“There is no such thing as an ideal text. Just like there is no ideal despair.”
A writer once told me this when I happened to meet him while still a student. I understood what it really meant much later—and at the time it was at least some comfort. There are no ideal texts—and that’s all…
But in April 1978, at a baseball match between Japan and the United States, Haruki Murakami for the first time understood that he could write an ideal novel. That’s how the book was born that became the beginning of the cult “Rat Trilogy”—the novel “Hear the Wind Sing.”