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 … 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.
–from Haruki Murakami’s 2009 Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech