Haruki Murakami on

Asking the Right

Questions
By Deborah Treisman
In “Cream,” your story in this week’s issue, the
narrator recounts to a younger friend a strange
incident that happened to him years before. Why did
you choose to frame the story that way?

I’m not sure. I probably thought that it was better to

have the story told retrospectively, rather than in the
voice of a teen-ager.

When he was eighteen years old, the narrator received

an invitation to a piano recital from a girl he barely
knew, and, as it turned out, the recital didn’t happen,
and the narrator never found out why. Do you have a
theory about what happened? Is there a possible
innocent explanation for this?

A lot of unexplained things have happened to me over

the years, and those experiences often seem to speak
to me, metaphorically, about my life. Not in a literal
way, but figuratively.

The narrator is at a transitional time, between high

school and university. Instead of cramming for the
university entrance exam, he spends his days reading
novels at the library. Does his in-between state
somehow trigger the rest of the story? Does he need
this kind of mystery to prod him to get his life back on
track?
He’s in limbo, moving between adolescence and
manhood, and as he does so he has a number of odd
experiences that confuse him. Books are a life
preserver he clings to. I went through the same period
myself, and books meant a lot to me then, too. So did
music, as well as cats.

An old man appears to the boy and poses an

impossible riddle. Is the old man real? A figment of the
boy’s imagination? A manifestation of his future self?
What does he want from―or for―this boy?

The young man needs someone to guide him, someone

like this old man. But finding the right guide is very
difficult.

Do you have an answer to the puzzle the old man

poses? Is there such a thing as a circle with many
centers but no circumference?

I think it corresponds to a kind of faith. This doesn’t

have to be a particular religion, though.

Although the narrator never solved the mystery of what

happened that day, he did learn something that stayed
with him ever since. Did having no answer become an
answer in itself?

Sometimes asking the right question is better than

getting the right answer. I’ve always kept that in mind
in my life, and as I’ve written my stories.

The story is set in Kobe, where you grew up. What

made you choose that as the location for “Cream”?
It was because the scenery that this eighteen-year-old
man sees and the scenery in Kobe blend together
within me.

Is the story part of a series or a new collection you’re

working on?

I hadn’t thought about it, but, now that you mention it, I
could see possibly making it into a series (or a full-
length novel). Thank you for the suggestion!

(Answers translated, from the Japanese, by Philip

Gabriel.)