Stimulating structures: Michie Stadium, West Point, New York

Home to the Army Cadets, this beautiful stadium is located on the banks of the Hudson River in beautiful upstate New York. I can't really picture myself sitting through a college football game--unless the job required it of course--but if I did have to, Michie would be the place to be.

Murakami on Murakami

Following on the heels of yesterday's Haruki Murakami, here some interviews where the famed Japanese author discusses various aspects of his life and work. The first one comes from the February 20, 2008 online edition of Germany's "Der Speigel" where Murakami talks about his passion for running--and his inspiration to write.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Murakami, which is tougher: writing a novel, or running a marathon?

Murakami: Writing is fun--at least mostly. I write for four hours every day. After that I go running. As a rule, 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). That’s easy to manage. But running 42.195 kilometers (26 miles) all at once is tough; however it’s a toughness I seek out. It is an inevitable torment which I deliberately take upon myself. For me that is the most important aspect of running a marathon.

SPIEGEL: And which is nicer: completing a book or crossing the finishing line of a marathon?

Murakami: Putting the final full stop at the end of a story is like giving birth to a child, an incomparable moment. A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime. I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five. When I am running I don’t feel that kind of limit. I publish a thick novel every four years, but I run a 10-kilometer race, a half-marathon and a marathon every year. I have run 27 marathon races so far, the last was in January, and numbers 28, 29 and 30 will follow quite naturally.

SPIEGEL: In your latest book, the German translation of which is to be released next Monday, you describe your career as a runner and discuss the importance of running for your work as a writer. Why did you write this autobiographical work?

Murakami: Ever since I went running for the first time, 25 years ago in the autumn of 1982, I have been asking myself for why I decided on this particular sport. Why don’t I play football? Why did my real existence as a serious writer begin on the day that I first went jogging? I tend to understand things only if I record my thoughts. I found that when I write about running I write about myself.

SPIEGEL: Why did you start running?

Murakami: I wanted to lose weight. During my first years as an author I smoked a lot, about 60 cigarettes a day, in order to be able to concentrate better. I had yellow teeth, yellow fingernails. When I decided to stop smoking, at the age of 33, I sprouted rolls of fat on my hips. So I ran; running seemed to me to be most practicable.

SPIEGEL: Why?

Murakami: Team sports aren’t my thing. I find it easier to pick something up if I can do it at my own speed. And you don’t need a partner to go running, you don’t need a particular place, like in tennis, just a pair of trainers. Judo doesn’t suit me either; I’m not a fighter. Long-distance running is not a matter of winning against others. Your only opponent is yourself, no one else is involved, but you are engaged in an inner conflict: Am I better than I was last time? Exerting yourself to the limit over and over again, that is the essence of running. Running is painful, but the pain doesn’t leave me, I can take care of it. That agrees with my mentality.

SPIEGEL: What kind of shape were you in at the time?

Murakami: After 20 minutes I was out of breath, my heart was hammering, my legs were trembling. At first I was uncomfortable when other people saw me jogging. But I integrated running into my day like brushing my teeth. So I made rapid progress. After just under a year I ran my first, though unofficial, marathon.

SPIEGEL: You ran from Athens to Marathon on your own. What appealed to you about that?

Murakami: Well, it’s the original marathon, it’s the historic route -- though in the opposite direction, because I didn’t want to arrive in Athens during the rush hour. I had never run more than 35 kilometers; my legs and my upper body were not particularly strong yet; I didn’t know what to expect. It was like running in terra incognita.

SPIEGEL: How did you get along?

Murakami: It was July; it was hot. So hot, even in the early morning. I had never been to Greece before; I was surprised. After half an hour I took off my shirt. Later I dreamt of an ice-cold beer and counted the dead dogs and cats lying along the roadside. I was furious with the sun; it burnt down on me so angrily, small blisters formed on my skin. It took me 3:51 hours, a passable time. When I arrived at the finish I hosed myself down at a petrol station and drank the beer I had dreamt of. When the petrol pump attendant heard what I had done, he presented me with a bunch of flowers.

SPIEGEL: What is your best time for a marathon?

Murakami: 3:27 hours by my watch, in New York, in 1991. That’s five minutes per kilometer. I am very proud of that because the last stretch of the course, which leads through Central Park, is really hard. I have tried a few times to improve on that time, but I’m getting older. In the meantime I’m no longer interested in my best personal time. For me it’s a matter of being satisfied with myself.

SPIEGEL: Is there some mantra that you recite while running?

Murakami: No. I just tell myself once in a while: Haruki, you’ll make it. But in fact I don’t think of anything while I’m running.

SPIEGEL: Is that possible, to think of nothing?

Murakami: When I am running my mind empties itself. Everything I think while running is subordinate to the process. The thoughts that impose themselves on me while running are like light gusts of wind -- they appear all of a sudden, disappear again and change nothing.

SPIEGEL: Do you listen to music while running?

Murakami: Only when I’m training. And then rock music. At the moment my favorite is the Manic Street Preachers. When I go jogging in the morning, which is the exception, I load Creedence Clearwater Revival into the minidisk player. Their songs have a simple, natural rhythm.

SPIEGEL: How do you manage to motivate yourself again every day?

Murakami: Sometimes I find it too hot to run, and sometimes too cold. Or too cloudy. But I still go running. I know that if I didn’t go running, I wouldn’t go the next day either. It’s not in human nature to take unnecessary burdens upon oneself, so one’s body soon becomes disaccustomed. It mustn’t do that. It’s the same with writing. I write every day so that my mind doesn’t become disaccustomed. So that I can gradually set the literary yardstick higher and higher, just as running regularly makes your muscles stronger and stronger.

SPIEGEL: You grew up as an only child; writing is a lonely business, and you always run alone. Is there some connection between these things?

Murakami: Definitely. I am used to being alone. And I enjoy being alone. Unlike my wife, I don’t like company. I have been married for 37 years, and often it is a battle. In my previous job I often worked until dawn, now I'm in bed by nine or ten.

SPIEGEL: Before you became a writer and a runner, you owned a jazz club in Tokyo. A change in life could hardly be more radical.

Murakami: When I had the club I stood behind the bar, and it was my job to engage in conversation. I did that for seven years, but I’m not a talkative person. I swore to myself: Once I’ve finished here I will only ever talk to those people I really want to talk to.

SPIEGEL: When did you notice it was time for a fresh start?

'I knew I Was Going to Write a Novel'

Murakami: In April 1978, I was watching a baseball game in the Jingu Stadium in Tokyo, the sun was shining, I was drinking a beer. And when Dave Hilton of the Yakult Swallows made a perfect hit, at that instant I knew I was going to write a novel. It was a warm sensation. I can still feel it in my heart. Now I am compensating for the old, open life through my new, closed life. I have never appeared on television, I have never been heard on the radio, I hardly ever give readings, I am extremely reluctant to have my photograph taken, I rarely give interviews. I’m a loner.

SPIEGEL: Do you know the novel “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” by Alan Sillitoe?

Murakami: I wasn’t impressed by the book. It’s boring. You can tell that Sillitoe wasn’t a runner himself. But I find the idea itself fitting: running allows the hero to access his own identity. In running he discovers the only state in which he feels free. I can identify with that.

SPIEGEL: And what did running teach you?

Murakami: The certainty that I will make it to the finishing line. Running taught me to have faith in my skills as a writer. I learned how much I can demand of myself, when I need a break, and when the break starts to get too long. I known how hard I am allowed to push myself.

SPIEGEL: Are you a better writer because you run?

Murakami: Definitely. The stronger my muscles got, the clearer my mind became. I am convinced that artists who lead an unhealthy life burn out more quickly. Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin were the heroes of my youth -- all of them died young, even though they didn’t deserve to. Only geniuses like Mozart or Pushkin deserve an early death. Jimi Hendrix was good, but not so smart because he took drugs. Working artistically is unhealthy; an artist should lead a healthy life to make up for it. Finding a story is a dangerous thing for an author; running helps me to avert that danger.

SPIEGEL: Could you explain that?

Murakami: When a writer develops a story, he is confronted with a poison that is inside him. If you don’t have that poison, your story will be boring and uninspired. It’s like fugu: The flesh of the pufferfish is extremely tasty, but the roe, the liver, the heart can be lethally toxic. My stories are located in a dark, dangerous part of my consciousness, I feel the poison in my mind, but I can fend off a high dose of it because I have a strong body. When you are young, you are strong; so you can usually conquer the poison even without being in training. But beyond the age of 40 your strength wanes, you can no longer cope with the poison if you lead an unhealthy life.

