Bill Li and friends,

See this speech (attached doc) by 村上春樹 while receiving his award in Jerusalem earlier this
year. If you haven't read any of his writings, this one is a good start to know
him. I believe the English part is his original writing.

Harold

Always on the side of the egg

By Haruki Murakami

I have come to Jerusalem today as a novelist, which is to say as a professional spinner of lies.

Of course, novelists are not the only ones who tell lies. Politicians do
it, too, as we all know. Diplomats and military men tell their own
kinds of lies on occasion, as do used car salesmen, butchers and
builders. The lies of novelists differ from others, however, in that no
one criticizes the novelist as immoral for telling them. Indeed, the
bigger and better his lies and the more ingeniously he creates them,
the more he is likely to be praised by the public and the critics. Why
should that be?

My answer would be this: Namely, that by telling skillful lies - which is to say, by making up fictions that appear to
be true - the novelist can bring a truth out to a new location and
shine a new light on it. In most cases, it is virtually impossible to
grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is
why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place,
transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a
fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to
clarify where the truth lies within us. This is an important
qualification for making up good lies.

Today, however, I have no intention of lying. I will try to be as honest as I can. There are a
few days in the year when I do not engage in telling lies, and today
happens to be one of them.

So let me tell you the truth. A fair number of people advised me not to come here to
accept the Jerusalem Prize. Some even warned me they would instigate a
boycott of my books if I came.

The reason for this, of course, was the fierce battle that was raging in Gaza. The UN reported that
more than a thousand people had lost their lives in the blockaded Gaza
City, many of them unarmed citizens - children and old people.

Any number of times after receiving notice of the award, I asked myself
whether traveling to Israel at a time like this and accepting a
literary prize was the proper thing to do, whether this would create
the impression that I supported one side in the conflict, that I
endorsed the policies of a nation that chose to unleash its
overwhelming military power. This is an impression, of course, that I
would not wish to give. I do not approve of any war, and I do not
support any nation. Neither, of course, do I wish to see my books
subjected to a boycott.

Finally, however, after careful consideration, I made up my mind to come here. One reason for my
decision was that all too many people advised me not to do it. Perhaps,
like many other novelists, I tend to do the exact opposite of what I am
told. If people are telling me - and especially if they are warning me
- "don't go there," "don't do that," I tend to want to "go there" and
"do that." It's in my nature, you might say, as a novelist. Novelists
are a special breed. They cannot genuinely trust anything they have not
seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.

And that is why I am here. I chose to come here rather than stay away. I
chose to see for myself rather than not to see. I chose to speak to you
rather than to say nothing.

This is not to say that I am here to deliver a political message. To make judgments about right and wrong is
one of the novelist's most important duties, of course.

It is left to each writer, however, to decide upon the form in which he or
she will convey those judgments to others. I myself prefer to transform
them into stories - stories that tend toward the surreal. Which is why
I do not intend to stand before you today delivering a direct political
message.

Please do, however, allow me to deliver one very personal message. It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of
paper and paste it to the wall: Rather, it is carved into the wall of
my mind, and it goes something like this:

"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg."

Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand
with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what
is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist
who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what
value would such works be?

What is the meaning of this metaphor?
In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and
rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs
are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them.
This is one meaning of the metaphor.

This is not all, though. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or
less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a
fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And
each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid
wall. The wall has a name: It is The System. The System is supposed to
protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it
begins to kill us and cause us to kill others - coldly, efficiently,
systematically.

I have only one reason to write novels, and that
is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine
a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a
light trained on The System in order to prevent it from tangling our
souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the
novelist's job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each
individual soul by writing stories - stories of life and death, stories
of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake
with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions
with utter seriousness.

My father died last year at the age of 90. He was a retired teacher and a part-time Buddhist priest. When he
was in graduate school, he was drafted into the army and sent to fight
in China. As a child born after the war, I used to see him every
morning before breakfast offering up long, deeply-felt prayers at the
Buddhist altar in our house. One time I asked him why he did this, and
he told me he was praying for the people who had died in the war.

He was praying for all the people who died, he said, both ally and enemy
alike. Staring at his back as he knelt at the altar, I seemed to feel
the shadow of death hovering around him.

My father died, and with him he took his memories, memories that I can never know. But the
presence of death that lurked about him remains in my own memory. It is
one of the few things I carry on from him, and one of the most
important.

I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today.
We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race
and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called The System.
To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high,
too strong - and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it
will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and
irreplaceability of our own and others' souls and from the warmth we
gain by joining souls together.

Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no
such thing. We must not allow The System to exploit us. We must not
allow The System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make
us: We made The System.

That is all I have to say to you.

I am grateful to have been awarded the Jerusalem Prize. I am grateful
that my books are being read by people in many parts of the world. And
I am glad to have had the opportunity to speak to you here today.

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