Ryū Murakami Quotes

All Americans have something lonely about them. I don't know what the reason might be, except maybe that they're all descended from immigrants.

He invited me to his apartment in the wee hours one morning and pulled out a set of children's building blocks. It seems he used to ride around and around on the Yamanote Line with them, building cast...

About Author

Ryū Murakami (村上 龍, Murakami Ryū, born February 19, 1952) is a Japanese novelist, essayist and filmmaker. His novels explore human nature through themes of disillusion, drug use, surrealism, murder and war, set against the dark backdrop of Japan. His best known novels are Almost Transparent Blue, Audition, Coin Locker Babies, and In the Miso Soup.

But why is it that if you imagine a baby who smells of milk, for example, you can't help smiling? Why is there such an agreement around the world about what is or isn't a foul smell? Who decided what...

In heated rooms, he often felt the outlines of his body, the border between him and the external world, grow disturbingly fuzzy.

That's when he hit her, when he saw how scared she was. He couldn't bear it that she was frightened and asking for help. Asking for help is wrong. Because there isn't any such thing as help in this wo...

They needed a reason why a little kid would commit murder, someone or something to point the finger at, and I think they were relieved when they hit upon horror movies as the culprit. But there's no r...

Everyone’s running around comparing wounds, like bodybuilders showing off their muscles. And what’s really unbelievable is that they really believe they can heal the wounds like that, just by putting...

This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and cl...

Every time he studied this instrument, with its slender, gleaming steel rod that tapered down to such needle-like sharpness, he wondered why it was necessary to have things like this in the world. If...

To distort our faces with joy, or wail and weep with sorrow, or collapse in agony, or wallow in sentimentality – wasn’t an inviolable human trait but something we can lose simply by leading dull and d...

These young men, in other words, represented a variety of types, but one thing they had in common was that they'd all given up on committing positively to anything in life. This was not their fault, h...

When you're a kid, getting lost isn't just an event or a situation, it's like a career move. You get this thrill of anxiety and fear and a feeling that you've done something that can never be undone.

Oba-sans, to put it in somewhat difficult terms, are life-forms that have stopped evolving. And anyone can turn into an Oba-san. Young women, of course, but even young men, even middle-aged men —even...

People were infected with the concept that happiness was something outside themselves, and a new and powerful form of loneliness was born.

Lady #1, Maki, had never once given any thought to what was really right for her in her life, simply believing that if she surrounded herself with super-exclusive things, she'd become a super-exclusiv...

When you're in an extreme situation you tend to avoid facing it by getting caught up in little details. Like a guy who's decided to commit suicide and boards a train only to become obsessed with wheth...

People were infected with the concept that happiness was something outside themselves, and a new and powerful form of loneliness was born. Mix loneliness with stress and enervation, and all sorts of m...

That’s what violence was: emotion leaking out from consciousness into the physical world, linking up with the muscles of the arms and shoulders and diaphragm and, inevitably, the face. Stifle emotion...

No forgiveness for lies.

But what I did sense was an emptiness like a black hole inside of him, and there was no predicting what might emerge from a place like that.