SPIEGEL: J.D. Salinger wrote his only novel, “Catcher in the Rye” when he was 32. Was he too weak for his poison?

Murakami: I translated the book into Japanese. It is quite good, but incomplete. The story becomes darker and darker, and the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, doesn’t find his way out of the dark world. I think Salinger himself didn’t find it either. Would sport have saved him too? I don’t know.

SPIEGEL: Does running give you the inspiration for stories?

Murakami: No, because I’m not the kind of writer who reaches the source of a story playfully. I have to dig for the source. I have to dig very deep to reach the dark places in my soul where the story lies hidden. For that, too, you have to be physically strong. Since I started running, I have been able to concentrate for longer, and I have to concentrate for hours on my way into the darkness. On the way there you find everything: the images, the characters, the metaphors. If you are physically too weak, you miss them; you lack the strength to hold on to them and bring them back up to the surface of your consciousness. When you are writing, the main thing isn’t digging down to the source, but the way back out of the darkness. It’s the same with running. There is a finishing line that you have to cross, whatever the cost may be.

SPIEGEL: Are you in a similarly dark place when you are running?

Murakami: There is something very familiar to me about running. When I run I am in a peaceful place.

SPIEGEL: You lived in the United States for several years. Are there differences between American and Japanese runners?

Murakami: No, but when I was in Cambridge (as a writer-in-residence at Harvard), it became clear to me that the members of an elite run differently from ordinary mortals.

SPIEGEL: How do you mean?

Murakami: My running route took me along the Charles River, and I was constantly seeing these young female students, Harvard freshmen. They jogged with long strides, their iPods in their ears, their blonde ponytails swinging to and fro on their backs. Their entire body was radiant. They were aware that they were unusual. Their self-awareness impressed me deeply. I was a better runner, but there was something provokingly positive about them. They were so different from me. I was never the member of an elite.

SPIEGEL: Can you distinguish a beginner from a veteran runner?

Murakami: A beginner runs too fast, his breathing is too shallow. The veteran is at rest. One veteran recognizes another just the way that a writer recognizes the style and language of another writer.

SPIEGEL: Your books are written in the style of magical realism, reality blends with magic. Does running have a surrealist or metaphysical dimension -- quite apart from the pure physical achievement?

Murakami: Every activity acquires something contemplative if you perform it long enough. In 1995 I took part in a 100-kilometer race; it took me 11:42 hours and in the end it was a religious experience.

SPIEGEL: A-ha.

Murakami: After 55 kilometers I broke down; my legs would no longer obey me. I felt as though two horses were pulling my body apart. After about 75 kilometers I was suddenly able to run properly again; the pain had vanished. I had reached the other side. Happiness surged through me. I reached the finishing line filled with euphoria. I could have gone on running. Nevertheless, I will never run another ultramarathon.

SPIEGEL: Why not?

Murakami: After this extreme experience I went into a state that I have called “Runner’s Blue.”

SPIEGEL: What is that?

Murakami: A sort of listlessness. I was tired of running. Running 100 kilometers is terribly boring, you are on your own for more than eleven hours, and this boredom gnawed at me. It sucked the motivation out of my soul. The positive attitude was gone. I hated running. For weeks.

SPIEGEL: How did you restore your pleasure in it?

Murakami: I tried to force myself to run, but that didn’t work. The fun had gone out of it. So I decided to try a different sport. I wanted to try a new stimulus, and so I started on the triathlon. It helped. After a while, my desire to run returned.

SPIEGEL: You are 59 years old. How long do you intend to go on taking part in marathons?

Murakami: I will go on running for as long as I can walk. You know what I would like to be written on my tombstone?

SPIEGEL: Tell us.

Murakami: "At least he never walked."

SPIEGEL: Mr. Murakami, thank you for this interview.

The second--and perhaps the definitive Murakami interview in English--was conducted by Jonathan Wray and published in the Paris Review in 2004. A treasure.

Haruki Murakami is not only arguably the most experimental Japanese novelist to have been translated into English, he is also the most popular, with sales in the millions worldwide. His greatest novels inhabit the liminal zone between realism and fable, whodunit and science fiction: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, for example, features a protagonist who is literally of two minds, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, perhaps his best-known work outside of Japan, begins prosaically—as a man’s search for his missing wife—then quietly mutates into the strangest hybrid narrative since Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Murakami’s world is an allegorical one, constructed of familiar symbols—an empty well, an underground city—but the meaning of those symbols remains hermetic to the last. His debt to popular culture (and American pop culture, in particular) notwithstanding, it could be argued that no author’s body of work has ever been more private.

Murakami was born in 1949 in Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital, to a middle-class family with a vested interest in the national culture: his father was a teacher of Japanese literature, his grandfather a Buddhist monk. When he was two, his family moved to Kobe, and it was this bustling port city, with its steady stream of foreigners (especially American sailors), that most clearly shaped his sensibility. Rejecting Japanese literature, art, and music at an early age, Murakami came to identify more and more closely with the world outside Japan, a world he knew only through jazz records, Hollywood movies, and dime-store paperbacks.

As a student in Tokyo in the late sixties, Murakami developed a taste for postmodern fiction while looking on, quietly but sympathetically, as the protest movement reached its high-water mark. He married at twenty-three and spent the next several years of his life running a jazz club in Tokyo, Peter Cat, before the publication of his first novel made it possible for him to pay his way by writing. The novel, Hear the Wind Sing, translated into English but not available outside Japan at the author’s request, won him the coveted Gunzo Literature Prize and the beginnings of a readership. With each book that followed, his acclaim and popularity grew, until the publication in 1987 of his first realistic novel, Norwegian Wood, transformed him into a literary megastar and the de facto “voice of his generation”—eighties’ Japan’s version of J. D. Salinger. The book has sold more than two million copies in Japan alone, the equivalent of one for every household in Tokyo.

Since then Murakami has been an unwilling celebrity in his native country, living abroad for years at a time to secure a measure of distance from his public image. He has lived both in Europe and the U.S.; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, for example, was written while teaching at Princeton and Tufts. Though he has never returned to the straightforward lyricism of Norwegian Wood, his novels continue to find an ever wider audience—his new novel Kafka on the Shore has already sold three thousand copies in Japan and is due out in English later this year. Internationally, Murakami is now the most widely-read Japanese novelist of his generation; he has won virtually every prize Japan has to offer, including its greatest, the Yomiuri Literary Prize. He is also an extremely active translator, having brought writers as diverse as Raymond Carver, Tim O’Brien, and F. Scott Fitzgerald to Japanese readers, many of them for the first time.

Murakami’s office sits just off the main drag in boutique-choked Aoyama, Tokyo’s equivalent of New York City’s SoHo. The building itself is squat and dated-looking, as though the change in the neighborhood had happened without its permission. Murakami rents a moderate-sized suite on the building’s sixth floor, and his rooms give much the same impression: plain wooden cabinets, swivel chairs, Mylar-covered desks—office furniture, in short. The decor seems both deeply incongruous with the notion of a writer’s studio and at the same time somehow fitting: his characters are often in just such an everyday environment when the dream world first beckons to them. As it turns out, although he writes there on occasion, the office’s main function is as the nerve center for the business end of Murakami’s career. The air hums with polite industry. No fewer than two assistants glide capably about in dainty stockinged feet.

Throughout the following interview, which took place over two consecutive afternoons, he showed a readiness to laugh that was pleasantly out of keeping with the quiet of the office. He’s clearly a busy man and by his own admission a reluctant talker, but once serious conversation began I found him focused and forthcoming. He spoke fluently, but with extended pauses between statements, taking great care to give the most accurate answer possible. When the talk turned to jazz or to running marathons, two of his great passions, he could easily have been mistaken for a man twenty years younger, or even for a fifteen-year-old boy.

PR: I’ve just read After the Quake, your newest story collection and I found it interesting how freely you mixed stories that were realistic, in the style of your novel Norwegian Wood, let’s say, with others that had more in common with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Do you see a fundamental difference between those two forms?

HM: My style, what I think of as my style, is very close to Hard-Boiled Wonderland. I don’t like the realistic style, myself. I prefer a more surrealistic style. But with Norwegian Wood, I made up my mind to write a hundred percent realistic novel. I needed that experience.

