Haruki Murakami “Jazz Messenger”(translated by Jay Rubin) http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/books/review/Murakami-t.html?8bu&emc=bu
このエッセイは、”I never had any intention of becoming a novelist — at least not until I turned 29. This is absolutely true.”で始まる。ここでの話の要点は、”Practically everything I know about writing, then, I learned from music.”ということなのだろう。曰く、
また、
Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music — and mainly from jazz. Next comes melody — which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm. If the way the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’t ask for anything more. Next is harmony — the internal mental sounds that support the words. Then comes the part I like best: free improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow. Finally comes what may be the most important thing: that high you experience upon completing a work — upon ending your “performance” and feeling you have succeeded in reaching a place that is new and meaningful. And if all goes well, you get to share that sense of elevation with your readers (your audience). That is a marvelous culmination that can be achieved in no other way.
そして、最後はセロニアス・モンクで決める；
My style is as deeply influenced by Charlie Parker’s repeated freewheeling riffs, say, as by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elegantly flowing prose. And I still take the quality of continual self-renewal in Miles Davis’s music as a literary model.
ところで、村上春樹氏のジャズとの最初の出会いは14歳の時にArt Blakey and the Jazz Messengersの神戸公演のティケットを「誕生日プレゼント」として貰ったこと。また、その42年後にボストンからフロリダにいる（Jazz Messengersのメンバーだった）ウェイン・ショーターと携帯電話で会話した話も出てくる。
One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: “It can’t be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!”I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.
村上春樹といえば、村上春樹の中国語訳を一手に引き受けている林少華さんが『読書』2007年７月号の「村上春樹的中国之行」（pp.28-33）で、1994年６月の村上春樹中国滞在について記している。
