“I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.”
— Haruki Murakami, The Paris Review Interview
Haruki Murakami is one of the most widely read novelists alive, beloved for works like Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore, and 1Q84. His fiction moves between the ordinary and the surreal with quiet ease, blending Japanese sensibility with Western literary influences in ways that feel entirely his own. Readers around the world return to his books not just for story, but for a particular quality of attention, a sense that the world is being looked at carefully and without rush.
In this interview with The Paris Review, one of literature’s most respected long-form conversations, Murakami speaks about his role not as a judge of human behavior but as a witness to it. There is something almost meditative in how he describes his work. He is not trying to arrive anywhere. He is trying to stay open.
For a writer whose novels often resist tidy resolution, this feels less like a philosophy and more like a natural extension of how he sees. His characters drift through uncertainty, love, loss, and strangeness without always finding answers, and perhaps that is the point. Murakami seems to trust that observation itself has value, that looking closely and honestly at people and the world is its own kind of meaning.
What he describes here is a rare kind of artistic patience, the willingness to sit with questions rather than settle them.
