“Do I have a sense of alternative lives? Ummm-a. Yes. So I feel it’s very strange, still. Sometimes I wonder why I’m a novelist right now. There is no definite career reason why I became a writer. Something happened, and I became a writer. And now I’m a successful writer. When I go to the States or Europe, many people know me. It was so strange. Some years ago I went to Barcelona and did a signing and, you know, 1,000 people came. The girls kissed me. I was so surprised. What happened to me?”

He writes intuitively, without a plan. His latest novel came to him while sitting in traffic in Tokyo. What if he got out on the gridlocked freeway and went down the emergency exit; would the course of his life change? “That is the starting point. I have a kind of premonition it’s going to be a big book. It’s going to be very ambitious. That’s what I knew. I wrote the novel Kafka On The Shore, maybe five or six years ago and was waiting for the new book to come; it came. It has come. I knew it was going to be a big project. It’s just a feeling.”

Haruki Murakami: \’I took a gamble and survived\’ | Books | The Guardian.