Occasionally I’d write short stories in third person, but my novels were consistently in first person. Naturally this “I” didn’t equal me, Haruki Murakami (just like Philip Marlowe isn’t Raymond Chandler), and in each novel the image of the first-person male protagonist changes, but as I continued writing in first person, the line between the real-life me and the protagonist of the novels to a certain extent inevitably blurred, both for the writer and for the reader.
