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:

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.

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.

Ryu Murakami

She's like smoke:you think you're seeing her clearly enough, but when you reach for her there's nothing there.

Ryu Murakami

The world's worst flavor combination was mango and menthol.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ryu Murakami

They don't realise that they've changed; they think it's the world that changed.

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.

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.

Ryu Murakami

Just before I fell asleep, I had a moment of panic...

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.

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.

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.

Ryu Murakami

And just because I've written this book, don't think I've changed. I'm like I was back then, really.

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.

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.

Ryu Murakami