Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami said Saturday writing good stories is the best he can do for victims of terrorist attacks and natural disasters such as the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami.
"I was wondering what could I do for the people who have suffered. But I thought, ‘What I can do is to write good fiction,’ " he said during an event in New York, referring to a number of tragedies, including the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States and the disaster that devastated parts of Japan’s Tohoku region.
Murakami, 69, said that after the 1995 earthquake that destroyed much of his hometown of Kobe, he "just wanted to write something" and penned a collection of short stories.