PR: Did you think of that book as an exercise in style or did you have a specific story to tell that was best told realistically?

HM: I could have been a cult writer if I’d kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book. That’s why I wrote that book. It was a best-seller in Japan and I expected that result.

PR: So it was actually a strategic choice.

HM: That’s right. Norwegian Wood is very easy to read and easy to understand. Many people liked that book. They might then be interested in my other work; so it helps a lot.

PR: So Japanese readers are like American readers? They want an easy story.

HM: My latest book, Kafka on the Shore, sold three hundred thousand sets—it’s in two volumes here, you know. I was surprised that it sold that many; that’s no ordinary thing. The story is very complicated and very hard to follow. But my style, my prose, is very easy to read. It contains a sense of humor, it’s dramatic, and it’s a page-turner. There’s a sort of magic balance between those two factors; perhaps that’s another reason for my success. Still, it’s incredible. I write a novel every three or four years, and people are waiting for it. I once interviewed John Irving, and he told me that reading a good book is a mainline. Once they are addicted, they’re always waiting.

PR: You want to turn your readers into junkies.

HM: That’s what John Irving said.

PR: Those two factors—a straightforward, easy-to-follow narrative voice paired with an often bewildering plot—is that a conscious choice?

HM: No, it’s not. When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come. I don’t choose what kind of story it is or what’s going to happen. I just wait. Norwegian Wood is a different thing, because I decided to write in a realistic style. But basically, I cannot choose.

PR: But do you choose the voice that it’s told in, that deadpan, easy-to-follow voice? Do you choose that?

HM: I get some images and I connect one piece to another. That’s the story line. Then I explain the story line to the reader. You should be very kind when you explain something. If you think, It’s okay; I know that, it’s a very arrogant thing. Easy words and good metaphors; good allegory. So that’s what I do. I explain very carefully and clearly.

PR: Does that come naturally for you?

HM: I’m not intelligent. I’m not arrogant. I’m just like the people who read my books. I used to have a jazz club, and I made the cocktails and I made the sandwiches. I didn’t want to become a writer—it just happened. It’s a kind of gift, you know, from the heavens. So I think I should be very humble.

PR: At what age did you become a writer? Was it a surprise to you?

HM: When I was twenty-nine years old. Oh yes, it was a surprise. But I got used to it instantly.

PR: Instantly? From the first day of writing you felt comfortable?

HM: I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream—I was surprised to find it happening. But after a moment, I thought, Yes, it’s happened and I’m a writer; why not? It’s that simple.

PR: How did your wife feel about your decision to start writing?

HM: She didn’t say anything at all; and when I said, I’m a writer, she was surprised and kind of embarrassed.

PR: Why was she embarrassed? Did she think you wouldn’t make it?

HM: To become a writer is kind of flashy.

PR: Who were your models? What Japanese writers influenced you?

HM: I didn’t read many Japanese writers when I was a child or even in my teens. I wanted to escape from this culture; I felt it was boring. Too sticky.

PR: Wasn’t your father a teacher of Japanese literature?

HM: Right. So it was the father-son relationship too. I just went toward Western culture: jazz music and Dostoevsky and Kafka and Raymond Chandler. That was my own world, my fantasyland. I could go to St. Petersburg or West Hollywood if I wanted. That’s the power of the novel—you can go anywhere. Now it’s easy to go to the States—everyone can go anywhere in the world—but in the 1960s it was almost impossible. So I just read and listened to the music and I could go there. It was a kind of state of mind, like a dream.

PR: And that led at some point to writing.

HM: Right. When I was twenty-nine, I just started to write a novel out of the blue. I wanted to write something, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how to write in Japanese—I’d read almost nothing of the works of Japanese writers—so I borrowed the style, structure, everything, from the books I had read—American books or Western books. As a result, I made my own original style. So it was a beginning.

PR: Your first book was published, you won a prize and were more or less on your way. Did you begin to meet other writers?

HM: No, not at all.

PR: You had no friends who were writers at that time?

HM: None.

PR: And over time did you meet anyone who became a friend or a colleague?

HM: No, not at all.

PR: To this day, you have no friends who are writers?

HM: No. I don’t think so.

PR: Is there no one you show your work to when it’s in progress?

HM: Never.

PR: How about your wife?

HM: Well, I showed the first manuscript of my first novel but she claims she never read it! So she got no impression at all, I guess.

PR: She wasn’t impressed.

HM: No. But that was the first draft and it was terrible. I rewrote and rewrote.

PR: Now when you’re working on a book is she ever curious what you’re writing?

HM: She’s my first reader, every time I write a book. I rely on her. She’s a kind of partner to me. It’s like Scott Fitzgerald—for him, Zelda was the first reader.

PR: So you’ve never felt, at any point in your career, that you were part of any community of writers?

HM: I’m a loner. I don’t like groups, schools, literary circles. At Princeton, there was a luncheonette, or something like that, and I was invited to eat there. Joyce Carol Oates was there and Toni Morrison was there and I was so afraid, I couldn’t eat anything at all! Mary Morris was there and she’s a very nice person, almost the same age as I am, and we became friends, I would say. But in Japan I don’t have any writer friends, because I just want to have . . . distance.

PR: You wrote a significant portion of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in the U.S. Did living there have any clear effect on your writing process or on the text itself?

HM: During the four years of writing The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I was living in the U.S. as a stranger. That “strangeness” was always following me like a shadow and it did the same to the protagonist of the novel. Come to think of it, if I wrote it in Japan, it might have become a very different book. My strangeness while living in the U.S. differed from the strangeness I feel while in Japan. It was more obvious and direct in the U.S. and that gave me a much clearer recognition of myself. The process of writing this novel was a process similar to making myself naked, in a way.

PR: Are there people currently writing in Japan whose books you read and enjoy?

HM: Yes, some of them. Ryu Murakami. Banana Yoshimoto—some of her books I like. But I don’t do any reviews or critiques; I don’t want to be involved in that.

PR: Why not?

HM: I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world. I prefer translating to criticism, because you are hardly required to judge anything when you translate. Line by line, I just let my favorite work pass through my body and my mind. We need critiques in this world, for sure, but it’s just not my job.

PR: Getting back to your own books: hard-boiled American detective fiction has clearly been a valuable resource. When were you exposed to the genre and who turned you on to it?

HM: As a high-school student, I fell in love with crime novels. I was living in Kobe, which is a port city where many foreigners and sailors used to come and sell their paperbacks to the secondhand bookshops. I was poor, but I could buy paperbacks cheaply. I learned to read English from those books and that was so exciting.

PR: What was the first book you read in English?

HM: The Name Is Archer, by Ross MacDonald. I learned a lot of things from those books. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. At the same time I also loved to read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Those books are also page-turners; they’re very long, but I couldn’t stop reading. So for me it’s the same thing, Dostoevsky and Raymond Chandler. Even now, my ideal for writing fiction is to put Dostoevsky and Chandler together in one book. That’s my goal.

PR: At what age did you first read Kafka?

HM: When I was fifteen. I read The Castle; that was a great book. And The Trial.

PR: That’s interesting. Both those novels were left unfinished, which of course means that they never resolve; your novels too—particularly your more recent books, like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle—often seem to resist a resolution of the kind that the reader is perhaps expecting. Could that in any way be due to Kafka’s influence?

HM: Not solely. You’ve read Raymond Chandler, of course. His books don’t really offer conclusions. He might say, He is the killer, but it doesn’t matter to me who did it. There was a very interesting episode when Howard Hawks made a picture of The Big Sleep. Hawks couldn’t understand who killed the chauffeur, so he called Chandler and asked, and Chandler answered, I don’t care! Same for me. Conclusion means nothing at all. I don’t care who the killer is in The Brothers Karamazov.

PR: And yet the desire to find out who killed the chauffeur is part of what makes The Big Sleep a page-turner.

HM: I myself, as I’m writing, don’t know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I start to write a story, I don’t know the conclusion at all and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don’t know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there’s no purpose to writing the story.

PR: Is there also a sense of not wanting to explain your books, in the way a dream loses its power when it comes under analysis?

HM: The good thing about writing books is that you can dream while you are awake. If it’s a real dream, you cannot control it. When writing the book, you are awake; you can choose the time, the length, everything. I write for four or five hours in the morning and when the time comes, I stop. I can continue the next day. If it’s a real dream, you can’t do that.

