My Take | Just who among us is building a wall?

Over the weekend, many Hong Kong media billed as a headline a message of encouragement sent by Haruki Murakami from Berlin to the city's Occupy protesters.

It was widely reported as a statement of support. But I wonder whether the famed Japanese novelist, often billed as a front-runner for the Nobel literature prize, really understands Hong Kong; and whether the protesters and their supporters actually read the message and not just the headlines.

Murakami says we should strive to create a world without walls. The novelist was in the German capital to receive a top literary prize and no doubt he was thinking about the 25th anniversary of the breaching of the Berlin Wall.

"I'd like to send this message to the young people in Hong Kong who are struggling against their wall right now," he wrote.

A world without walls, he says, "created in the quiet but sustained effort to keep on singing, to keep on telling stories, stories about a better and freer world to come, without losing heart.

"We can see [a world without walls] with our own eyes - we can even touch it with our own hands if we try hard."