Dark master of a dream world

Haruki Murakami says there are no answers in his fictional world, only dreams. Stephen Phelan talks to the acclaimed Japanese novelist.

At a shrine in a forest, on a mountain in Japan, a flustered young woman tries to describe the special appeal of Haruki Murakami novels.

I have mentioned his name in bars, temples and beauty spots on my way across the country to interview Murakami in Tokyo and the reactions have been similar.

Many young Japanese know his books well, but there is something about them that is difficult to articulate in English.

Murakami writes stories that make people feel strange, and strange feelings must be the hardest to put into foreign words. This particular girl makes a wholehearted effort: "I am always wanting to escape into his world."

She seems unsatisfied with the translation, but I think she speaks succinctly for me and the growing millions of fans who read his work in Japanese, English, Taiwanese, Latvian or Hebrew.

When I meet the author a few days later, it's obvious that he understands.

"Many people tell me that they don 't know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange," Murakami says. "But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That's good."

Sitting in his nondescript office in Tokyo's Aoyama district, Murakami looks compact and lean; the healthiest 55-year-old in the world. This is a man who runs 10 kilometres and swims five every day; who does the Boston Marathon each year for a holiday. He speaks English well enough to translate Western classics into Japanese, so he can talk genially about almost anything. He is also self-possessed, inscrutable and often enigmatic. Certain words are totemic in his speech patterns: dream; darkness; kindness.

His answers never really explain anything but they are never disappointing either.

"The world is a metaphor," he says at one point, although he doesn't say what for, and I don't think he knows. When I ask him what he thinks about while he 's writing, he says he doesn't think at all.

"It is more like dreaming," he says. "As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change."

This is how his latest novel, Kafka on the Shore, was written, just like all the others.

You should read it if you think there are no new ways to tell a teenage rites-of-passage story.

It's a sustained narrative fugue about a 15-year-old runaway beset by mythic, surreal and metaphysical troubles. He kills his father and sleeps with his mother - but only in the most oblique and abstract ways - while his elderly alter ego talks to cats, makes mackerel rain from the sky and confronts malevolent supernatural forces that come to life as famous brand-name advertising icons Colonel Sanders and Johnnie Walker.

"When I am writing," Murakami says, "I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say."

Murakami has suggested that strange things happen in his books precisely because his own life is so ordinary. He wakes up at four every morning, writes until 10, goes running and swimming, buys some records, does some cooking, listens to music with his wife Yoko, and goes to bed at about nine.

The narrators of most of his novels are semi-employed, half-awake, disengaged free-thinkers in their late 20s. Murakami has always drawn backdated inspiration from that blurry time of life but he feels sorry for anyone going through it, including me.

"You are 27 or 28, right?" he says. "It is very tough to live at that age. When nothing is sure. I have sympathy with you."

When Murakami was that age, he and his wife were running a jazz bar called Peter Cat in downtown Tokyo. They couldn't think of anything else to do. Theirs was a generation of aftershock kids, raised in a Japan that had been stopped dead by the most emphatic weapons in the universe and restarted under US military power and cultural energy.

Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and could not relate either to the esoteric delicacy of his parents' traditions - they practised Buddhism and taught Japanese literature - or the hyper-capitalism taking shape around him.

"Most young people were getting jobs in big companies, becoming company men. I wanted to be individual."

As a teenager, Murakami had read "all the great authors" - Dostoevsky, Kafka, Flaubert, Dickens, Raymond Chandler. He spent his lunch money