He is particularly concerned about Tokyo's popular governor, the novelist Shintaro Ishihara.彼は東京での人気が特に心配知事は、石原慎太郎の小説家です。 "Ishihara is a very dangerous man. He is an agitator. He hates China." "石原知事は、非常に危険な男だ。彼はアジテーターです。彼は中国が嫌いです。 " As Murakami discusses plans to make a public statement opposing Ishihara, it's hard to recognise the writer often derided by the Tokyo literati as an apathetic pop- artist - a threat to the political engagement of Japanese fiction.村上として議論を計画して石原氏に反対する公式声明を行うことを認識するのは難しいが、東京の作家文学者たちによってしばしばderidedポップアーティストとして冷淡-脅威と日本の政治的関与のフィクションです。 Yet Murakami always distanced himself from the Japanese tradition of the writer as social admonisher: "I thought of myself as just a fiction writer."村上常に自分自身から抜かまだ、日本の伝統的な作家としての社会的admonisher ： "と思っただけで小説家としての自分自身です。 "
The enemy within
By Ben Naparstek
Haruki Murakami seems the very picture of the Japanese writer- prophet. He gazes out over the rooftops of Tokyo's chichi Ayoama suburb, speaking in low, urgent tones about Japan's rightward lurch. "I am worrying about my country," says the 57-year-old writer, widely believed to be Japan's literary Nobel laureate-in- waiting. "I feel I have a responsibility as a novelist to do something."
He is particularly concerned about Tokyo's popular governor, the novelist Shintaro Ishihara. "Ishihara is a very dangerous man. He is an agitator. He hates China." As Murakami discusses plans to make a public statement opposing Ishihara, it's hard to recognise the writer often derided by the Tokyo literati as an apathetic pop- artist - a threat to the political engagement of Japanese fiction. Yet Murakami always distanced himself from the Japanese tradition of the writer as social admonisher: "I thought of myself as just a fiction writer."
Murakami's resistance to literary cliques means many believe he is thumbing his nose at Japan and its literature. He refuses to participate in talk shows and literary festivals - and declines most requests for television and telephone interviews. As dreamy and introverted as his disaffected protagonists, Murakami has no literary friends and never attends parties. He has spent large stretches of his adult life in Europe and the US.
We meet in his unassuming Aoyama office, during his brief return to Tokyo from Harvard, where he holds a writers' fellowship. "I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way. They don't appreciate this."
As a teenager, Murakami kicked against the reading tastes of his parents - both lecturers in Japanese literature - by consuming pulpy American mystery novels in English. He read "to get away from Japanese society". Murakami's idols are still American writers - Fitzgerald, Carver, Chandler and Vonnegut. His offhand prose, studded with references to American low culture, contrasts with the formal elegance of Japan's literary lodestars - Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe and Junichiro Tanizaki. The heroes of his surreal, genre-bending novels are more likely to eat spaghetti, listen to Radiohead and read Len Deighton than drink sake or quote Oe. They are under-employed drifters, without children or long-term partners, who refuse to genuflect to the Japanese group ethos of the family and the corporation.
In his short story "The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes" - collected in his new book, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - Murakami allegorically depicts the ructions touched off when he netted an award for his debut novel, Hear the Wind Sing, in 1979. The protagonist is a finalist in a contest for a new recipe of an age- old confection known as a "Sharpie". His updated Sharpie cake causes bloody tumult among the wizened crows judging the competition. The young relish his recipe; the old guard does not.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman draws together 25 short stories, penned over five years. In the introduction, Murakami writes that "I find writing novels a challenge, writing short stories a joy." 'A "Poor Aunt" Story' illustrates Murakami's belief "that with one idea, one word, you can write a short story". His narrator, who styles himself as "one of those people who try to write stories", falls in thrall to the random image of a poor aunt.
Murakami works on short stories in the intervals between novels. "You can test your new technique in a short story for your next novel. It's an experiment - a game." Sputnik Sweetheart grew out of "Man-Eating Cats", in which the narrator disappears after being lured by an intoxicating melody to climb a hill in the Greek countryside. Typically for Murakami, loss and suicide sound the keynotes. "Many of my friends committed suicide, so I have several empty spots in my mind. I think it is my responsibility to look at them."
Murakami's breakthrough novel was Norwegian Wood, which originated as "Firefly" - about an introverted college student, Toru, who pines after his mentally unstable girlfriend. Like Toru, Murakami was raised in Kobe, and moved to Tokyo to study drama and film at college. There, Murakami witnessed the rupturing of his generation's idealism, with the quashing of the '68 and '69 student riots. Although Murakami didn't participate in the demonstrations, his characters often wrestle with feelings of emptiness arising from the defeat. "Spiritually I was with the protesters but I couldn't co-operate. I'm a lone wolf."
