Ryu Murakami quotes

Ryu Murakami is a Japanese novelist, short story writer, and filmmaker, acclaimed for his explorations of youth culture and the darker sides of society. His provocative works often blend psychological insight with graphic violence and satire. He has received several major literary awards and is considered a key figure in contemporary Japanese literature. Here are 25 of his quotes:

Every one of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down. (Ryu Murakami)
You have to watch your step with women these days, Pops. She could be involved with Yakuza or something. Even some of the girls in my class -- you should hear the stuff they talk about. Fifteen years old, and there's nothing they don't know. We're not in the age of Peace and Love anymore. View quote
Ryu Murakami
Everybody wants to talk about themselves, and everybody wants to hear everybody else's story, so we take turns playing reporter and celebrity. View quote
Ryu Murakami
She's like smoke:you think you're seeing her clearly enough, but when you reach for her there's nothing there. View quote
Ryu Murakami
The world's worst flavor combination was mango and menthol. View quote
Ryu Murakami
But sometimes things happen that no one hopes for. Events that cause everything you've worked towards, the life you've carefully constructed piece by piece, to come tumbling down all around you. No one is to blame, but you're left with a wound you can't heal on your own and can't believe you'll ever learn to accept, so you struggle to escape the pain. Only time can heal wounds as deep as that - a lot of time - and all you can really do is place yourself in its hands and try to consider the passing of each day a victory. You tough it out moment by moment, hour by hour, and after some weeks or months you begin to see signs of recovery. Slowly the wound heals into a scar. View quote
Ryu Murakami
"I really did suffer a lot,” she said, "and for a lot longer than I even care to remember. I was sure I'd never find anything to take the place of ballet, and it took all my energy just to get through each day. My parents and my friends all said that time alone would heal the wound, and I guess I knew it was true, but I wished I could hibernate or something, and let time go by without having to suffer through it. But of course the clock just kept slowly ticking away. Tick, tick, tick. View quote
Ryu Murakami
Nice person, bad person -- that's not the level this girl is at. I can see you're crazy about her and probably won't be able to hear this, Ao-chan, but I think you'd be better off staying away from someone like her. I can't read her exactly, but I can tell you she's either a saint or a monster. Maybe both extremes at once, but not somewhere in between. View quote
Ryu Murakami
To distort our faces with joy, or wail and weep with sorrow, or collapse in agony, or wallow in sentimentality – wasn't an inviolable human trait but something we can lose simply by leading dull and dreary lives. ‘A rich emotional life,' she'd written, ‘is a privilege reserved only for the daring few'. View quote
Ryu Murakami
Buying and selling is the basis of all social intercourse, and the commodity an actor or model offered for sale was nothing less than her own being. View quote
Ryu Murakami
The young people nowadays – men and women, amateurs and pros – generally fall into one of two categories: either they don't know what it is that's most important to them, or they know but don't have the power to go after it. But this girl's different. She knows what's most important to her and she knows how to get it, but she doesn't let on what it is. I'm pretty sure it's not money, or success, or a normal happy life, or a strong man, or some weird religion, but that's about all I can tell you. She's like smoke:you think you're seeing her clearly enough, but when you reach for her there's nothing there. That's a sort of strength, I suppose. But it makes her hard to figure out. (Ryu Murakami)
In this country we have the illusion that there's always this warm, loving community we belong to, but the other side of that is a sort of exclusiveness and xenophobia, and our food reflects that.Japanese cuisine isn't inclusive at all-infact it's extremely inhospitable to outsiders, to people who don't fit into the community. View quote
Ryu Murakami
... The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different than the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there. View quote
Ryu Murakami
Parents, teachers, government - they all teach you how to live the dreary, deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally. View quote
Ryu Murakami
They don't realise that they've changed; they think it's the world that changed. View quote
Ryu Murakami
All Americans have something lonely about them. I don't know what the reason might be, except maybe that they're all descended from immigrants. View quote
Ryu Murakami
There in that pool stained with green blood, he had learned two things: one was that all the pain stopped when you stopped fighting death; and the other was that as long as you could still hear your heart beating, you had to keep fighting back. View quote
Ryu Murakami
Just before I fell asleep, I had a moment of panic... View quote
Ryu Murakami
That's what violence was: emotion leaking out from consciousness into the physical world, linking up with the muscles of the arms and shoulders and diaphragm and, inevitably, the face. Stifle emotion during an act of violence and the face becomes a blank, unreadable mask. View quote
Ryu Murakami
People were infected with the concept that happiness was something outside themselves, and a new and powerful form of loneliness was born. Mix loneliness with stress and enervation, and all sorts of madness can occur. Anxiety increases, and in order to obliterate the anxiety, people turn to extreme sex, violence, and even murder. View quote
Ryu Murakami
One of the photographs in the magazine caught his eye. A homeless youth in New York City. It was the face of a human being who'd been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition, nothing but wounds. The face of a person who could probably kill someone without feeling anything whatsoever. (Ryu Murakami)
In Japan, even when you're alone, you're never really that lonely. But the loneliness you feel among people with differently colored skin and eyes, whose language you don't even speak very well – that sort of loneliness is something you feel down to the marrow of your bones. View quote
Ryu Murakami
And just because I've written this book, don't think I've changed. I'm like I was back then, really. View quote
Ryu Murakami
Yeah, he'd said, maybe it's just my idea, but really it always hurts, the times it don't hurt is when we just forget, we just forget it hurts, you know, it's not just because my belly's all rotten, everybody always hurts. So when it really starts stabbing me, somehow I feel sort of peaceful, like I'm myself again. View quote
Ryu Murakami
In the old days, things like tropical fish or imported wineglasses weren't within reach for the average person. Now when you walked down the street you passed shop windows full of the finest quality goods from around the world. Any of these things could be yours if you were willing to sacrifice a little, and many people ended up sacrificing a lot. It's difficult to control the desire to accumulate things. View quote
Ryu Murakami