It's embarrassing, but I keep forgetting everything that I wrote," Haruki Murakami says, in the apologetic, wondering-aloud voice he shares with his protagonists in such novels as A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which wove the textures of modern Japanese alienation into woolly, hilarious whodunits that delighted budding literary gurus and cyberpunk kids alike in the 1980s. When Murakami began publishing short stories in The New Yorker in 1990, he won over many of the doubters and some of the haters who had dismissed his work as self-indulgent surrealism for the Walkman set. In 1997, he published The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, an unmistakably adult novel that has made him a likely candidate for a Nobel Prize in Literature.
Youthfully dressed in an orange T-shirt, jeans, and green leather New Balance sneakers, the man who gave the collision of East and West a good name (his narratives are stuffed with references to classic rock songs of the sixties and seventies) professes to have only the vaguest recollection of the novels and stories that have made him so famous. "Sometimes, reporters or my fans will quote something. I think, 'Yeah, that's not bad, who wrote it?'?"Murakami says, as the big orange lizard printed on his T-shirt fixes visitors with a quizzical, off-kilter gaze. "It's just like underwear," he goes on. "When you wear it, you don't mind. But once you take it off, you don't want to put it back on again."
The master's new collection of short stories, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (Knopf), spans the length of his career, from 1980 to the present. It features the usual cast of Murakami characters, including a lonely boy with a chronic inner-ear condition, a friend who loans his suits to the narrator whenever he needs to attend a funeral (there is no shortage of funerals), the mother of a Japanese surfer killed by a shark in Hawaii, an illustrator who tries to pay a woman to wear his dead wife's clothes, and a thieving monkey that lives in the sewers of Tokyo and may or may not be responsible for the suicide of a beautiful young girl.
The author himself, who is 57 years old and married, is currently enjoying a sabbatical year as artist-in-residence at Harvard, where he spends much of his time listening to the Ahmad Jamal Trio at the Regattabar in Cambridge and buying old jazz records. What distinguishes him from other great writers whose books are available in the world's major airports—Philip Roth, say, or Gabriel García Márquez—is his ability to describe the spooky and fantastical passages of everyday lives. Murakami's protagonists endure unhappy marriages, cook pasta, go to the mall, and lose their keys, while being plagued by the occasional primate. His signature combination of flatness and whimsy comes from his ability to tilt ordinary events several degrees on their axis until they feel strange—but without diminishing the psychological reality and complexity of his characters. He is a fantasist with the kind of perfect pitch that allows incredible things to happen, quietly.
The distinctly international flavor and appeal of Murakami's fiction might also have something to do with his double life as a translator, which began when, as a young Tokyo jazz-club owner in the 1970s, he translated F. Scott Fitzgerald's short stories into Japanese. After translating works by Raymond Carver, Truman Capote, and J.D. Salinger, Murakami is now working on The Great Gatsby and Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye. He credits all the American authors he has translated as his teachers, but claims to owe his biggest debt to the fictional Philip Marlowe, Chandler's hard-boiled detective.
"The protagonist of my work is searching for something. And in the end, he finds that something. But when he finds that it's disfigured, it's lost," Murakami tells me, choosing his words with a casualness belied by the fact that the cuffs of his jeans are rolled up precisely two-and-a-half inches on each leg. The nameless sense of loss that shadows his characters, he goes on, is part of the shared disappointment of the generation of young idealists who, like him, came of age in Japan in the 1960s, only to learn that the Establishment was bigger and stronger than they were. "We had a big sense of loss. We lost our idealism. We have to live on and survive, but we can't believe in any optimistic vision or solid value," Murakami explains. "In my twenties, I was just frozen. I had no idea how to live after that big defeat."
For Murakami, deliverance eventually came in his late twenties, at a baseball game at Tokyo's Jingu Stadium, when a cleanly hit double inspired him to think that he could overcome his personal paralysis by turning to fiction. As his career and reputation grew, he watched as the "Japanese miracle" of the 1970s and 1980s was itself revealed to be a fiction, with the collapse of the Tokyo stock and real-estate markets. Having left Japan in 1990 for a nearly five-year stay in the United States (because, Murakami insists, the record stores are better here), he returned to Tokyo in time to witness the end of the Japanese "bubble economy," the devastating Kobe earthquake, and the sarin attack by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in the Tokyo subway system. He began to write directly about the headline-making events that he had largely avoided, an effort that culminated in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which moves back and forth between the story of a guy whose wife has disappeared and a historical narrative set in Manchukuo, the puppet state that the Japanese established in the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1932.
"He was my typical protagonist—30 years old, cool, and alone. But at the same time, he is surrounded by society, the system, and history. He had to fight these things. He couldn't be cool anymore," Murakami says. The achy sense of loss that pervades Murakami's fiction reflects the essence of modern Japan, born in the ashes of the country's defeat in the Second World War. But it is also intensely personal. He traces his own interest in the horrors the Japanese perpetrated in China to his father's experiences as a soldier in Manchuria. In the 1970s and 1980s, after the promised revolution of their youth failed to arrive, many of Murakami's friends, he tells me, committed suicide: "They chose not to exist. I chose to exist. In Japan, the other side is close to you. People could go to the other side; maybe people could also come over. This life is kind of permeable."
The lizard perched on Murakami's T-shirt gives out a sleepy-eyed stare as the master tilts his head and tugs on one of his low-hanging earlobes. His obsession with ears spans the entirety of his career, from his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, to the title story of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. "It would be strange to suddenly find an ear in the hallway outside my office," he suddenly confides, adding that the protagonist of his next novel will have an ear chopped off by the Chinese mafia. When I ask him why, Murakami grins. "You have two ears, but only one life."
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