Dear Mr. Haruki Murakami,
Today I read your interview article with Sarah Lyall of The New York Times (October 10, 2018) and I was impressed. I agree with you that 'a book is a metaphor'. You expressed my cherished thoughts so poetically.
Although I haven't read any of your bestselling books, I do like your statement very much: "If you close your eyes and dive into yourself you can see a different world. It's like exploring the cosmos, but inside yourself."
Wow, you were speaking for me too!
All the while living my life for eighty two years, I've never dreamed that there would be a day like today, one day. Looking back, had I not lost my first love almost sixty years ago, I could not have come to realize that I and all others, all beings are 'cosmians' born 'arainbow' from the Cosmos. A young boy happened to fall in love with the microcosmos of a flower and ended up embracing the whole of the macrocosmos.
Your answer was: "I don't have to dream, because I can write," when you were asked at the end of the interview: "What do you dream about?"
You said: "I'm a realistic person, a practical person, but when I write fiction I go to weird, secret places in my self. What I am doing is an exploration of myself ㅡ inside myself."
In my case, I didn't have to write fiction, because I've been living my dreams, being aware from early on that facts were stranger than fiction and that life itself was but a dream.
As the published author of 20 books (including 4 translations ㅡ Thomas Mann's Transposed Heads and Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, Spirits Rebellious and The Nymphs of The Valley) ㅡin Korean except only one in English, all based on my own life, I couldn't agree more with Ralph Waldo Emerson when he said: "Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are."
Ever since my earliest childhood I aspired to write on the invisible sheet of life with the pen of living in the ink of blood, sweat and tear of love, and I'm still striving on.
I am writing this letter, seeking your help, perchance, through your huge readership, in reaching out to find a Japanese lady whom I have forsaken almost fifty years ago and to whom I’m dying to extend my belated apologies and explanation before I expire, if I could by any remotest chance.
Unlike yourself, I've usually been an unrealistic and impractical person except as to this lady, which became my lifelong regret and shame.
I don't know if there is a similar saying in Japan as in Korea: 'Make sure you build a Great Wall with a lady even if you sleep with her only for one night.'
In 1970 I visited Japan for the first time to attend a business conference in Tokyo. Capitalizing on my off-duty free-time for a couple of days I went to Kyoto and Nara for sightseeing after visiting the Osaka Expo.
Upon arriving at the Kyoto train station, I approached a young lady in the plaza and, making use of my poor Japanese, I asked her for some directions. As it turned out, she was at the train station to meet her sister, and, saying goodbye to her sister, to my infinite surprise, she offered to be my guide for the day. How could I resist this undreamed of 'romantic tour’ with such an attractive lady?
As if in a sweet dream, the whole day passed by in a blink of an eye. Even more surprising was her kind invitation for dinner at her home. After dinner with her and her friends, she accompanied me to the station. She even came down onto the platform to see me off after buying me some cookies and candies from the gift shop. I was taking the night train for Tokyo to fly back to Seoul the next morning.
During the short flight, I was in agony, not knowing what to do. It may have been just a friendly goodwill kindness on her part, nothing more and nothing less. But as far as I was concerned , this was a case of ‘all or nothing’ and ‘now or never’. I did not let her know that I was a married man with two children. Since she didn't ask me, I felt it’d be presumptuous and rude of me to tell her I was not available. More likely, rather, unconsciously or subconsciously, how I wished I was a 'free man'!
After much struggle between my head and my heart, just moments before disembarking from the plane, I tore up and threw away the note she handed me with her name and address written on it. I justified and rationalized my action by telling myself: “It’s all for her. I don’t want to give her any ‘false hope’. The sooner she forgets about me, the better off she will be to find a suitable, unattached bachelor." Burning that bridge to her once and for all had to be the best decision that I could make for her, even though it was the worst for me, I thought.
Tragi-comedically enough, soon after my return home, my wife and I got divorced due to our irreconcilable differences.. Our marriage was an accident in the first place. We had sex under the influence of alcohol one night without having had a date. In those days, 'one-night-stand' was unheard of. I felt responsible and we married. As soon as we got divorced, we learned that she was pregnant with our third child. So we remarried for the sake of the children. After trying harder for eighteen more years , we got divorced again for the second time, twenty years after our first wedding.
In my earliest days, I started devouring great people’s biographies and reciting their sayings. Thus brainwashed and hypnotized, I convinced myself that I was a big fire, not a small one easily extinguished even by a breeze, like an eternal star that starts to shine as soon as the sky is dark enough, or like a kite that rises highest against the wind, not with it. I forced myself to live by ‘sollen’ (‘ought to be’ in German).
However, I’ve come to realize, only after so many trials and errors, that one cannot go against the nature of things that is ‘sein’ (just ‘to be’ in German). What will happen , will; what will not, won’t, no matter what. I’ve come to the conclusion that for anything to happen anytime anywhere, the whole Cosmos has to conspire.
If I had failed to build the Great Wall of our blink-brief romance half a century ago, I pray, with your assistance, I might be able to rebuild the bridge between us, at long last, even if it may be between our tombstones with a copy of my next and last book, Cosmian, laid at hers for a bouquet ㅡ my 21st, 2nd in English and 1st in Japanese, if you are so kindly inclined to translate this book to be out next year.
Gratefully,
Tae-Sang Lee
Founder of CosmianNews
http://www.cosmiannews.com
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