interesting than it should be.

Because of this I tend to forget the original version.

However, whenever it is written down precisely, I can read the record and

re-experience the dream, even if, for example, half an year has passed since I really saw it. Your books are similar to this. They depict a world in which people can live or experience only through dreams. The strangeness, the wonder, the pleasure. . . The world you depict is impossible to see or feel or live when you are awake. It's not about a dream. It IS a dream. So, as I writer, I thought it would be a shame not to make a record of my dreams. It's been almost an year since I started. It has become quite a volume.

For example, in "Tours of the Black Clock," where the protagonist rows a boat to an island where the Chinese live. . . the mist and fog surrounding him, the girl in blue who suddenly appears. . . it's so dreamlike. It is as if you were dragged into somebody else's dream, and that's the very pleasure of reading it. Even when a dead man or a dead body pops into the story, the reader is not at all surprised, because he knows he has wandered into a dreamworld. I find this very unique and I think that no other writer has done this before.

SE: Thank you very much. I don't know if any other writer has NOT done it. Since I am a pretty subconscious writer, I'm not even sure if it was something that I was really aware of. But as a matter of fact, after I wrote and published "Days Between Stations," the best compliment that I got, maybe the best compliment that I have ever got, was. . . somebody said to me one day, "You know, I was trying to think of this dream I had, and then I realized it wasn't a dream. It was your novel that I had read." So I became more aware of a certain kind of dream logic that I think probably dictates my books. . . in the same way that cinema can capture dream logic.