Tales of the unexpected – UK Telegraph

He is a superstar in Japan but has always preferred the American way. Now with his offbeat tales of superfrogs, mystery women and phantom sheep, Haruki Murakami is ready to take on Britain. By Mick Brown

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'The world is more insecure than when I was young'

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Devastating: the Kobe earthquake

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Milestone: subway gas attack

Mick Brown

12:00AM BST 15 Aug 2003

To read Haruki Murakami is to enter a series of strange, often hallucinatory labyrinths in which everything is familiar but nothing is as it seems.

The hero of Murakami's stories, which are invariably written in the first person, is a sort of Japanese everyman for the modern age. We might assume that he is a version of Murakami himself. This Murakami doppelganger is somewhere in his twenties or thirties. He works as a minor cog in the wheels of the service industry - commercial translation, writing advertising copy - something below his intellectual capabilities. He's sometimes unemployed. Work bores him. He lives in Tokyo, most usually in an egg-carton apartment building close to a flyover. He is sometimes married or has a girlfriend, but he's essentially a loner. He usually has a cat.

He listens to a lot of music - rock, classical and jazz (Bill Evans and the Beach Boys are particular favourites) - but nothing Japanese. His listening is frequently interrupted by strange telephone calls - mysterious women offering phone sex; gangsters making quiet threats. He tends to sleep badly, often getting up in the middle of the night to drink whisky and brood on things until day-break. He is a decent sort, bemused by the essential strangeness of life, with more questions than answers. 'I can understand his position,' says Murakami lightly. 'He's an outsider. He's his own man. He doesn't belong to any system or any company. He's part of me, but he's not me. He's looking for something.'

Haruki Murakami is Japan's bestselling author - 'bestselling' in this case being on a scale almost unimaginable for a literary author in Britain. His most successful - if most atypical - novel, Norwegian Wood, has sold four million copies since its publication in 1987.

He is also among the most industrious. Since the publication of his first book in 1979, Murakami has written 20 books of fiction and short stories, and innumerable essays on subjects as varied as jazz, travel and the Olympic Games. To which must be added his work translating into Japanese some 25 books by American authors including F Scott Fitzgerald, JD Salinger, Raymond Carver, Truman Capote, John Irving and Paul Theroux - work that for most people would constitute a lifetime's output, but which Murakami cheerfully describes as 'a hobby'.

A wonderfully spare and lucid stylist, Murakami acknowledges his work is easy to read, but 'hard to understand'. Like Borges or Kafka, he creates a self-contained universe in which reality and illusion, truth and metaphor, mingle to the point where it is often hard to tell the difference. In his short story Superfrog Saves Tokyo, a man is confronted by a giant frog who quotes Dostoevsky, Conrad and Nietzsche, soliciting his help to wage war against a worm that is threatening to destroy Tokyo with an earthquake.

In the novel South of the Border, West of the Sun, a man meets up with a childhood sweetheart and risks his marriage in an impetuous and ill-starred affair; but by the end of the book we are no wiser as to whether the affair has actually happened or is all simply a figment of his imagination. Underpinning all Murakami's books is the sense that life is unpredictable, a mystery, possibly absurd - but there is hope.

For a long time his writing has been a well-kept secret in this country, his books and stories appearing only spasmodically in English translation. Now, in something of a Murakami feast, seven novels and two volumes of short stories have been published here in a uniform packaging - a sure sign that his commercial star is rising to a level commensurate with his critical reputation.

Murakami is an unusual writer for lots of reasons, but perhaps the most surprising thing about him is his distinctly unwriterly passion for physical fitness. Since taking up jogging in 1982 (and the following year running the Athens Marathon course by himself) he has competed in more than 20 full marathons, including New York (three times) and Boston (six times).

Though he is an infrequent visitor to this country, I met him when he was passing through London recently en route to Tokyo, where he lives, from Boston where he had been competing in a marathon. Short and boyish-looking for his 54 years, dressed in jeans, running shoes and a T-shirt, he is a shy, intensely quiet man with a self-deprecating, almost stunned air.

Murakami was born in Japan's ancient capital of Kyoto in 1949 but grew up in Kobe. His grandfather was a Buddhist priest. His father, who was also a priest for a short while, taught Japanese literature at high school. From an early age, Murakami seems to have turned against the culture and traditions that surrounded him. Having no interest in Japanese literature, he devoured 19th-century European authors - Balzac, Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Dickens. 'But no Japanese literature at all. If I'd read Japanese literature I would have had to talk about it with my father, and I didn't want that.'

By his college years, he had moved on to F Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler and Kurt Vonnegut, and, like others of his generation, had also discovered Western pop. 'I didn't like my surroundings so much. That is part of the reason why I liked those foreign things - I just wanted to escape.' He was still at university in Tokyo when, in 1971, he married a fellow student, Yoko Takahashi. With money earned from working in a record shop, augmented by a bank loan, they set up a coffee-bar-cum-jazz-club called Peter Cat (named after Murakami's late and much beloved pet) in a Tokyo suburb.

It was a gesture of independence which required no small amount of determination. Murakami's parents disapproved of him marrying at such a young age, and of him turning his back on the 'salaryman' life which was held to be the Japanese ideal. 'When I refused to take a position in an office or a company, they were so disappointed, because suddenly I was an outsider. And to be an outsider in those days was very dangerous, very risky. In those days, the Japanese economy was so strong that you were safe if you stuck to the system. People thought you'd be safe for the rest of your life.' He smiles. 'Now, of course, we know that's not true.'

Murakami and his wife were to run the club for the next seven years. He booked the acts, served drinks, schmoozed with customers, threw out drunks. But while he loved the music, he says, he did not love the life.