Despite his reading, Murakami was an unremarkable, ill-motivated student. "My heroes don't have anything special. They have something to tell other people but they don't know how, so they talk to themselves. I thought I was one of those ordinary people." Although harbouring loose aspirations to become a scriptwriter, Murakami finally realised that "to make a movie is a collective art. So I gave up wanting to be a scriptwriter". At university, Murakami met his lifelong partner, Yoko, and together they ran a jazz bar, Peter Cat, for seven years. "I wasn't interested in working for a big company like Toyota or Sony. I just wanted to be independent. But that's not easy. In this country, if you don't belong to any group, you're almost nothing. Among the many values in life, I appreciate freedom most. I'd like to keep that freedom in my characters, so the protagonist won't have to commute to the company or office. They are not married, so they are free to do anything, free to go anywhere."
The itch to write hit him with all the random force of a trigger for a story. Murakami points out of the window to the stadium where, one night in 1979, he "was just watching baseball and drinking beer and thought, 'I can write'". He worked on his first novel by writing in the small hours after 14-hour days at Peter Cat. He wrote the initial chapters in English, before translating them into Japanese. "I didn't know how to write fiction, so I tried writing in English because my vocabulary was limited. I knew too many words in Japanese. It was too heavy." He writes like a jazz musician extemporises - guided by impulse, without a plan.
"I didn't have a teacher or a colleague as a writer, so the only way I knew was good music - rhythm, improvisation, harmony. I just know how to begin. If I knew how to finish, it wouldn't be fun because I'd know what would happen next. Writing is like dreaming when you're awake. When you're sleeping, you cannot dream a continuous dream. But when you're a writer, you can continue your dream every day. So it's fun."
The couple closed Peter Cat in 1981 after Murakami's second novel, Pinball 1973, became a bestseller. International recognition arrived with his following novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard- Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - kaleidoscopic dreamscapes that fused the conventions of the hard-bitten detective novel with sci-fi overlays and off-the-wall comedy. In 1987, Murakami surprised readers by producing a traditional rites-of- passage novel, expanding "Firefly" into Norwegian Wood. "I had to prove I could write in a realistic style."
But by dipping his toe into realism, Murakami triggered a tsunami. Norwegian Wood shifted two million copies. To Murakami, it was too much of a good thing. "It became a phenomenon. It wasn't a book any more. I didn't want to be famous. I felt betrayed. I lost some of my friends. I don't know why but they left. I was not happy at all."
He decamped to Europe with Yoko to escape, shuttling around for five years before taking up a writer's fellowship at Princeton in 1991. From abroad, Murakami witnessed the bursting of Japan's bubble economy. Suddenly, mainstream Japan was made to confront the questions that trouble his characters. "We had to stop and think - what is truly good for us? What is our value? We lost our confidence, so we had to find something else as the purpose of society."
The gap between Murakami and Japan narrowed further in 1995, when the country was rent by two further convulsions. On January 17, Kobe was hit by an earthquake that killed nearly 6,500 people. Two months later, Aum cultists released toxic nerve gas into the Tokyo subway system. Murakami, who had spent four years at Princeton writing his opus The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, returned from self- exile. "It wasn't a patriotic thing. I just wanted to do something for my people."
The sharpening of Murakami's social commitment was heralded by after the quake - a set of six bleakly absurd stories, portraying the aftershocks of the Kobe earthquake. He also turned to non- fiction with Underground, a collection of interviews with the doomsday cultists responsible for the gassings and the subway riders who survived them. Murakami came to empathise with the work- obsessed salarymen and office ladies who he had previously felt were not worth writing about. "Many people expected that I would be sympathetic to the cult people because they're outsiders. But that was not the case. They're shallow, but the common people have the depth of real life."
Childless, like his characters, Murakami is free to pursue his daily regime of writing, translating and fitness. After rising at 6am, he writes for about six hours, broken by an hour-long jog or swim. His evenings are spent listening to jazz and translating American novels into Japanese. Murakami has translated more than 40 works by the like of Truman Capote and John Irving. "Writing fiction, you get egotistical. You have to have confidence. But translating, you have to respect the text, so your ego shrinks to normal size. It's good for your mental health."
Asked about his decision not to have children, Murakami comments that he fails to share the post-war idealism of his parents: "I'm not so optimistic." He also notes that "books are more important to me." He pauses, pensive, then half-grins - perhaps implying that these are mere equivocations: "I didn't want to be a parent because I knew my children would hate me." He refuses to be drawn on his difficult relationship with his parents, saying only that "they had their own values and I had my own. I was an only child and their presence was heavy."
Although about to return to Harvard, Murakami imagines moving back to Japan permanently in a few years: "When I'm 60, I guess it will be time to settle down." Despite what Japan's most hidebound pundits argue, Murakami's writing has always been closer to his homeland than the fictional universes of Fitzgerald, Carver and Chandler. Occidental critics ritually compare Murakami with postmodernists such as Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. But in Japan, as Murakami tells it, "people do not think my stories are postmodern." In Japanese spirituality, the divide between the real and the fantastic is permeable, so his tales of unicorn skulls, six-foot frogs and star-patterned sheep are "very natural".
"You know the myth of Orpheus. He goes to the underworld to look for his deceased wife, but it's far away and he has to undergo many trials to get there. There's a big river and a wasteland. My characters go to the other world, the other side. In the western world, there is a big wall you have to climb up. In this country, once you want to go there, it's easy. It's just beneath your feet."
BLIND WILLOW, SLEEPING WOMAN
by Haruki Murakami
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