‘I want to open a window in their souls’: Haruki Murakami on the power of writing simply

When it came to the realm of creativity, I was basically facing a pure nothingness.

All creative activity is, to some extent, done partly with the intention to rectify or fix yourself. In other words, by relativizing yourself, by adapting your soul to a form that’s different from what it is now, you can resolve—or sublimate—the contradictions, rifts, and distortions that inevitably crop up in the process of being alive.