The day before we meet in Manhattan, a woman stopped Haruki Murakami in Central Park, where he had come for his late-morning run. “Excuse me,” she said, “but aren’t you a very famous Japanese novelist?” A faintly odd way of putting the question, but Murakami responded in his usual equable manner. “I said ‘No, really I’m just a writer. But still, it’s nice to meet you!’ And then we shook hands. When people stop me like that, I feel very strange, because I’m just an ordinary guy. I don’t really understand why people want to meet me.”
It would be a mistake to interpret this as false modesty, but equally wrong to see it as genuine discomfort with fame: so far as it’s possible to tell, the 69-year-old Murakami neither relishes nor dislikes his global celebrity. His outlook, instead, is that of a curious if slightly bemused spectator – both of the surreal stories that emerge from his subconscious, and of the fact that they are devoured by readers in their millions, in Japanese and in translation. It’s surely no coincidence that the typical Murakami protagonist is a similarly detached observer: a placid, socially withdrawn and often nameless man in his mid-30s, who seems more intrigued than alarmed when an inexplicable phone call, or the search for a lost cat, leads him into a dreamlike parallel universe populated by exploding dogs, men in sheep costumes, enigmatic teenage girls and people with no faces.
Murakami has a theory that this mesmerising literary formula appeals particularly in times of political chaos. “I was so popular in the 1990s in Russia, at the time they were changing from the Soviet Union – there was big confusion, and people in confusion like my books,” he explains, sipping water in a conference room at the offices of his American literary agency. “In Germany, when the Berlin Wall fell down, there was confusion – and people liked my books.” If that’s right, Donald Trump’s America and Brexit Britain should prove especially fertile markets for his 14th novel, Killing Commendatore, a 674-page dose of high Murakami weirdness, translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen and published in the UK on 9 October.
Trying to summarise his plots is a mug’s game, but it may suffice to note that the book’s anonymous narrator is a disconsolate portrait painter, recently abandoned by his wife, whose attempt to get away from it all in the mountains of eastern Japan turns into an elaborate adventure involving a mysterious technology entrepreneur, a bell that rings spontaneously in the night, an underground shrine – wells and other subterranean chambers, along with lost cats, are a Murakami trademark – and a strikingly chatty two-foot-high samurai soldier who springs from the canvas of a painting the narrator discovers in an attic. (For the author, a devotee of the fiction of F Scott Fitzgerald since his teens, these ingredients combine to constitute “a homage to The Great Gatsby” – a claim that grows somewhat less improbable as the new novel proceeds.)
It makes sense that Murakami’s work might prove popular in times of political anxiety: it exerts an entrancing, sometimes almost sedative effect on the reader, the strangeness of the plot developments dampened by an emotional flatness that can feel like a comforting refuge from the real world and its extremes. Murakami once told an interviewer that he liked baseball “because it’s boring”, and his 2007 memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running extols the pleasure – if that’s the right word – of running as a respite from feeling too much.
However, you should not expect Murakami to tell you what any of the fantastical content in his work is supposed to mean. He operates from a bedrock trust in his subconscious: if an image arises from that dark inner well, he figures, it must be meaningful by definition – and his job is to record what arises, rather than to analyse it. (That’s a job for “intelligent people”, he says, his face crinkling into a smile. “And writers don’t have to be intelligent.”) In his 2002 novel Kafka on the Shore, for example, there’s a scene in which fish begin to fall, like hail, from the sky. “People ask me, ‘Why fish? And why are they falling from the sky?’ But I have no answer for them. I just got the idea that something should fall from the sky. Then I wondered: what should fall from the sky? And I said to myself: ‘Fish! Fish would be good.’
“And you know, if that’s what comes to me, maybe there’s something right about that – something from the deep subconscious [that resonates with] the reader. So now the reader and I have a secret meeting place underground, a secret place in the subconscious. And in that place, maybe it’s absolutely right that fish should fall from the sky. It’s the meeting place that matters, not analysing the symbolism or anything like that. I’ll leave that to the intellectuals.” Murakami’s sense of himself as a sort of pipeline – a conduit between his subconscious and that of his readers – is so pronounced that he even pauses, after referring to himself in passing as a “natural storyteller”, to issue a correction: “No, I’m not a storyteller. I’m a story watcher.” His relationship to those stories is that of the dreamer to a dream, which may explain why he claims almost never to dream at night. “Well, maybe once a month, I dream,” he says. “But I usually don’t. I think it’s because I get to dream when I’m awake, so I don’t have to dream when I’m sleeping.”
