Q. What are you reading?

A. I just finished "After the Quake," by Haruki Murakami, and another book called "Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home," by Rupert Sheldrake.

Q. What did you like about them?

A. I love dogs and his book is about research on certain kinds of animal behavior. One of the things I like is the research isn't stuck in the dogma of lab experiments but involves the real world. He gets animal trainers, vets and pet owners to help him with experiments and information. ... And in Murakami's, all of the stories are connected by the large-scale disaster of the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan. ... It fascinated me how he takes these mundane and not particularly important events, but the way he puts them together and the aura he casts over them makes them really seem vivid and important in an eerie kind of way.

Q. Both books dig into the subconscious workings of habits and memories — is this a theme in your writing, perhaps in your new mystery novel "Murder Casts a Shadow"?

A. I'm really interested in dreams and in what's going on underneath things and what the subtext of our life is. Some of the things Rupert Sheldrake is investigating are important for us to understand as human beings. And I think Murakami, and certain other writers too, want to explore that part of themselves and being human, too. ... It relates to what I do as a playwright and in some of my short stories. Some of those things are in my new mystery but they're culturally based ideas and beliefs systems that are part of Polynesian culture already, not something theoretical. I like to see those connections or at least feel them somehow.