I think jogging is bad for your health. All that pressure on the knees and back cannot be good for you.
I want my words to survive translation.
I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.
I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.
I don’t have a deep link with England like, say, Jonathan Coe or Hanif Kureishi might demonstrate. For me, it is like a mythical place.
I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.
And I’m a Hailsham student – which is enough by itself sometimes to get people’s backs up.
I wouldn’t want to try to adapt something of my own. It would be like going back to school and doing all my exams again.
Our family arrived in England in 1960. At that time I thought the war was ancient history. But if I think of 15 years ago from now, thats 1990, and that seems like yesterday to me.
The fantasy never got beyond that – I didn’t let it – and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.
Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time, it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.
Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.
I’ve always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.
Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.
If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them.
If you go to Tokyo, I think it becomes very obvious that there’s this almost seamless mixture of popular culture and Japanese traditional culture.
Every country should have a strong literary tradition of its own at the center, but it should also have an interest in other countries.
I find Japanese books quite baffling when I read them in translation. It’s only with Haruki Murakami that I find Japanse fiction that I can understand and relate to. He’s a very international writer.
I grew up in Britain before it became a multicultural place, so in many ways I have a nostalgia for an England that’s vanished – the England of my childhood has actually disappeared.
Throughout my career I’ve struggled to encourage people to read my books on a more metaphorical level. I’m less attached to my settings than, for example, Saul Bellow. The setting of a novel for me is just a part of the technique. I choose it at the end.