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Haruki Murakami: Where My Characters Come From - The Atlantic

theatlantic.com · 4,567 words · saved by 3 readers

I don’t choose them; they choose me.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. I ’m often asked if any characters in my novels are based on real people. On the whole, the answer is no. I’ve written a lot of novels, but only two or three times have I intentionally, from the start, had a real person in mind when I created a character (in each case a secondary one). When I did, I was a bit nervous that a reader might detect that the character was modeled on somebody—especially if the person who d

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