PR: You say that you don’t know who the killer is as you’re writing, but a possible exception occurs to me: the character of Gotanda in Dance Dance Dance. There’s a certain deliberate buildup in that novel toward the moment at which Gotanda makes his confession—in classic crime-novel style, he’s presented to us as the last person to suspect. Did you not perhaps know that Gotanda was guilty in advance?

HM: In the first draft I didn’t know it was Gotanda. Closer to the end—two-thirds in or so—I knew. When I wrote the second draft I rewrote the Gotanda scenes, knowing it was him.

PR: Is that one of the main purposes of revision, then—to take what you’ve learned from the end of the first draft and rework the earlier sections to give a certain feeling of inevitability?

HM: That’s right. The first draft is messy; I have to revise and revise.

PR: How many drafts do you generally go through?

HM: Four or five. I spend six months writing the first draft and then spend seven or eight months rewriting.

PR: That’s pretty fast.

HM: I’m a hard worker. I concentrate on my work very hard. So, you know, it’s easy. And I don’t do anything but write my fiction when I write.

PR: How is your typical workday structured?

HM: When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long—six months to a year—requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

PR: I wanted to ask about your characters. How real do they become to you as you work? Is it important to you that they have a life independent of the narrative?

HM: When I make up the characters in my books, I like to observe the real people in my life. I don’t like to talk much; I like to listen to other people’s stories. I don’t decide what kind of people they are; I just try to think about what they feel, where they are going. I gather some factors from him, some factors from her. I don’t know if this is “realistic” or “unrealistic,” but for me, my characters are more real than real people. In those six or seven months that I’m writing, those people are inside me. It’s a kind of cosmos.

PR: Your protagonists often seem to serve as projections of your own point of view into the fantastic world of your narratives—the dreamer in the dream.

HM: Please think about it this way: I have a twin brother. And when I was two years old, one of us—the other one—was kidnapped. He was brought to a faraway place and we haven’t seen each other since. I think my protagonist is him. A part of myself, but not me, and we haven’t seen each other for a long time. It’s a kind of alternative form of myself. In terms of DNA, we are the same, but our environment has been different. So our way of thinking would be different. Every time I write a book I put my feet in different shoes. Because sometimes I am tired of being myself. This way I can escape. It’s a fantasy. If you can’t have a fantasy, what’s the point of writing a book?

PR: Another question about Hard-Boiled Wonderland. It has a certain symmetry to it, a certain formal quality, and also a sense of resolution that sets it apart from later books such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, for example. Did your ideas on the function and importance of structure in the novel change at some point?

HM: Yes. My first two books have not been published outside of Japan; I didn’t want them to be. They’re immature works, I think—very small books. They were flimsy, if that’s the right word.

PR: What were their shortcomings?

HM: What I was trying to do in my first two books was to deconstruct the traditional Japanese novel. By deconstruct, I mean remove everything inside, leaving only the framework. Then I had to fill the framework in with something fresh and original. I discovered how to do it successfully only after my third book, A Wild Sheep Chase, in 1982. The first two novels were helpful in the learning process—no more than that. I consider A Wild Sheep Chase to be the true beginning of my style. Since then, my books have gotten bigger and bigger; their structures are more complicated. Every time I write a new book, I like to destroy the former structure, to make up a new thing. And I always put a new theme, or a new restriction, or a new vision into the new book. I’m always conscious of the structure. If I change the structure, I have to change the style of my prose and I have to change the characters accordingly. If I did the same thing each time, I would be tired. I’d get bored.

PR: And yet as much as some elements of your writing have changed, others have endured. Your novels are always told in the first person. In each of them, a man cycles between a variety of sexually charged relationships with women; he is generally passive vis-à-vis these women, who seem to function as manifestations of his fears and fantasies.

HM: In my books and stories, women are mediums, in a sense; the function of the medium is to make something happen through herself. It’s a kind of system to be experienced. The protagonist is always led somewhere by the medium and the visions that he sees are shown to him by her.

PR: Mediums in the Victorian sense? Psychic mediums?

HM: I think sex is an act of . . . a kind of soul-commitment. If the sex is good, your injury will be healed, your imagination will be invigorated. It’s a kind of passage to the upper area, to the better place. In that sense, in my stories, women are mediums—harbingers of the coming world. That’s why they always come to my protagonist; he doesn’t go to them.

PR: There seem to be two distinct types of women in your novels: those with whom the protagonist has a fundamentally serious relationship—often this is the woman who disappears and whose memory haunts him—and the other kind of woman, who comes later and helps him in his search, or to do the opposite—to forget. This second type of woman tends to be outspoken, eccentric, and sexually frank, and the protagonist interacts with her in a much warmer and more humorous way than he had with the missing woman, with whom he never quite connected. What purpose do these two archetypes serve?

HM: My protagonist is almost always caught between the spiritual world and the real world. In the spiritual world, the women—or men—are quiet, intelligent, modest. Wise. In the realistic world, as you say, the women are very active, comic, positive. They have a sense of humor. The protagonist’s mind is split between these totally different worlds and he cannot choose which to take. I think that’s one of the main motifs in my work. It’s very apparent in Hard-Boiled Wonderland, in which his mind is actually, physically split. In Norwegian Wood, as well, there are two girls and he cannot decide between them, from the beginning to the end.

PR: My sympathies always seem to tend toward the girl with the sense of humor. It’s easier to allow the reader into a relationship in which humor is the primary currency; it’s harder to charm the reader with an earnest description of a love affair. In Norwegian Wood I was rooting for Midori all the way.

HM: I think most readers would say the same. Most would choose Midori. And the protagonist, of course, chooses her in the end. But some part of him is always in the other world and he cannot abandon it. It’s a part of him, an essential part. All human beings have a sickness in their minds. That space is a part of them. We have a sane part of our minds and an insane part. We negotiate between those two parts; that is my belief. I can see the insane part of my mind especially well when I’m writing—insane is not the right word. Unordinary, unreal. I have to go back to the real world, of course, and pick up the sane part. But if didn’t have the insane part, the sick part, I wouldn’t be here. In other words, the protagonist is supported by two women; without either of them, he could not go on. In that sense, Norwegian Wood is a very straightforward example of what I’m doing.

PR: The character of Reiko in Norwegian Wood is interesting in that light. I wouldn’t quite know where to put her; she seems to have a foot in both worlds.

HM: She has a half-sane, half-insane mind. It’s a Greek mask: if you see her from this side, she’s a tragic character; if you see her from the other side, she’s comic. In that sense, she’s very symbolic. I like that character very much. I was happy when I wrote her, Reiko-San.

PR: Do you yourself feel more affection for your comic characters—for your Midoris and May Kasaharas—than you do for your Naokos?

HM: I like to write comic dialogue; it’s fun. But if my characters were all comic it would be boring. Those comic characters are a kind of stabilizer to my mind; a sense of humor is a very stable thing. You have to be cool to be humorous. When you’re serious, you could be unstable; that’s the problem with seriousness. But when you’re humorous, you’re stable. But you can’t fight the war smiling.

PR: Few novelists have written and rewritten their obsessions so compulsively, I think, as you have. Hard-Boiled Wonderland, Dance Dance Dance, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Sputnik Sweetheart almost demand to be read as variations on a theme: a man has been abandoned by, or has otherwise lost, the object of his desire, and is drawn by his inability to forget her into a parallel world that seems to offer the possibility of regaining what he has lost, a possibility that life as he (and the reader) knows it can never offer. Would you agree with this characterization?

HM: Yes.

PR: How central is this obsession to your fiction?

HM: I don’t know why I keep writing those things. I find that in John Irving’s work, every book of his, there’s some person with a body part that’s missing. I don’t know why he keeps writing about those missing parts; probably he doesn’t know himself. For me it’s the same thing. My protagonist is always missing something, and he’s searching for that missing thing. It’s like the Holy Grail, or Philip Marlowe.

PR: You can’t have a detective unless something’s missing.

HM: Right. When my protagonist misses something, he has to search for it. He’s like Odysseus. He experiences so many strange things in the course of his search . . .

PR: In the course of trying to come home.

HM: He has to survive those experiences, and in the end he finds what he was searching for. But he is not sure it’s the same thing. I think that’s the motif of my books. Where do those things come from? I don’t know. It fits me. It’s the driving power of my stories: missing and searching and finding. And disappointment, a kind of new awareness of the world.

