A Japanese Literary Rebel

There's a recent New York Times article about the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami that's worth reading. I'm in an alumni writing workshop and we are currently reading Murakami's novel "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles." I'm reading it for the second time, and I must say it holds up for me. If you try to read it, make sure you stay with it through the first 200 pages before deciding it is too slow (as some of my fellow workshop mates were saying). Trust me, it gets better and better from that point on (or you may love it from page one).

I wrote previously about seeing Murakami read an excerpt from "Wind-Up Bird" when it first came out in English. I appreciated learning about his writing routine in the current article. His most recent novel to be released in English is "Kafka on the Shore" which I bought but haven't read yet. Here's a quote from the article by NORIMITSU ONISHI:

"He wrote "Kafka" in six months, starting, as he usually does, without a plan. He spent one year revising it. He follows a strict regimen. Going to bed around 9 p.m. - he never dreams, he said - he wakes up without an alarm clock around 4 a.m. He immediately turns on his Macintosh and writes until 11 a.m., producing every day 4,000 characters, or the equivalent of two to three pages in English."

Sounds a lot like Graham Greene's routine.

Link