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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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.


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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.html


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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.

Documents

Haruki Murakami: Racing to Checkpoint Charlie – my memories of the Berlin Wall | Books | The Guardian