I love the girl from Ipanema. And of course, there's an example really in a nutshell of Murakami's styles, isn't it? There's autobiography in there; there's music in there; there's sort of metaphysics in there; there's a girl in there.

 

Um, you know, it's wonderful. He takes a simple premise in the real world, or at least in something close to the real world, something in a record and just goes into it.

 

When I think of my high school's corridor, I think of combination salad--lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, asparagus, onion rings, and pink Thousand-Island dressing. Combination salads remind me of a girl I sort of knew back then. Now this connection is a logical one, because all this girl ever ate was salads. Whenever I was with her, we had these salad-filled conversations. She was a girl of strong convictions, one of which was that if you ate a well-balanced diet with plenty of vegetables, everything would be all right.

 

He's able to just take philosophical meditations on the meaning of life and on memory and time and absolutely play games with them.

 

He's an existentialist ,one way or another, isn't he?

 

Absolutely, absolutely! The message is a real simple one that life is what you make it. There's nothing exterior; there's nothing outside the brain. It's all inside; It's all...all of realities. It's in your synapsis. The best thing you can do is just keep learning about the world and whatever meaning it has is meaning that you  assign to it.

 

（All the leaves are brown，and the sky is grey. I’ve been for a walk on a winter’s day....）

 

Kobe High School, where Murakami spent his adolescence, not the greatest student.  He says he passed his time playing mah-jongg(mah-jong), fooling around with girls, skipping class, smoking, and reading novels.

 

I'm a kind of rebel. It was the 1960s, the age of the rebel. We felt we were free. We could do anything. Back then, I just wanted to find a window that faced the outside world, and it happened to be foreign culture. I was interested in reading books in English, mostly American literature. So I was addicted to those things. I could escape from Japanese society and its culture. So it was just great.