PR: Disappointment as a rite of passage?

HM: That’s right. Experience itself is meaning. The protagonist has changed in the course of his experiences—that’s the main thing. Not what he found, but how he changed.

PR: I wanted to ask about the process of translation with regard to your own books. As a translator yourself, you must be aware of the hazards involved. How did you come to choose your translators?

HM: I have three—Alfred Birnbaum, Philip Gabriel, Jay Rubin—and the rule is “first come, first get.” We’re friends, so they are very honest. They read my books and one of them thinks, That’s great! I’d like to do that. So he takes it. As a translator myself, I know that to be enthusiastic is the main part of a good translation. If someone is a good translator but doesn’t like a book so much, that’s the end of the story. Translation is very hard work, and it takes time.

PR: The translators never fight among themselves?

HM: Not really. They have their own preferences; they are different people, with different characters. Regarding Kafka on the Shore, Phil liked it and took it. Jay wasn’t so enthusiastic. Phil is a very modest, gentle person, and Jay is a very meticulous, precise translator. He’s kind of a strong character. Alfred is a kind of bohemian; I don’t know where he is right now. He’s married to a woman from Myanmar, and she’s an activist. Sometimes they get captured by the government. He’s that kind of person. He’s kind of free as a translator; he changes the prose sometimes. That’s his style.

PR: How do you collaborate with your translators? How does the process work, exactly?

HM: They ask me many things when they are translating, and when the first draft is completed, I read it. Sometimes I’ll give them some suggestions. The English version of my books is very important; small countries, such as Croatia or Slovenia, translate from the English, not the Japanese. So it must be very precise. But in most countries, they translate from the original Japanese text.

PR: You yourself seem to prefer to translate realists—Carver, Fitzgerald, Irving. Does that reflect your tastes as a reader, or is it helpful to your writing in some way to immerse yourself in something very different?

HM: The people I’ve translated have all written books from which I could learn something. That’s the main thing. I learn a lot from the realistic writers. Their work requires a very close reading to translate, and I can see their secrets. If I were to translate postmodern writers like Don DeLillo, John Barth, or Thomas Pynchon, there would be a crash—my insanity against their insanity. I admire their work, of course; but when I translate I choose realists.

PR: Your writing is often talked about as being the most accessible Japanese literature for American readers, to the point that you yourself are described as the most Western of contemporary Japanese authors. I was wondering how you see your relationship to Japanese culture.

HM: I don’t want to write about foreigners in foreign countries; I want to write about us. I want to write about Japan, about our life here. That’s important to me. Many people say that my style is accessible to Westerners; it might be true, but my stories are my own, and they are not Westernized.

PR: And many of the references that seem so Western to Americans—the Beatles, for example—are an integral part of the Japanese cultural landscape as well.

HM: When I write about people eating a McDonald’s hamburger, Americans wonder, Why is this character eating a hamburger instead of tofu? But eating a hamburger is very natural to us, an everyday thing.

PR: Would you say that your novels portray contemporary urban Japanese life accurately?

HM: The way people act, the way people talk, the way people react, the way people think, is very Japanese. No Japanese readers—almost no Japanese readers—complain that my stories are different from our life. I’m trying to write about the Japanese. I want to write about what we are, where we are going, why we are here. That’s my theme, I guess.

PR: You’ve said elsewhere, referring to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, that you were interested in your father, in what happened to him, and to his entire generation; but there are no father figures in the novel, or indeed almost anywhere in your fiction. Where in the book itself is this interest apparent?

HM: Almost all my novels have been written in the first person. The main task of my protagonist is to observe the things happening around him. He sees what he must see, or he is supposed to see, in actual time. If I may say so, he resembles Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. He is neutral, and in order to maintain his neutrality, he must be free from any kinship, any connection to a vertical family system. This might be considered my reply to the fact that “family” has played an overly significant role in traditional Japanese literature. I wanted to depict my main character as an independent, absolute individual. His status as an urban dweller has something to do with it too. He is a type of man who chooses freedom and solitude over intimacy and personal bonds.

PR: When I was reading “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo” in your latest collection of stories, in which an enormous subterranean worm living deep under Tokyo threatens it with destruction, I couldn’t help thinking of manga, or the old-style Japanese monster movie. Then there’s also the traditional myth of the giant catfish sleeping in Tokyo Bay that, according to legend, wakes up once every fifty years and causes an earthquake. Do any of these associations make sense to you? How about manga, for example? Do you see a connection to your work?

HM: No, I don’t think so. I’m not a great fan of manga comics. I was not influenced by those things.

PR: What about Japanese folklore?

HM: When I was a child, I was told many Japanese folktales and old stories. Those stories are critical when you are growing up. That Super-Frog figure, for example, might come from that reservoir of stories. You have your reservoir of American folklore, Germans have theirs, Russians have theirs. But there is also a mutual reservoir we can draw from: The Little Prince, McDonald’s, or the Beatles.

PR: The global pop-culture reservoir.

HM: Narratives are very important nowadays in writing books. I don’t care about theories. I don’t care about vocabulary. What is important is whether the narrative is good or not. We have a new kind of folklore, as a result of this Internet world. It’s a kind of metaphor. I’ve seen that movie, The Matrix—it’s a folktale of the contemporary mind. But everybody here said it’s boring.

PR: Have you seen Hayao Miyazaki’s anime film Spirited Away? It seems to me there are certain similarities to your books, in that he also manipulates folk material in contemporary ways. Do you enjoy his movies?

HM: No. I don’t like animated movies. I saw just a little part of that movie, but that is not my style. I’m not interested in that kind of thing. When I write my books, I get an image, and that image is so strong.

PR: Do you go to the movies often?

HM: Oh, yes. All the time. My favorite director is from Finland—Aki Kaurismäki. Every one of his movies I liked. He’s way out of the ordinary.

PR: And funny.

HM: Very funny.

PR: You said earlier that humor is stabilizing. Is it useful in other ways?

HM: I want my readers to laugh sometimes. Many readers in Japan read my books on the train while commuting. The average salaryman spends two hours a day commuting and he spends those hours reading. That’s why my big books are printed in two volumes: They would be too heavy in one. Some people write me letters, complaining that they laugh when they read my books on the train! It’s very embarrassing for them. Those are the letters I like most. I know they are laughing, reading my books; that’s good. I like to make people laugh every ten pages.

PR: Is that your secret formula?

HM: I don’t calculate. But if I could manage that, it would be good. I liked to read Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan while I was a college student. They had a sense of humor, and at the same time what they were writing about was serious. I like those kind of books. The first time I read Vonnegut and Brautigan I was shocked to find that there were such books! It was like discovering the New World.

PR: But you’ve never been tempted to write something in that vein?

HM: I think this world itself is a kind of comedy, this urban life. TVs with fifty channels, those stupid people in the government—it’s a comedy. So I try to be serious, but the harder I try, the more comical I get. We were dead serious when I was nineteen years old, in 1968 and 1969. It was a serious time, and people were very idealistic.

PR: It’s interesting that Norwegian Wood, which is set in that time, is perhaps the least comic of your books.

HM: In that sense, our generation is a serious generation. But looking back on those days, it was so comical! It was an ambiguous time. So we—my generation—are used to it, I guess.

PR: One of the cardinal rules of magic realism is not to call attention to the fantastic elements of the story. You, however, disregard this rule: your characters often comment on the strangeness of the story line, even call the reader’s attention to it. What purpose does this serve? Why?

HM: That’s a very interesting question. I’d like to think about it . . . Well, I think it’s my honest observation of how strange the world is. My protagonists are experiencing what I experience as I write, which is also what the readers experience as they read. Kafka or García Márquez, what they are writing is more literature, in the classical sense. My stories are more actual, more contemporary, more the postmodern experience. Think of it like a movie set, where everything—all the props, the books on the wall, the shelves—is fake. The walls are made of paper. In the classical kind of magic realism, the walls and the books are real. If something is fake in my fiction, I like to say it’s fake. I don’t want to act as if it’s real.

PR: To continue the metaphor of the movie set, might the pulling back of the camera intend to show the workings of the studio?

HM: I don’t want to persuade the reader that it’s a real thing; I want to show it as it is. In a sense, I’m telling those readers that it’s just a story—it’s fake. But when you experience the fake as real, it can be real. It’s not easy to explain. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers offered the real thing; that was their task. In War and Peace Tolstoy describes the battleground so closely that the readers believe it’s the real thing. But I don’t. I’m not pretending it’s the real thing. We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world. So our stories are the same; we are walking through fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through these scenes, are real. The situation is real, in the sense that it’s a commitment, it’s a true relationship. That’s what I want to write about.

