Haruki Murakami says writing

is what he can do for disaster

sufferers

Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami said Saturday writing good stories is the best
he can do for sufferers from terrorist attacks and natural disasters such as the
2011 massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan's northeast.

"I was wondering what could I do for the people who have suffered. But I
thought, what I can do is to write good fiction," he said during an event in New
York, referring to a number of tragedies, also including the Sept. 11 terror
attacks on the United States.

The 69-year-old Murakami said that after the 1995 earthquake that destroyed
his hometown of Kobe, western Japan, he "just wanted to write something" and
penned a collection of short stories.

He also explained how he wrote the book "Underground" about the 1995 sarin
gas attack on the Tokyo subway system by the AUM Shinrikyo

"I came back to Japan after the earthquake in Kobe and the train attack" after
four years in the United States, he said. "I felt that I should have come home so
there should be something I could do for the people, not for the country."

"After all, when I write a good story, good fiction, we can understand each other
if you are a reader and I'm a writer," Murakami said.

Although Murakami and his readers may not know each other, "there is a special
secret passage between us, and we can send a message to each other," he said.
"So I think (writing good stories) is a way I can contribute to society or people in
the world."

Murakami touched on the 2011 quake and tsunami that also triggered a
meltdown at a nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture in his latest novel
"Kishidancho Goroshi" (Killing Commendatore), the English translation of which
will be released on Tuesday.

He said that after writing the first one or two paragraphs of the novel, he put the
manuscript in the drawer of his desk. Several months later, he came up with a
storyline and finished the work in about 18 months.

The latest novel became Murakami's first multivolume novel in seven years
when the original was put on sale in Japan in February 2017, following "1Q84" in
2009-2010.

In the interim, the world-renowned Japanese writer released other new works
including the novel "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage," which
achieved bestseller status in English translation in 2014, as well as a collection of
short stories and a book of conversations with Japanese composer Seiji Ozawa.

Saturday's event, which marked a rare public appearance for Murakami, was
sponsored by The New Yorker magazine, for which he has written for many
years.

Murakami debuted with a novel titled "Hear the Wind Sing" in 1979, which won
him the Gunzo literature prize for up-and-coming writers.

"Norwegian Wood," a 1987 novel named after a Beatles song, catapulted

Murakami to fame in Japan and around the world. It tells of a college student's
bittersweet coming of age in Tokyo in the 1960s.

His works have been translated into many languages and he has won several
literary prizes, such as the Franz Kafka Prize in 2006, the Jerusalem Prize in 2009,
and the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award for 2016.

Often named by bookmakers among the favorites to win the Nobel Prize in
Literature, Murakami last month asked to be withdrawn from a list of candidates
for a new prize set up in replacement of the postponed Nobel prize.