Word: write
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...locked in battle with extremists since the army assault on Islamabad's Red Mosque last month, he has yet to acknowledge the strength of al-Qaeda militants based in Pakistan. As a result, when the U.S. points to al-Qaeda's presence in Pakistan, the Pakistani public can easily write off the remarks as American propaganda...
Haruki Murakami doesn't much go in for metaphors, but even he wouldn't deny the aptness and symbolism of the moment when he decided he would write his first novel. It was April 1978 and Murakami was in the stands at Tokyo's Meiji-Jingu Stadium, watching a baseball game, beer in hand. He was verging on 30, and nearly a decade into running a jazz café with his wife Yoko. A journeyman American batter named Dave Hilton came to the plate for the Yakult Swallows, stroked the first pitch into left field, and safely reached second base...
...deliberate distance he keeps from Japan's literary community, and in his abstemious mode of living. "Writers and artists are supposed to live a very unhealthy, bohemian kind of life," says Murakami. "But I just wanted to do it differently." So he rises at 4 a.m. to write for hours before swimming or running, training for marathons and lately triathlons as well. Murakami says he needs the exercise to keep up his stamina for the draining work of writing - the prolificacy of his output is legendary - but there's also an element of physical pleasure in his declaration that...
...studied disconnection from the world that has made Murakami's early work so beloved of the fashionable literati - and the lonely young - has receded. In fact, responsibility is his animating principle these days. "I have a gift to write about these things," Murakami says of 1997's Underground, his oral history of the Tokyo subway gas attacks and a book he sees as a career turning point. "At the same time, I have a responsibility." Though he says he doesn't want to talk about Japanese politics, he returns to the subject again and again throughout a 212-hour conversation...
...that self that his fans - in any nation - will find themselves seeking out. Wherever Murakami moves as he continues his career - he says he plans on writing until 80 at least - expect his global readership to follow, even for reasons they can't quite articulate. Murakami, John Updike writes, "is a tender painter of negative spaces." Perhaps that ability to finger the ineffable is what finally explains his global appeal. "When I write fiction, I go down to the dark places," says Murakami. What could be more universal than the nameless stuff of our deepest dreams? Murakami doesn't illuminate...