I've just finished Murakami Haruki's 1995 novel, Kokkyo no minami, taiyo ni nishi (also available in English translation by Philip Gabriel as South of the Border, West of the Sun). The tale of a boy who chases after lost childhood loves even after he grows up, it covers much of the author's usual terrain: the mysterious other world, the seductive power of music, the empty flash of contemporary urban life. So why didn't I like it?

Mostly, the work lacks the fizz that distinguishes Murakami's best writing. The postmodern philosophical dilemmas here seem tacked on, rather than growing organically from the story, and the playful language games never seem to get out of low gear. Good Murakami is dotted with sentences that burst in your head like fast-forwarded film of a flower blooming. The prose here, however, is all too prosaic. Yare yare, as a Murakami character might sigh.

Murakami himself has been in the news again lately. It was speculated that after the brutal Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, he might decline the Jerusalem Literary Award. Instead, he accepted the prize last week, but gave a speech criticizing Israel's policies toward Palestinians. Part of his Feb. 15 speech:

Please do allow me to deliver one very personal message. It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the wall: rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like this:

"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg."

Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?

What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them. This is one meaning of the metaphor.

This is not all, though. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: it is "The System." The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others--coldly, efficiently, systematically.

I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on the System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist's job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories--stories of life and death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.