PR: In your writing, you return to mundane details time and time again.

HM: I like details very much. Tolstoy wanted to write the total description; my description is focused on a very small area. When you describe the details of small things, your focus gets closer and closer, and the opposite of Tolstoy happens—it gets more unrealistic. That’s what I want to do.

PR: To take the focus so close that you pass through the zone of realism, and the everyday and the banal becomes strange again?

HM: The closer it gets, the less real it gets. That’s my style.

PR: Earlier you mentioned García Márquez and Kafka as writers of literature, in contrast to your own work; do you not think of yourself as a writer of literature?

HM: I’m a writer of contemporary literature, which is very different. At the time that Kafka was writing, you had only music, books, and theater; now we have the Internet, movies, rental videos, and so much else. We have so much competition now. The main problem is time: in the nineteenth century, people—I’m talking about the leisure class—had so much time to spend, so they read big books. They went to the opera and sat for three or four hours. But now everyone is so busy, and there is no real leisure class. It’s good to read Moby-Dick or Dostoevsky, but people are too busy for that now. So fiction itself has changed drastically—we have to grab people by the neck and pull them in. Contemporary fiction writers are using the techniques of other fields—jazz, video games, everything. I think video games are closer to fiction than anything else these days.

PR: Video games?

HM: Yes. I don’t like playing video games myself, but I feel the similarity. Sometimes while I’m writing I feel I’m the designer of a video game, and at the same time, a player. I made up the program, and now I’m in the middle of it; the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. It’s a kind of detachment. A feeling of a split.

PR: Is that a way of saying that although you have no idea what is going to happen next as you write, another part of you knows exactly what’s coming?

HM: Unconsciously, I guess. When I’m absorbed in writing, I know what the author is feeling and I know what the reader is feeling. That’s good—it gives my writing speed. Because I want to know what happens next as much as the reader does. But also you have to stop the current sometimes. If it gets too fast, people get tired and bored. You have to make them stop at a certain point.

PR: And how do you do that?

HM: I just feel it. I know it’s time to stop.

PR: What about jazz and music in general? How is it useful to you in your work?

HM: I’ve been listening to jazz since I was thirteen or fourteen years old. Music is a very strong influence: the chords, the melodies, the rhythm, the feeling of the blues are helpful when I write. I wanted to be a musician, but I couldn’t play the instruments very well, so I became a writer. Writing a book is just like playing music: first I play the theme, then I improvise, then there is a conclusion, of a kind.

PR: In a traditional jazz piece the initial theme would be returned to toward the end. Do you return to yours?

HM: Sometimes. Jazz is a journey for me, a mental journey. No different than writing.

PR: Who are your favorite jazz musicians?

HM: There are too many! I like Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan. When I was a teenager, they were the coolest musicians ever. I also like Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, of course. If you ask me who I actually put on the turntable most, then the answer would be Miles from the fifties through the sixties. Miles was always an innovator, a man who kept up with his own revolutions—I admire him greatly.

PR: Do you like Coltrane?

HM: Ah, so-so. Sometimes he does too much. Too insistent.

PR: What about other types of music?

HM: I like classical music as well, particularly baroque music. And in my new book, Kafka on the Shore, the protagonist, the boy, listens to Radiohead and Prince. I was so surprised: some member of Radiohead likes my books!

PR: I’m not surprised.

HM: I read the Japanese liner notes for Kid A the other day, and he said that he likes my books, and I was so proud.

PR: Can you tell me a little about Kafka on the Shore?

HM: It’s the most complicated book I have ever written, more complicated even than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It’s almost impossible to explain. There are two stories that run parallel. My protagonist is a fifteen-year-old boy. His name, his first name, is Kafka. In the other story line, the protagonist is a sixty-year-old man. He’s illiterate; he cannot write or read. He’s kind of a simpleton, but he can talk to cats. The boy, Kafka, was cursed by his father, an Oedipal kind of curse: you will kill me, your father, and make love with your mother. He escapes from his father, to escape from his curse, and he goes to a faraway place, but he experiences a very strange world, very unrealistic, dreamlike things.

PR: In terms of structure, is it similar to Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, in that it goes back and forth, chapter by chapter, from one story line to the other?

HM: Right. At first, I was trying to write the sequel to Hard-Boiled Wonderland, but I decided to write a totally different story. But the style is very similar. The soul is very similar. The theme is this world and the other world; how you can come and go between them.

PR: I’m very excited to hear that, because Hard-Boiled Wonderland is my favorite book of yours.

HM: Mine too. It’s a very ambitious book, the new one, because the protagonists in my books are always in their twenties or their thirties. This time it’s a fifteen year old.

PR: More like Holden Caulfield?

HM: That’s right. It was kind of exciting to write that story. When I wrote about the boy, I could remember how it was when I was fifteen years old. I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It’s a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That’s why I want to write a book.

PR: To get back to those fifteen-year-old perceptions?

HM: For instance. Yes.

PR: How important was growing up in Kobe and not elsewhere in Japan to the style that you developed? Kobe has a reputation as a worldly town, and possibly a bit eccentric.

HM: People in Kyoto are stranger than in Kobe! They are surrounded by mountains, so their mentality is different.

PR: But you were born in Kyoto. Is that right?

HM: Yes, but when I was two we moved to Kobe. So that is where I’m from. Kobe is by the sea and next to the mountains, on a kind of strip. I don’t like Tokyo; it’s so flat, so wide, so vast. I don’t like it here.

PR: But you live here! I’m sure you could live anywhere you liked.

HM: That’s because I can be anonymous here. It’s the same as in New York. Nobody recognizes me; I could go anywhere. I can take the train and nobody bothers me. I have a house in a small town in the suburbs of Tokyo, and everybody knows me there. Every time I take a walk, I get recognized. And sometimes it’s annoying.

PR: You mentioned Ryu Murakami earlier. He seems to have a very different agenda as a writer.

HM: My style is kind of postmodern; his is more mainstream. But when I read Coin Locker Babies for the first time, I was shocked; I decided I would like to write that kind of powerful novel. Then I started to write A Wild Sheep Chase. So it’s a kind of rivalry.

PR: Are you friends?

HM: We’ve had a good relationship. We are not enemies, at least. He has a very natural, powerful talent. It’s as if he has an oil well just beneath the surface. But in my case, my oil was so deep that I had to dig and dig and dig. It was real toil. And it took time to get there. But once I got there, I was strong and confident. My life was systematized. It was good to be digging all the way.

Curling up with a good book: The short stories of Haruki Murakami

Titles: The Elephant Vanishes/after the quake/Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Years published (English translations): 1993/2002/2006

Skillfully mixing the mundane with the mystical, the here-and-now with the out there, Haruki Murakami is one of our finest living authors. His style is instantly recognizable and his works are always a joy.

Murakami characters are forever ironing their shirts, or doing sit-ups, or listening to classic rock or jazz, or watching baseball. They hold jobs in publishing houses and department stores, making good, not great, money. The usual stuff. But nothing is never completely as it seems in a Murakami work. Because while you're sitting their listening to your Stones record, a giant talking frog could appear in your living room. Or a girlfriend could simply disappear. Or a stone could assert otherworldly powers on the person who finds it. His work is frequently eerie and at times unsettling. Also too, it can be very funny.

But a Murakami work is never abstruse--indeed legend has it that Murakami got the idea for his first novel while watching a baseball game and just gave it a try, simply to see if he could write a novel. The common man touch is ever-present. But Murakami's works are also very thought-provoking--they force you to look at things closely, differently, examining the most minute aspects of everything. Because the littlest thing could be very important.

The first collection here is "The Elephant Vanishes," comprising stories written between 1983 and 1990. Here is a review by Herbert Mitgang, originally published in the New York Times on March 28, 1993. Mitgang's main beef is that the stories aren't "Japanese" enough, whatever that means (the article is headlined "As Japanese as Burt Bacharach--why Burt Bacharach of all people. I can see the Times editors having a lengthy, passionate discussion on an American who was the closest to Murakami in terms of Japanese-ness. Ronald Reagan? Not nearly Japanese enough. Johnny Depp? Maybe too Japanese. Burt Bacharach. Aah, that one fits pretty good! Actually, the characters in one of the stories listen to some Burt Bacharach records, but I like my little digression and will thus keep it in.). Obviously Murakami is Japanese but he's spent a great amount of time in North America and Western Europe, so it would probably be unfair to expect him to temper his Western influences. Still a worthwhile review, though, and ultimately very favorable.