The key moments in Murakami’s emergence as a writer share this sense of having arisen from somewhere beyond his conscious control. Born in 1949 in Kyoto, during the postwar American occupation of Japan, Murakami disappointed his parents by spurning a corporate career in favour of opening a jazz club in Tokyo, Peter Cat, named after his pet. A few years later he was in the stands at a baseball stadium watching the ball sail off the bat of an American player named Dave Hilton, when it suddenly occurred to him that he could write a novel, an epiphany that led to Hear the Wind Sing (1979). Soon after, when the Japanese literary magazine Gunzo woke him one weekend with a phone call informing him that the novel had been shortlisted for its new writers’ prize, he hung up, then went for a walk with his wife, Yoko. They found an injured pigeon, which they carried to the local police station. “That Sunday was bright and clear, and the trees, the buildings, and the shop windows sparkled beautifully in the spring sunlight,” he wrote years later. “That’s when it hit me. I was going to win the prize. And I was going to go on to become a novelist who would enjoy some degree of success. It was an audacious presumption, but I was sure at that moment that it would happen. Completely sure. Not in a theoretical way but directly and intuitively.”
Critical acclaim in Japan was slow in coming. “I was a black sheep in the Japanese literary world,” Murakami recalls – partly because his books, with their absence of any sense of being rooted in Japan, and their multitudes of American cultural references, were seen as “too American-like”. (These days, by contrast, he’s regularly discussed as a leading candidate for the Nobel prize, though he withdrew his name from the “alternative Nobel” established in response to the postponement of this year’s prize, saying he preferred to concentrate on writing.) “Being born just after the war, we grew up in American culture: I was listening to jazz and American pop, watching American TV shows – it was a window to another world. But anyway, by and by I got my own style. Not Japanese or American style – my style.”
In any case, whatever the critics thought, his commercial success grew steadily, hitting a high point in 1987 with Norwegian Wood, an aching tale of nostalgia for young love, which sold 3.5m copies within a year of publication. It was written in a realist manner to which Murakami would never return in his novels – although, on reflection, he rejects the notion that his tales of falling fish and supernaturally impregnated women aren’t realistic. “It’s my realism,” he says. “I like Gabriel García Márquez very much, but I don’t think he thought of what he wrote as magic realism. It was just his realism. My style is like my eyeglasses: through those lenses, the world makes sense to me.”
As his stature increased, he also began to perfect the daily writing routine for which he’s arguably now as famous as for any single novel: rising at 4am to write for five or six hours, producing 10 pages a day before a run of at least six miles, and maybe a swim. “Owning a jazz club, life was so disorderly and confusing – going to bed at three or four in the morning – so when I became a writer, I decided to live a very solid life: get up early, go to bed early, exercise every day,” Murakami says. “My belief is that I should be strong physically in order to write strong things”: he may only be a pipeline, but it’s his duty to keep the pipeline in good working order. From the outside, it certainly seems to be working – he could pass for 50 – but the rhythm is also a source of deep happiness, which probably accounts for the lengthening of his books. “Those days are pleasurable days, so the more days, the more fun, and the more pages,” he says. “I really don’t know why people like to read my long books. But” – this without a trace of arrogance – “I am very popular.”
His hyper-productive routine also provides him with surplus capacity, which he uses for short stories; for non-fiction (most notably Underground, based on numerous interviews with survivors of the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo Metro, as well as with members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult responsible); and for personally answering his readers’ questions, not only about his books but also in his role as a kind of agony uncle. (“Thirty is right around the corner for me, but there isn’t a single thing that I feel like I’ve accomplished,” begins one of the 3,716 questions to which he provided answers in an ebook published in Japan in 2015.) Murakami is also a leading translator of American fiction into Japanese: Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, Grace Paley, JD Salinger, and most recently John Cheever.
He enjoys reading his own work in English translation, because it’s like reading a brand new novel. “It takes a year or two to translate these big books,” he says. “So by the time I read the translation, I’ve forgotten everything.” He mimes excitedly turning the pages: “What’s going to happen? And then the translator calls me: ‘Hi, Haruki, how did you like my translation?’ And I reply: ‘This is a great story! I like it very much!’”
It’s only when our conversation turns to American politics, as it inevitably must, that he adopts something closer to an authorial mission. Asked for his thoughts on the crisis in the country whose culture he holds in such affection, he thinks, in silence, for almost a full minute. Then he says: “When I was in my teens, in the 1960s, that was the age of idealism. We believed the world would get better if we tried. People today don’t believe that, and I think that’s very sad. People say my books are weird, but beyond the weirdness, there should be a better world. It’s just that we have to experience the weirdness before we get to the better world. That’s the fundamental structure of my stories: you have to go through the darkness, through the underground, before you get to the light.”
Which feels like a form of hope well suited to the moment. A Murakami protagonist doesn’t necessarily end the novel having learned that much, still less in a state of perfect happiness; but he has usually been delivered from his off-kilter dream world to a place of equanimity and calm. Life may be abidingly strange, Murakami’s books seem to say, but nightmares do end. You can find your lost cat.
• Killing Commendatore is published by Harvill Secker.
