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8/10/2019 Haruki Murakami: Racing to Checkpoint Charlie my memories of the Berlin Wall | Books | The Guardian
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12/7/14, 7:aruki Murakami: Racing to Checkpoint Charlie my memories of the Berlin Wall | Books | The Guardian
Page ttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/22/haruki-murakami-walls-important-motif-novels
Haruki Murakami: Racing to Checkpoint Charlie my
memories of the Berlin Wall
It has been a quarter of a century now since the Berlin Wall that separated East and
West Berlin came down. The first time I visited Berlin was in 1983, and back then the
city was still divided into East and West by that looming wall. Travellers could go over
into East Berlin, but they had to pass through a number of checkpoints, and were
required to return to West Berlin before the clock struck midnight. Just like Cinderella
at the ball.
Along with my wife and a friend of ours I went to see a performance of Mozarts The
Magic Fluteat the East Berlin Opera House. The performance, and the wholeatmosphere, were wonderful. But as one act followed the next, the clock ticked inevitab
closer to midnight. I remember racing to Checkpoint Charlie on the way back. We mad
it just in time, but it was a close call. Of all the performances of The Magic FluteIve
seen, that had to be the most thrilling.
8/10/2019 Haruki Murakami: Racing to Checkpoint Charlie my memories of the Berlin Wall | Books | The Guardian
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12/7/14, 7:aruki Murakami: Racing to Checkpoint Charlie my memories of the Berlin Wall | Books | The Guardian
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When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, I remember feeling relieved. The Cold War
over, I told myself, and Im sure a more peaceful, positive world lies ahead. I think
many people around the world felt the same way. But, sadly, this feeling of relief didnt
last long. The Middle East continued to be embroiled in strife, there was a war in the
Balkans and one terrorist incident after another, and, of course, the attack on the Worl
Trade Centre in New York in 2001. Our hopes for a happier world collapsed with little t
show for them.
Walls have always been an important motif to me as a novelist. In my novelHard-boile
Wonderland the End of the World(Hard-Boiled Wonderland und das Ende der Welt) I
depicted an imaginary town surrounded by a high wall the kind of town where, once
you enter, you can never get out. In my novel The Wind-up Bird Chronicle(Mister
Aufziehvogel)the main character sits at the bottom of a well, passes through the thick
stone walls of the well and enters another world. And when I received the Jerusalem
prize, I gave a speech in Jerusalem entitled Walls and Eggs. I spoke about walls and
the eggs that break against them. Confronted with walls, how powerless are we? There
was fierce fighting going on in Gaza as I spoke.
For me, walls are a symbol of that which separates people, that which separates one set
of values from another. In some cases a wall may protect us. But in order to protect us,
has to exclude others thats the logic of walls. A wall eventually becomes a fixed
system, one that rejects the logic of any other system. Sometimes violently. And the
Berlin Wall was certainly a striking example of that.
Sometimes it seems to me that we destroy one wall only to build another. It could be an
actual wall, or an invisible wall that surrounds the mind. There are walls that tell us not
to go any further from where we are, and walls that tell others not to come in. One wallfinally collapses, the world looks different, and we breathe a sigh of relief, only to
discover that another wall has been erected in another part of the world a wall of
ethnicity, of religion, a wall of intolerance, of fundamentalism, a wall of greed, a wall of
fear. Are we unable to live without a system of walls?
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/feb/16/haruki-murakami-jerusalem-prizehttp://bookshop.theguardian.com/wind-up-bird-chronicle-3.htmlhttp://bookshop.theguardian.com/hard-boiled-wonderland-and-the-end-of-the-world.html8/10/2019 Haruki Murakami: Racing to Checkpoint Charlie my memories of the Berlin Wall | Books | The Guardian
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12/7/14, 7:aruki Murakami: Racing to Checkpoint Charlie my memories of the Berlin Wall | Books | The Guardian
Page ttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/22/haruki-murakami-walls-important-motif-novels
For us novelists, walls are obstacles we need to break through. Nothing more nor less
than that. When we write novels we pass through walls, metaphorically speaking. We
pass through walls separating reality and unreality, the conscious and the unconscious
We see what world lies on the other side of a wall, come back to our own side and
describe in detail, in writing, what we saw. We dont pass judgment on the meaning of
the wall, or the pros and cons of the role it plays. We just try to accurately portray the
scene we saw. Thats the sort of work we novelists do on a daily basis.
When a person reads fiction and is moved and excited by it, he may break through that
wall together with the author. Of course, when he closes the book hes basically in the
same place he was when he began reading. If hes moved at all its a matter of 10 or 20
centimetres at the most. The reality around him hasnt changed, and no actual problem
have been solved. Yet still the reader is left with the distinct feeling that he has broken
through a wall, gone somewhere and returned. Hes left with the sensation that he has
moved from his starting point, even if its only a small distance, ten or twenty
centimeters. And Ive always believed that experiencing that physical sensation is the
most important thing about reading. The actual feeling that you are free, that if you wa
to, you can break through walls and go wherever you like. I want to treasure that above
all. And write as many stories as I can that make that possible. And share those kinds o
stories with as many people as I can.
The problems facing our world today obviously wont be solved by that kind of shared
consciousness. Novels, unfortunately, dont have that kind of immediate effect. By
means of a story were able to imagine quite vividly a world unlike the one we live in
now. As John Lennon used to sing, we all have power to imagine. In the face of the dark
violent and cynical reality in which we live, this might seem at times like a powerless an
fleeting hope. But the power that each individual has to imagine is found precisely in
this: in the quiet yet sustained effort to keep on singing, to keep on telling stories,
without losing heart.
In a world of walls, imagining a world without them, clearly seeing that kind of world in
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our imagination may, in some cases, lead us to see it in reality. I would like to keep on
believing that stories have that kind of power. And the ideal place to reconsider that so
of power may very well be here, in Berlin, in 2014.
Id like to send this message to the young people in Hong Kong, who are struggling
against their wall at this moment.
This article is translation of Haruki Murakamis acceptance speech for Die Welt
Literaturpreis. It was translated by Philip Gabriel.
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