David Pilling
When he is writing, Haruki Murakami gets up at 4am. He works for five or six hours straight. After lunch, he goes for a 10km run and maybe swims 1,500m. He reads and listens to music, usually jazz or classical, and goes to bed at 9pm. Then repeat.
The “mesmerism”, to use his word, of this routine lulls him into his creative process. Solitary and quiet, he is drawn to another world. Of his mental process, he once told me a decade ago over lunch in Tokyo: “There’s a basement, but below that you have an inner basement beyond a secret door. It’s dark, completely dark down there. It’s a maze and a labyrinth, but if you are trained, you can come back to the surface. That’s what I do when I am writing.”
Even when he is not writing, Mr Murakami is not exactly garrulous. He shuns entanglement with his legions of fans, preferring to glide incognito around Tokyo’s quietly thrumming streets. He shuns the literary set and they shun him. Some of them are decidedly sniffy about his talents and regard his books, peopled by pasta-
eating deadbeats and eccentric drifters, as “un-Japanese”.
The release of each novel is a major event — fans camp outside shops and some of his titles have sold 1m copies in the first week — though he has been awarded neither the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award, nor the Naoki Prize for popular fiction. In 2013, he spoke at an event in Kyoto before 500 fans chosen by lottery. It was his first public appearance in Japan in 18 years. So publicity shy is he that, when his picture was used in a book on Japan (full disclosure: it was mine), his office requested its removal.
Now he is surfacing. According to his publishers, he suddenly said: “I want to exchange mails with my readers. It’s been too long.” A website — Murakami San No Tokoro (“Mr Murakami’s Place”) — has been created, complete with a cutesy illustration.
Fans are invited to write whatever takes their fancy. He will accept “agony uncle”-type questions, presumably on lost love, existential angst and what to do if, as in one of his stories, a 6ft frog comes knocking at the door. His publisher says he will discuss favourite places or just chat, and suggests people might quiz him about cats or Tokyo’s Yakult Swallows baseball team. The cognoscenti will grasp the references. Mr Murakami once ran a jazz bar called Peter Cat. And it was at a 1978 Yakult Swallows game that he is said to have had an epiphany: he would write novels.
His first, Hear the Wind Sing, penned in hour-long chunks while he was 29 and running Peter Cat, was published by the Gunzo literary magazine. Other novels followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase, a critical success featuring a lackadaisical protagonist convinced by a woman with intriguing ears to look for a missing ungulate. His breakthrough came with Norwegian Wood, a story of love and anguish set against the backdrop of Japan’s 1960s student movement. It sold 4m copies. Mr Murakami escaped the ensuing fame by fleeing Japan. He returned nine years later.
Born in 1949, he grew up in and around the port city of Kobe during the “miracle” years when Japan’s economy was leaping ahead. His parents — son of a Buddhist priest and daughter of an Osaka merchant — both taught Japanese literature. The young Murakami rebelled by reading Raymond Chandler and Jack Kerouac. While studying in Tokyo he met Yoko, to whom he remains married. They have no children.
After his nine-year absence, which he spent mostly in the US teaching at universities including Harvard and Princeton, he returned in 1995, just in time to see the Japanese miracle crumble. That year, large sections of Kobe collapsed after a massive earthquake. Two months later, Aum, a doomsday cult, attacked the Tokyo subway with a deadly gas once used by the Nazis. Mr Murakami responded with Underground, a non-fictional account of that day. His fiction took on darker hues.
He has remained detached yet political. In 2009, accepting the Jerusalem Prize for promoting individual freedom, he made a speech widely interpreted as pro-Palestinian. More recently, he wrote comparing nationalism in Japan, China and South Korea to “cheap liquor”. When friction flares, some Chinese shops clear his books from the shelves.
This is not the first time he has sought to engage with his fans. “His quasi-reticence is more akin to the games [Thomas] Pynchon plays with his reading public than to [JD] Salinger, who genuinely feared for his privacy,” says Alfred Birnbaum, who has translated several of Mr Murakami’s novels into English. In the 1990s, when the internet was something of a novelty, the author regularly conversed with readers. In one exchange, a woman asked why men were so stupid; didn’t they realise that sometimes all women needed was a hug? He replied, “Hello. Men are stupid, I agree. They just don’t get it. Of course, if it were me, I’d hug you.”
In another conversation, a woman who perhaps had read one too many of Mr Murakami’s novels, wrote: “My ex-boyfriend once told me, ‘You have very intelligent breasts.’ Perhaps he wanted to say that my boobs are small, though they’re bigger than the Chinese dumplings you get in convenience stores.” The writer responded, “Hello. Perhaps, he was talking not about the size, but the shape . . . I do believe some breasts look as if they’re intelligent. I’ve not seen yours, so I can’t say for certain.” For a recluse, it’s quite a chat-up line.
The writer is the FT’s Asia editor
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De FINANCIAL TIMES, 09/01/2015
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