Few cultures excite or upset the American imagination as tenaciously as Japan's. News of life on that leapfrog of islands streams relentlessly through our televisions and newspapers, alternately offending and enthralling us. What kind of country is this, we wonder, that can produce Noh drama and cram schools, zen gardens and Nintendo games? American writers can't seem to get enough of Japan, which has become for some--Jay McInerney, Brad Leit hauser and John Burnham Schwartz among them--a magnet for expatriate adventuring. For writers like Michael Crichton, on the other hand, Japan is a predator nation out to destroy the American way of business--a convenient scapegoat in a melodrama of economic espionage.

The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami provides a different point of view in "The Elephant Vanishes," his first collection of stories. (He is also the author of the novels "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" and "A Wild Sheep Chase.") These stories, ably translated by Jay Rubin and Alfred Birnbaum, show us Japan as it's experienced from the inside. What is exotic to foreigners-- oyster hot pot or pillows filled with buckwheat husks -- is here the stuff of ordinary life; but so are McDonald's, steak and Julio Iglesias. Indeed, Mr. Murakami's Japan is such an unquestioned hybrid of tradition and export that one has to read 11 pages into the first story before the most casual reference to a "Tokyoite" signals that we aren't in America. His narrators-- young, urban, downwardly mobile-- are as likely to eat spaghetti as soba noodles. They listen to Wagner and Herbie Hancock, but disdain "stupid Japanese rock music. Love songs sweet enough to rot your teeth." They read Len Deighton novels and "War and Peace," not Kobo Abe and "The Tale of Genji." Their universe is Japanese, but their cultural reference points are almost exclusively Western.

This is a Japan characterized by a peculiar spiritual torpor. Bizarre events take place regularly, but fail to generate much reaction or curiosity. In "The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women," for instance, a young man's search for a missing cat leads him into a closed-off alley that passes between the backyards of parallel houses, a path "neglected and untrafficked, like some abandoned canal." There he encounters a sunbathing teen-age girl who, like the alley itself, seems both of the ordinary world and strangely apart from it. But their rambling conversation is too lazy to be truly flirtatious.

Similarly, in "A Window," another young man, this one a writing teacher who works for a correspondence school, pays a visit to one of his pupils, a married woman in her early 30's. Their few hours together eating hamburger steak and listening to Burt Bacharach linger for years in the narrator's memory. "The weather was lovely that day," he recalls, "and over the railings of the building's verandas hung a colorful assortment of sheets and futons drying in the sun. Every now and then came the slap of a bamboo whisk fluffing out a futon. I can bring the sound back even now. It was strangely devoid of any sense of distance." Again, nothing happens. The wife and the teacher are "like two would-be passengers who had missed the same train," linked not so much by a shared passion as a shared sense of absence.

And in the haunting title story, another elephant mysteriously disappears, along with its keeper, from the enclosure where it has been kept as a kind of mascot for a Tokyo suburb. Again, the solution to the mystery hinges on questions of perspective and proportion.

In fact, all the stories in "The Elephant Vanishes" take place in parallel worlds not so much remote from ordinary life as hidden within its surfaces: secret alleys that afford unexpected -- and unsettling -- views. Mysteries are offered that defy solution or analysis. Their purpose, rather, is to point out not only how much we don't know but how much we can't know. As a result, the tendency of certain people and situations to defy description -- to most writers a bane -- becomes for Mr. Murakami something to revel in.

In the story called "Sleep," for example, a young woman suddenly discovers that she no longer needs it. Awakened literally and figuratively, she observes that there is something strange about her husband's face, but finds herself at a loss to articulate the source of this strangeness. "Honestly," she observes, " 'strange' is about all that fits. . . . The one thing I could remember was that his face looked strange."

Likewise, in "The Second Bakery Attack" a young man discovers that his wife keeps a shotgun and ski masks in the car, even though "neither of us had ever skied. But she didn't explain and I didn't ask. Married life is weird, I felt." One recalls the maxim given by the correspondence-school writing teacher in "A Window," who says to his student: "Don't try so hard to be the penetrating observer. Writing is, after all, a makeshift thing."

Makeshift indeed. Yet even in the slipperiest of Mr. Murakami's stories, pinpoints of detail flash out: pull tabs from beer cans lying in an ashtray "like scales from a mermaid"; shotgun shells rustling "like buckwheat husks in an old-fashioned pillow"; melted ice working its way through a cocktail "like a tiny ocean current."

"After I gave up sleeping," the narrator of "Sleep" observes, "it occurred to me what a simple thing reality is, how easy it is to make it work. . . . Like running a simple machine. Once you learn to run it, it's just a matter of repetition." In this observation she reveals her kinship with the narrator of "The Elephant Vanishes," who continues, after the disappearance, "to sell refrigerators and toaster ovens and coffee makers in the pragmatic world, based on afterimages of memories I retain from that world." Yet he, like his sleepless contemporary, doesn't live there anymore.

It's as if a kind of social schism has taken hold in this culture so intent on efficiency and productivity, a schism between the visible street and the hidden alley that resists simple resolution. In Mr. Murakami's view, "people are looking for a kind of unity in this kit-chin we know as the world. Unity of design. Unity of color. Unity of function." The problem, as he notes in a story called "The Last Lawn of the Afternoon," is that "no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore. You're left with this pile of kittens lolling all over one another."

No metaphor could suit more exactly these stories in which animals--elephants, kangaroos, windup birds, even a tragically mistreated "little green monster"--figure so crucially. These stories, like the kittens themselves, are "warm with life, hopelessly"-- and, I would add, wonderfully--"unstable."

"after the quake" (apparently, Murakami insists on lower casing the title, according to his fine translator Jay Rubin). The stories here were written in response to the devastating Kobe earthquake of 1995 and are meant to be linked thematically. This is the shortest collection of the three--and my personal favorite. The usual themes--alienation, loneliness, despair--are there in spades. In addition, as translator Rubin says "the central characters in 'after the quake' live far from the physical devastation, which they witness only on TV or in the papers, but for each of them the massive destruction unleashed by the earth itself becomes a turning point in their lives. They are forced to confront an emptiness they have borne inside them for years."

A very good review, originally published in The Guardian on Oct. 19, 2000 and written by an impressed Alex Clark.

"The short story is on the way out. Like the slide rule," pronounces Junpei, a dedicated practitioner of the form who falters over a greater length, and if Haruki Murakami's beguiling collection is intended to be a corrective to that dismal piece of sooth-saying, it succeeds magnificently. But it does more than simply prove that fragments of fiction can conjure entire worlds of thought and feeling in the space of a few pages; by subtly linking each of these pieces to a central theme--that of fragmentation itself--it demonstrates that snatches of narrative might, in the end, be all that we can truthfully claim rights over.

In "Landscape with Flatiron", a painter haunted by the unlikely possibility of dying trapped in a fridge devotes himself to building bonfires with an obsessive craftsmanship that belies his assertion that their sole purpose is to "warm people's hearts". "Stepping back a few paces, he would examine in detail the form he had constructed, adjust some of the pieces, then circle around to the other side for another look, repeating the process several times." It's an obvious comment on Murakami's own writing technique, in which ideas are reiterated and refined until they seem to reach a moment of almost sublime self-effacement.

Each of these stories, as their collective title suggests, takes place in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake, but because none of them is directly linked to it, they allow Murakami to examine its effects obliquely, from within his own infinitely nuanced metaphysical world.

If an earthquake is what happens beneath the ground, beyond our sight and immediate comprehension, then so too are our individual lives shaped by psychological and emotional tremors that we find hard to grasp, and subject to numerous unpredictable and violent aftershocks. In "UFO in Kushiro", a character whom we never view directly makes that connection almost instinctively; glued to the scenes of devastation on television for days after the quake, she rouses herself only to walk out on her husband, leaving him with the thought that "living with you is like living with a chunk of air".

To an extent, she's right: travelling to freezing Hokkaido because "cold or hot it was all the same to him", displaying next to no curiosity about the mysterious package a colleague has asked him to deliver, drinking coffee that is "more sign than substance", Komura shows little knowledge of or interest in his own interior landscape. Small wonder, then, that by the end of the story, impotence has been added to his list of worries.

