Do you ever miss your American jazz bar?

Sometimes. I owned it for seven years. But I hated the drunk customers. I had to fight with them and kick them out. And some musicians came to play on weekends all drugged up.

But I learned a lot about talent. You are born with or without talent — that’s a serious fact of life. For example, only one out of 10 bartenders has the knack for making a good cocktail. People ask me what they should do to become a writer. But I don’t know how to answer. If you don’t have the talent, it’s a waste of time. But life itself is more or less a waste of time. So, I don’t know ...

Life is a waste of time?

I have so many things that I love — jazz, cats, maybe girls. Books. They help me to survive my life, but I always feel like I’m wasting my time. My favorite writer is Dostoevsky.

The Brothers Karamazov has everything you could ever want to write and everything you could ever want to read. I call it a “total novel.” That’s what I want to write someday. I think The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is one step toward a total novel. I have only just started walking closer to the world of Dostoevsky, but it’s far away from my position, and it’s a long way to go, and I have very limited time.