Murakami Between Worlds

During an event at Town Hall on Dec. 11, Murakami spoke to a packed house about the globalization of Japanese literature and culture — a shift he helped to bring about. Earlier that week, he gave brief remarks while accepting a lifetime achievement award from the Center for Fiction, which was presented to him by the musician and writer Patti Smith. (Guests at the gala were instructed not to take photos or videos of Murakami.)

Murakami thanked his wife of more than 50 years, who he said is his first reader and often his toughest editor. And he recalled how, when he gave his first book signing in the United States decades ago, only a handful of people showed up.

“I remember sitting with a pen in my hand and nothing to do,” he told the audience. “It was one of the longest hours of my life.”

Such a tepid reception would be unthinkable now. Murakami is the rare writer with a towering literary reputation who is also immensely popular with readers worldwide. His new novels are celebrated with midnight release parties, where superfans gather at bookstores to buy copies the minute they go on sale. Fans have created playlists of music he’s referenced and published cookbooks based on the food in his novels. There’s even an account on X dedicated entirely to mentions of spaghetti in his work.

Murakami has won an array of prominent global literary awards, including the Franz Kafka Prize and the Jerusalem Prize, and is considered a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize. “We just laugh about it at this point,” Amanda Urban, Murakami’s agent, said of the flurry of anticipatory calls she receives every October around Nobel time.

“It’s always nice when the Nobel is given to someone who can use the power behind the Nobel, but I think Haruki’s already got it,” Urban said. “His work speaks to readers across all borders, across all languages, across all cultures, in a way I’ve never seen another author reach.”

In the United States, where his books have sold more than six million copies, Murakami has a string of upcoming releases. This fall, Knopf will publish “Abandoning a Cat,” a short, haunting work about Murakami’s relationship with his father. Next year, the imprint plans to release a book about his classical music record collection. The publisher is also repackaging his older books, which remain in high demand, with new covers.

At 77, Murakami is still remarkably prolific. He recently finished a new novel, which will be published in Japan this summer and is currently being translated into English.

Murakami wrote much of the novel last year after recovering from a serious illness, which he didn’t want to elaborate on, that left him hospitalized for a month and caused him to lose around 40 pounds. Being sick was a disorienting experience for Murakami, who usually runs for an hour a day but found himself struggling to walk. When his illness was acute, he had no desire to write. Once he recovered, he was relieved to find that the urge hadn’t left him.

“It’s kind of a resurrection,” he said of writing his new novel. “I came back.”

The story that came to him felt different from his previous work, more optimistic, he said. It is also new territory for him, as his first novel written primarily from a woman’s perspective. Murakami, who has been criticized by some who see his female characters as one-dimensional, marginal and overly sexualized, said writing from a young woman’s point of view felt different but surprisingly natural.

“I became her,” he said.

Murakami was reluctant to reveal much about the plot, except to say that the young woman at the center of the story, Kaho, is an artist and children’s book illustrator, and that things take a weird turn.

“She is a very ordinary girl, not so pretty, not so smart,” he said, “but so many strange things happen to her, around her.”

Asked what kinds of strange things happen, he smiled.

“It’s a secret,” he said.

A Murakami story often starts off in a mundane setting — a woman stuck in traffic at the start of “1Q84,” or the narrator cooking spaghetti at the beginning of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” Then things shift into a dreamlike, parallel reality.

Still, even Murakami’s strangest plots don’t read like fantasy. If anything, they feel hyper-real, rooted in granular details of daily life that seem familiar and ordinary but become uncanny.

“He starts in our world and then he takes you into his world,” said Lexy Bloom, his editor at Knopf. “You don’t even notice that you’re there, you’ve just gone with him.”

Murakami didn’t feel destined to be a writer. Growing up in the suburbs around Kobe and Osaka, the only child of two teachers, he wanted to be a musician but couldn’t bring himself to practice. He was a mediocre, indifferent student, especially when it came to Japanese literature.

“Honestly, I didn’t read any Japanese literature when I was in my teens because my parents were teaching Japanese literature, so I hated it,” Murakami said. Instead, he read works by American writers like Hemingway, Capote and Fitzgerald, and Russian classics like Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” and “The Brothers Karamazov.”

He credits his love of music — he has eclectic taste and an extensive vinyl record collection — for shaping his writing even more than the books he’s read: “I’ve learned so many things from good music: steady rhythm, beautiful melody and harmony, free improvisation from jazz.”

- Author: Alexandra Alter, The NEW YORK TIMES