sans phones, sans tables, sans chairs, sans all

[yes. the HTML is up the creek.]

From Self-Divider, a translation of Haruki Murakami's afterword to Norwegian Wood for the Korean edition:

3. This novel was written in the southern Europe. I started writing in a villa located on the island of Micene in Greece, on December 21, 1986, and finished writing it on March 27, 1987 in a hotel apartment on the periphery of Rome. It is difficult to figure out if my writing outside of Japan had any bearing on the novel itself. It might have had some effect, or it might not have had any effect at all. I only remain thankful that I could concentrate purely on writing due to the fact that I had no visitors or telephone calls. Aside from these facts, there weren’t such big changes in my writing environment.

The first part of Norwegian Wood was written in Greece, the middle part, in Sicily, and the last part, in Rome. In the cheap hotel room in Athens, there were no tables or chairs. So I went daily to a pub and listened to the cassette tape of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on my walkman repeatedly, about 120 times, and wrote this novel. To that end, I can say that I received a little help from Lennon and McCartney.

The whole thing here.