"When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It's like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly"
About this Quote
Murakami makes writing sound less like invention than possession: a body-level reentry into a former self. The “15-year old” isn’t just a character; it’s a switch that flips him back into sensory truth. Notice how quickly he abandons abstractions and stacks physical verbs - “feel,” “smell” - like proof. This isn’t nostalgia as warm glow. It’s nostalgia as instrument, a way to retrieve specificity on demand. The time-machine metaphor flatters the romantic idea of the novelist, but the real claim is craft: he’s describing a method for bypassing the adult mind’s cynicism and returning to the raw, high-contrast perceptions of adolescence.
The subtext is about authority. Writing young characters can easily turn into condescension, an adult ventriloquizing teenage angst. Murakami’s insistence on “Very actually. Very vividly” reads like a preemptive defense against that charge: he’s not describing youth from the outside, he’s reactivating it from within. The repeated “very” feels almost like self-hypnosis, or a spell to keep the memory from dissolving into idea.
Context matters: Murakami’s fiction often treats inner life as a literal landscape - wells, corridors, parallel worlds - so “time machine” fits his broader project of making the invisible mechanisms of memory and desire feel physically navigable. He’s also signaling an ethic. If the writer can summon the wind and air of 15, then adolescence isn’t a problem to be explained; it’s a reality to be inhabited, with all its heightened sensation, confusion, and private intensity intact.
The subtext is about authority. Writing young characters can easily turn into condescension, an adult ventriloquizing teenage angst. Murakami’s insistence on “Very actually. Very vividly” reads like a preemptive defense against that charge: he’s not describing youth from the outside, he’s reactivating it from within. The repeated “very” feels almost like self-hypnosis, or a spell to keep the memory from dissolving into idea.
Context matters: Murakami’s fiction often treats inner life as a literal landscape - wells, corridors, parallel worlds - so “time machine” fits his broader project of making the invisible mechanisms of memory and desire feel physically navigable. He’s also signaling an ethic. If the writer can summon the wind and air of 15, then adolescence isn’t a problem to be explained; it’s a reality to be inhabited, with all its heightened sensation, confusion, and private intensity intact.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nostalgia |
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