I used to think life was like a book: you turn the first page, and there’s the next, as you go on turning page after page, eventually you reach the l… - Miri Yu

I think that the role of a writer is to listen to the voices of the voiceless. It’s my job to listen to the voices of the spirits of those who die in the midst of discrimination, poverty, and loneliness, unable to bring anyone’s attention to their suffering. We can’t save the dead, but by listening, we can give comfort to their spirits. By listening to their suffering, we can bandage their burning, bleeding skin, no matter how many tears that bandage might have or how patched together it might be.

As a novelist, my job is to play a role as an endoscope to look inside of a person, while also showing him or her with an external camera.

I’m often asked, why would you move where there was a nuclear accident on purpose? I started writing novels when I was eighteen years old, and since then, in interivews, I’m always asked, “Why do you write? Who are writing for?” And I always answer, “I write for the people who don’t belong anywhere.” That might have roots in the fact, in the Korean War, my family left Korea and came to Japan, that my family has wandered from place to place, that I was expelled from school, so I come from a place of not belonging, and perhaps I started writing in order to make a place where I belonged in the world of novels and plays. That’s why I write for people who don’t belong.