If other characters are more preoccupied with delving beneath the surface, it doesn't always do them much good, because Murakami's point is that such a lack of fascination is systemic and endemic; only a massive shock might be able to dislodge it. A thyroid specialist in the throes of a sweaty menopause travels to Bangkok for a conference, and afterwards treats herself to a holiday in a luxury resort, where darkness impinges periodically on her insistent fantasies of what might have happened to an unnamed enemy from Kobe. An unsought meeting with a spirit doctor provides the possibility of release, but even then she seeks to neutralise the epiphanic with rational language. "If you put those feelings into words," counsels her discreet guide, "they will turn into lies."

Elsewhere, a confused young man experiences a similarly life-altering moment, realising that in the "ominous rumbling of the deepest darkness, secret rivers that transported desire, slimy creatures writhing", lies something vital, that "these, too, were helping to create the rhythm of the earth".

But if the seismic, real-life event that provoked After the Quake smacks of portentousness, Murakami hasn't abandoned the inspired surrealism that marked out novels like A Wild Sheep Chase and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as feats of inventive comic genius. Where else could you read of a giant frog persuading a mundane bank clerk to engage an evil subterranean worm in mortal combat, and take it seriously? Who else might allow their frog to quote Hemingway and Dostoevsky and to deliver sentences like "I am, indeed, pure Frog, but at the same time I am a thing that stands for a world of un-Frog"?

In the ruins of Kobe, as in the sarin gas attacks that he surveyed in his non-fiction work Underground , Murakami detects a "world devoid of light", a narrative arena where "meaning itself broke down". In these dazzlingly elegant stories, he restores some of the light and some of the meaning, arguing that the possibility of moments of optimism and connection is not something we should take for granted. Even Junpei, his pessimistic and passive short-story writer, dares to hope and plans a change of artistic direction: "I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end," he tells us, "who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love." In a world where even the ground beneath our feet can't be relied on, imagination becomes less of a luxury and more of a duty. It's an obligation that Murakami is busily making his raison d'être, to our very great advantage.

"Blind Willow" closes out the Murakami book fair in fine fashion. It's a large collection, encompassing stories written between 1981 and 2005. And it's a uniformly excellent collection as well. In the introduction to the English-language edition, Murakami notes "I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.’ This elegant analogy serves to give the reader some idea of what awaits. As does this review, written by Terrence Rafferty and originally published in the New York Times on Sept. 17, 2006.

In the introduction to “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman,” Haruki Murakami writes that he considers this book “the first real short story collection” he has published abroad since “The Elephant Vanishes” in the early 1990’s. No, he hasn’t forgotten “After the Quake” (2002), his slim volume of short fiction inspired by the 1995 Kobe earthquake, but that, he says, “was more like a concept album.” So Murakami’s idea of a “real short story collection” is a true miscellany, a grab bag containing prizes of widely variable shape, size and value. Or something--to borrow his own frame of reference--more like one of those overstuffed, career-spanning CD box sets, in which finished, studio-polished work gets tumbled together with demos, alternate versions, remixes, B-sides and stray tracks from obscure tribute albums.

The everything-but-the-kitchen-sink quality of “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” doesn’t damage the book in the way it would a collection by, say, William Trevor or Alice Munro, because there’s a fair amount of randomness built right into Murakami’s method--a sense that anything can happen at any time, in the world or on the page, and that the best strategy is just to hang on and see what comes next. As one character in this volume, a female tightrope walker, tells another, a male story writer: “You know, Junpei, everything in the world has its reasons for doing what it does. ... And all we can do is go with those things. As we take them in, we survive, and deepen.” As a philosophy of life, this may sound a touch banal, but it is precisely the advice that Junpei-- whose art and whose life are both too tightly controlled--needs to hear. And it is also, you can’t help feeling, a bit of wisdom that has enabled Murakami himself to survive and, maybe, deepen as a writer over the two and a half decades of taking things in that this odd, bracing sampler represents.

The 24 stories here include a couple (“A ‘Poor Aunt’ Story” and “New York Mining Disaster”) that were, the author says, among his very first attempts at the short form, and five he wrote only a year ago, which were published in Japan as an independent volume, “Strange Tales From Tokyo,” and which remain together at the end of “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.” (In its original Japanese incarnation, you might say, the wonderful “Strange Tales From Tokyo” could be taken for a concept album; in the context of this larger collection, it’s more like the great climactic medley on “Abbey Road.”) The 19 stories that precede the final five, though, are arranged in a seemingly helter-skelter way: nonchronologically, and without any discernible intent to group them thematically or stylistically. Melancholy, more or less realistic stories like “Hunting Knife” and “Tony Takitani” bump up against goofy little fables like “Dabchick” and “The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes,” both of which feature rather unpleasant talking birds. Readers in search of a clear, linear progression--much less a solution to the mystery of Murakami’s art--get no help from the writer himself. They may even find themselves feeling like the Zen detective narrator of one of the “Strange Tales,” who wraps up an unsuccessful (and strikingly desultory) investigation with these words: “I imagine my search will continue — somewhere. A search for something that could very well be shaped like a door. Or maybe something closer to an umbrella, or a doughnut. Or an elephant. A search that, I hope, will take me where I’m likely to find it.”

That’s about as well defined as things get in MurakamiLand, where sudden dislocations of time and space are pretty much the norm, and a certain, let’s say, ontological indeterminacy hangs like a low cloud over everything lived or imagined or dreamed or remembered. “For a few seconds,” says the narrator of the title story, “I stood there in a strange, dim place. Where the things I could see didn’t exist. Where the invisible did.” That place is the site of almost all Murakami’s fiction, from the sprawling novels “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” and “Kafka on the Shore” to the briefest stories in “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”: a terrain that, it seems, even the author is loath to map too precisely. If anything, this new collection has been shaped to keep boundaries as fluid and indistinct as possible — to blur the lines of demarcation between early Murakami and late, between realism and fantasy, between high seriousness and low, slapstick whimsy. (And, for that matter, between stories and novels: two of the best pieces here, “Firefly” and “Man-Eating Cats,” are short stories that grew into the novels “Norwegian Wood” and “Sputnik Sweetheart.”)

There’s no reliable way to get your bearings in Murakami’s world, but if you were to put a gun--or even a reasonably sharp-tipped umbrella--to my head and demand that I name the central concern of this rigorously eccentric writer’s work, I’d say that it is the stubborn elusiveness of the self, the eel-like slipperiness of identity. His stories and novels are full of people, usually young, who feel, as he writes of one character here, as if “his being, his very self, was going to melt away”; or who ask themselves, as another, in a different story, does, “So where is the real me?” and settle, uneasily, for a “fragile, provisional me.” In the most moving stories in this collection--“Chance Traveler” and “Hanalei Bay” are good examples--the point to which the intricate circuitry of Murakami’s narrative ultimately leads is some spark of connection between a past self and the more complex, more confusingly wired version we all seem to end up with. Sometimes the search for that elusive connection is explicit, as it is in the lovely story “A Folklore for My Generation: A Pre-History of Late-Stage Capitalism,” which, like much of its author’s fiction, is about solitude and the deceptive rigors of youth. That story is set in the period of Murakami’s own coming-of-age, the 60’s, when, he writes, “everything was simple and direct” --unlike the present time, when “if you try to grasp the reality of anything, there’s always a whole slew of convoluted extras that come with it.”

He isn’t always so blunt, but it’s apparent in everything he writes that the project of both his work and his life is the quest for a continuity of self, for a thread that, pulled taut, could put all those “convoluted extras,” along with everything that really matters, on a straight line: a bullet train named Murakami. What he has to guide him is nothing more (or less) than the sound of his own voice, which tells him, and his readers, approximately who he is, for the moment. And over the years he has developed and sustained a remarkably distinctive narrative tone: calm, wry, intimate, gently interrogative. In this English-language volume, he depends, as always, on the kindness of translators, and Philip Gabriel (14 stories) and Jay Rubin (10) serve him expertly here; the tales in “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” seem to speak with one, very seductive, voice. That voice, in each of these wildly varied excursions into the strange, dim territory of the self, says that someone named Haruki Murakami is still looking, quixotically, for something less fragile, less provisional than the usual accommodations we make do with on the road. These are just 24 of the places where, one time or another, he thought he might find it.