His decision to write arrived in the form of an epiphany. He was watching a baseball game, and the star batter had just hit a double when, Murakami says, he heard a voice telling him to begin writing a novel. 'It was one of the happiest experiences of my life. Perhaps the happiest.' Hear the Wind Sing, published in 1979, drew on memories of the student protests of his university days, in which Murakami himself had taken part, if not been altogether committed to. He later acknowledged that while he had thrown rocks and fought with riot police, 'the very thought of holding hands in a demonstration gave me the creeps'.

A second novel, Pinball '73 was published a year later, but it was not until the publication of his third, A Wild Sheep Chase, that, at the age of 32, Murakami was finally able to sell Peter Cat, and concentrate on writing full-time.

A Wild Sheep Chase tells the story of a man on a surrealistic odyssey, involving a sinister right-wing politician, a phantom sheep apparently bent on world domination and a part-time call-girl whose 'perfectly formed ears' bewitch whoever catches a glimpse of them: 'Several of the other customers were now turned our way, staring agape at her. The waiter who came over with more espresso couldn't pour properly. Not a soul uttered a word. Only the reels on the tape deck kept slowly spinning.' A mixture of Chandler-esque noir thriller and hallucinatory caper, Murakami describes it as 'a mystery without a solution' - typical of his books, in which strange things happen, but are never explained.

It was the book that truly signalled Murakami's arrival on the Japanese literary scene - and just how far removed he was from the rigorous geisha-and-tea-ceremony formalism of the Japanese 'pure literature' tradition. 'Japan has a strong tradition of autobiographical fiction,' says Jay Rubin, professor of Japanese literature at Harvard University, who has translated several of Murakami's books into English and written a study of his work. 'Writers get criticised for writing anything which isn't the literal truth. If somebody writes that he slept with three women and people know he only slept with two or actually slept with five, the critics are going to say this is not true. And it's a real shock to see a Japanese writer let his imagination go so wildly, as Haruki does.'

The values of his characters, their enthusiasm for Western music and French New Wave cinema, not only resonated with a young Japanese audience determined to cast off the cultural trappings of their parents; they also make his protagonists feel very familiar to Western readers. Japanese they may be, but they seem to belong more to the Western literary tradition of the existentialist loner of Chandler and Camus - cool, laconic and detached, afflicted by a sense of rootlessness and dislocation.

'I don't know how to put it,' muses the protagonist of Hear the Wind Sing, 'but I just can't get it through my head that here and now is really here and now. Or that I am really me. It doesn't quite hit home. It's always this way.'

'All of my protagonists are looking for something important, at least to them,' says Murakami. 'And that search is a kind of adventure for him, and a kind of trial. But the most important thing is not what he is searching for, but the process of the search itself. And that process means the fact that you are alone, you are by yourself, and you have to be independent, and try as hard as you can. So it's a kind of small odyssey.'

As it is for Murakami himself. He likens writing to a 'video game' in which he is both designer and player. He sits down at his computer with no structure in mind, no characters, no plot, trusting simply to his imagination to guide him. 'Writing a novel or a story is like entering a very special place for me. And it's not the real world. It's a kind of unconsciousness. It's like I am digging and digging a hole in the ground, descending to the depth, to the darkness. And in that dark space I see many things which are not of the real world - mystical things, signs, symbols, metaphors. Those unrealistic things are more natural to me than natural things.

'And when I'm doing that I feel I'm sharing with other people, and it's a very positive thing. But at the same time, it's dangerous, because there are evil things as well, and you have to be careful. It's just like I'm dreaming while I'm awake. It's a very special feeling.'

In 1986, Murakami and his wife left Japan to begin a period of wandering that would last, on and off, for the next nine years. They had grown disenchanted, he explains, with the rampant materialism of Japan's boom economy, and they wanted to see the world. They travelled around the Greek islands and Italy, settling in Rome, where Murakami was to write the book that would finally establish him as Japan's pre-eminent literary superstar.

A rite of passage novel in the tradition of Catcher in the Rye, superficially at least, Norwegian Wood is the most conventional of all Murakami's books, and the one that most brings to the fore his recurring themes of memory, transience and the inevitability of loss. (As the narrator in A Wild Sheep Chase puts it: 'Some things are forgotten, some things disappear, some things die. And there's hardly anything tragic about this.')

Disembarking from a plane in Hamburg, a middle-aged man hears a muzak version of the Beatles' song Norwegian Wood and enters a reverie in which he is transported back to his youth and an ill-fated love affair with a remote, psychologically damaged young girl. (The women in Murakami's books are often mysterious, unattainable, almost spectral presences, as if glimpsed longingly with the nose pressed against a window.)

Set in the late 1960s and early 1970s, against a background of student protest and the dawning sexual revolution, Norwegian Wood is a beautifully crafted meditation on adolescent love and pain, a book that resonates like a sweet, sad dream long after you've read it - so sweet that you barely notice that it contains no fewer than four suicides.

'That was a very wild time, and some of my friends got lost and killed themselves,' says Murakami soberly. 'I can say I have survived those days. And I just wanted to leave a record of that. I felt that was my obligation.'

Norwegian Wood brought Murakami pop-star status in Japan. Readers of his own generation warmed to the book's nostalgic themes, while it also proved particularly popular with girls in their late teens and early twenties, whom newspapers quickly dubbed 'The Norway Tribe' - 'young girls,' according to one report, 'dedicated to the book, who want to talk more seriously about love and how to live'. Norwegian Wood was cited in advertisements for everything from chocolates to carpet-sweepers, and a light orchestral version of the song went to the top of the Japanese charts.