The New Yorker:

The writer on his style, his process, and the strange, dark places he encounters on the page.

By Deborah Treisman 

“What is he like? Is he a kind man?” I was asked by an anxious administrator who had been assigned to guide me through Tokyo’s Aoyama neighborhood to Haruki Murakami’s office, which was in a discreet, unmarked building on a side street. She visibly deflated when Murakami’s assistant answered the door, accepted delivery of me, and sent her off to wait out our lunch meeting at a nearby train station. It was 2010, and in Japan at that point Murakami was a celebrity of a magnitude unrivalled in the literary world. His behemoth three-volume novel “1Q84,” published in 2009 and 2010, sold more than six million copies in the country. When he participated in the 2008 New Yorker Festival, tickets sold out in minutes, and fans claimed to have flown to New York from Japan, Korea, and Australia to see him in person. They had travelled so far because Murakami is also, famously, reclusive and rarely participates in public events.

He talks about being “surprised and confused” by the overwhelmingly enthusiastic response to his first attempts at fiction. That confusion may have fuelled something in him. His narratives are almost always inquisitive, exploratory. His heroes, hapless or directed, set off on missions of discovery. Where they end up is sometimes familiar, sometimes profoundly, fundamentally strange. A subtle stylist and a self-willed Everyman, Murakami is a master of both suspense and sociology, his language a deceptively simple screen with a mystery hidden behind it. In his fiction, he has written about phantom sheep, about spirits meeting up in a netherworld, about little people who emerge from a painting, but, beneath the evocative, often dreamlike imagery, his work is most often a study of missed connections, of both the comedy and the tragedy triggered by our failures to understand one another.

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