It has been a quarter of a century now since the Berlin Wall that separated East and West Berlin came down. The first time I visited Berlin was in 1983, and back then the city was still divided into East and West by that looming wall. Travellers could go over into East Berlin, but they had to pass through a number of checkpoints, and were required to return to West Berlin before the clock struck midnight. Just like Cinderella at the ball.

Along with my wife and a friend of ours I went to see a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the East Berlin Opera House. The performance, and the whole atmosphere, were wonderful. But as one act followed the next, the clock ticked inevitably closer to midnight. I remember racing to Checkpoint Charlie on the way back. We made it just in time, but it was a close call. Of all the performances of The Magic Flute I’ve seen, that had to be the most thrilling.

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, I remember feeling relieved. “The Cold War is over,” I told myself, “and I’m sure a more peaceful, positive world lies ahead.” I think many people around the world felt the same way. But, sadly, this feeling of relief didn’t last long. The Middle East continued to be embroiled in strife, there was a war in the Balkans and one terrorist incident after another, and, of course, the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001. Our hopes for a happier world collapsed with little to show for them.

Walls have always been an important motif to me as a novelist. In my novel Hard-boiled Wonderland the End of the World (Hard-Boiled Wonderland und das Ende der Welt) I depicted an imaginary town surrounded by a high wall – the kind of town where, once you enter, you can never get out. In my novel The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (Mister Aufziehvogel)the main character sits at the bottom of a well, passes through the thick stone walls of the well and enters another world. And when I received the Jerusalem prize, I gave a speech in Jerusalem entitled “Walls and Eggs”. I spoke about walls and the eggs that break against them. Confronted with walls, how powerless are we? There was fierce fighting going on in Gaza as I spoke.

For me, walls are a symbol of that which separates people, that which separates one set of values from another. In some cases a wall may protect us. But in order to protect us, it has to exclude others – that’s the logic of walls. A wall eventually becomes a fixed system, one that rejects the logic of any other system. Sometimes violently. And the Berlin Wall was certainly a striking example of that.

Sometimes it seems to me that we destroy one wall only to build another. It could be an actual wall, or an invisible wall that surrounds the mind. There are walls that tell us not to go any further from where we are, and walls that tell others not to come in. One wall finally collapses, the world looks different, and we breathe a sigh of relief, only to discover that another wall has been erected in another part of the world – a wall of ethnicity, of religion, a wall of intolerance, of fundamentalism, a wall of greed, a wall of fear. Are we unable to live without a system of walls?

For us novelists, walls are obstacles we need to break through. Nothing more nor less than that. When we write novels we pass through walls, metaphorically speaking. We pass through walls separating reality and unreality, the conscious and the unconscious. We see what world lies on the other side of a wall, come back to our own side and describe in detail, in writing, what we saw. We don’t pass judgment on the meaning of the wall, or the pros and cons of the role it plays. We just try to accurately portray the scene we saw. That’s the sort of work we novelists do on a daily basis.

When a person reads fiction and is moved and excited by it, he may break through that wall together with the author. Of course, when he closes the book he’s basically in the same place he was when he began reading. If he’s moved at all it’s a matter of 10 or 20 centimetres at the most. The reality around him hasn’t changed, and no actual problems have been solved. Yet still the reader is left with the distinct feeling that he has broken through a wall, gone somewhere and returned. He’s left with the sensation that he has moved from his starting point, even if it’s only a small distance, ten or twenty centimeters. And I’ve always believed that experiencing that physical sensation is the most important thing about reading. The actual feeling that you are free, that if you want to, you can break through walls and go wherever you like. I want to treasure that above all. And write as many stories as I can that make that possible. And share those kinds of stories with as many people as I can.

The problems facing our world today obviously won’t be solved by that kind of shared consciousness. Novels, unfortunately, don’t have that kind of immediate effect. By means of a story we’re able to imagine quite vividly a world unlike the one we live in now. As John Lennon used to sing, we all have power to imagine. In the face of the dark, violent and cynical reality in which we live, this might seem at times like a powerless and fleeting hope. But the power that each individual has to imagine is found precisely in this: in the quiet yet sustained effort to keep on singing, to keep on telling stories, without losing heart.

In a world of walls, imagining a world without them, clearly seeing that kind of world in our imagination may, in some cases, lead us to see it in reality. I would like to keep on believing that stories have that kind of power. And the ideal place to reconsider that sort of power may very well be here, in Berlin, in 2014.

I’d like to send this message to the young people in Hong Kong, who are struggling against their wall at this moment.



• This article is translation of Haruki Murakami’s acceptance speech for Die Welt Literaturpreis. It was translated by Philip Gabriel.