Articles

• The Japanese author, now in his seventies, has come to embody both the romance and futility of literary yearning, not unlike his own protagonists who drift through dreamscapes in search of meaning, cats, or lost love. So, the question lingers: why hasn’t one of the most read, translated, and loved writers alive ever won the Nobel Prize in Literature?

• Perhaps it’s because Murakami’s rebellion is too inward, his women too unreal, or his sadness too seductive. His greatest strengths as an author – the ability to make the ordinary shimmer with strangeness, to romanticise solitude until it glows – may also be what keep him at the Nobel’s margins.

• Few writers can make boiling spaghetti or a walk on a sunny morning feel like revelation. Murakami transforms the banal into the mystical, giving loneliness its own vocabulary. His novels capture the modern ache, the quiet sorrow of existing in a detached, emotionally barren world. And yet, the very emotional texture that enchants readers is also what alienates the prize committees.

• Murakami’s universe, for all its beauty, is steeped in the male gaze. His women are often vessels for male longing: Ethereal, sexual, sometimes disappearing without explanation. They are dreamed more than lived, existing mainly to haunt, heal or catalyse a protagonist’s journey. Even when they speak, they are filtered through the eyes of men who desire or often misunderstand them. It isn’t malice, but habit; a kind of quiet, unexamined gaze that feels increasingly out of step with how literature now engages with gender and representation.

• His novels are sensual, but the sensuality often slips into objectification, turning women’s bodies into metaphors for male emptiness. As the world demands more nuanced portrayals, Murakami’s women can feel like artefacts of an older sensibility – haunting, but hollow.

• Then there is the issue of narrative passivity or detachment. His narrators are too emotionally numb to rage, too passive to rebel; they drift, observe and internalise. His absurd settings (Sputnik Sweetheart, Birthday Girl) blur the line between the real and the surreal, ending in silence and ambiguity. Readers linger, re-read, and find comfort in the unresolved. While hypnotic, his works are inward-looking, subjective, and deliberately evasive. His stakes are emotional or metaphysical, rarely moral.

• Murakami’s books feel so intimate. He doesn’t demand belief; he invites reflection. His books aren’t about answers but atmospheres; learning to live with emptiness, finding beauty in repetition, sitting still with longing, and sometimes not looking for answers.

• If the Nobel celebrates global conscience, Murakami writes about global solitude. And solitude, as every reader knows, rarely gets a standing ovation.

After the First World War, traumatized soldiers were often prescribed a course of reading.

• First, commission well. George R.R. Martin once said the job of editors is to “clip the wings” of writers, and “tell them in which direction to fly”. When it comes to LLMs, that means giving clear instructions about exactly what you want, and asking them to refine their output as many times as necessary.

• Second, pay attention to detail. AI writers will make mistakes and offer phrases that sound good but mean nothing. They like to lavish their prose with Latinate words, talking about the “bi-directional flow” and how to “expedite grid enhancements”; remind them that Anglo-Saxon words are often punchier. They like clichéd metaphors: there are lots of “Achilles’ heels”. And AI tends to use the “rule of three” far more than humans. The Economist also likes this rhetorical trick. But whereas we try to group three sensible bits of advice, AI offers such redundant sentences as: “The mystery has been solved—not partially, not ambiguously, but definitively.” Such lines should be cut—definitively.

• Finally, know your audience. The editor is an intermediary between writer and reader. llms are sycophants and their smarmy tone is often off-key. If you are writing an email to break some bad news to your boss, tell your bot to skip the exclamation marks. ai can be pretentious or pontificating (it was trained on human writing, after all). Most people are short of time, but a verbose ai pins you to the wall like a bore at a party.

• that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do

• Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.

• I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn’t read. And certainly couldn’t read for pleasure.

• Literate people read fiction.

• Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it’s a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it’s hard, because someone’s in trouble and you have to know how it’s all going to end … that’s a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable.

• People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.

• The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.

• I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children.

• Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.

• And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed.

• Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

• Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

• Another way to destroy a child’s love of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of any kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books.

• I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally.

• Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today.

• According to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is the “only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account”.

• Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations because it will lack a skilled workforce.

• I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us – as readers, as writers, as citizens – have obligations. I thought I’d try and spell out some of these obligations here.

• I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.

• We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.

• We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

• One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading.

• We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

• I’m going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It’s this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.

• Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. “If you want your children to be intelligent,” he said, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” He understood the value of reading, and of imagining.