“Murakami is simply my home”

Haruki Murakami is warm rain at dusk in a place that doesn’t really exist anymore. Letting that rain fall on you feels like a cure. I felt this surprising tranquility, this strange voluptuousness, from the first page I read of him. It was January 1994. I wasn’t doing very well. And I couldn’t read anymore. Incapacity which prevented me from getting better – reading being the ideal recourse for melancholy, feverish and easily frightened people, I won’t tell you that.

I was dragging myself sadly when, in a corridor (I was working at Editions du Seuil at the time), I came across The Wild Sheep Race (1982; Seuil, 1990). I opened it (perhaps because of the title, which seemed like a strange promise), and it was simply at home. There was a young guy looking for a star sheep, a girlfriend with shocking ears, a driver who knew 32 decimal places of pi as well as God’s phone number…

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