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PRINCETON, N.J. — This is probably the most well-known story about Haruki Murakami, but you need to approach it with caution: Like most anecdotes about the reclusive Japanese author – indeed, like much of his fiction – it raises as many questions as it seems on the surface to answer.
Back in 1978, Murakami was running a jazz bar in Tokyo called Peter Cat with his wife, Yoko. It had been about four years since he'd finished his film-and-drama studies at university, and he hadn't done much of anything in the way of art. He was enraptured and inspired by the work of such Western directors as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, but, being an introvert, lacked the temperament to marshal others in the collaborative process of filmmaking.
One clear spring afternoon, he was sitting in the bleachers of Jingu Stadium watching the hometown Yakult Swallows baseball team square off against the Hiroshima Carp. The sun was shining, he was drinking a beer. As an imported American player for the Swallows hit a beautiful line drive – a double – Murakami heard the satisfying crack of the bat and suddenly had this thought: He was capable of writing a novel.
That's where the story ends. Even now, more than 30 years later, he has only the slim thread of a theory about the source of that revelation. “When I was a boy and I was in college, I wanted to write something, but I had no experience of life at all so I had nothing to write,” he explains. “But after working hard, I got my own experience.”
Japanese author Haruki Murakami at Princston University. (Michael Falco for The Globe and Mail)
Murakami is sitting now in the airless library of a guest house on the campus of Princeton University, where he was a visiting fellow in the early 1990s. He is here to receive an honorary degree, the following day, and seems thankful his responsibilities don't include giving a public address. “I have to wear a cap and gown. I just sit down and get some doctorate or something.” He emits a breathy laugh. “For what, I don't know.”
His modesty is genuine but unfounded. With 11 novels, dozens of short stories and two non-fiction books, Murakami is probably the most critically and commercially successful Japanese writer of his generation outside of his home country. His newest work, released this week, is a memoir titled What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, in which he discusses his reasons for taking up marathon running about 30 years ago. (The title is a tip of the hat to What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver, one of the many American writers Murakami cites as influences.)
Murakami is courteous, if withholding: He is shy, which is one reason he does not like to appear on television or radio, and rarely grants newspaper or magazine interviews. At 59, he is in impressive shape, tightly muscled, with the build of a bulldog; the physical compactness is mirrored in the spareness of his speech and conversational manner. He tends to avert his eyes from the gaze of those with whom he is speaking. Today, he is dressed in weekend casual: a pale green T-shirt and khaki pants. He seems, because of all of this, a wholly unlikely person to cause offence.
Yet for many years, Murakami outraged his countrymen with his novels. Time and again, he sketched out stories that favoured individualism, and blasted modern Japan, which he saw as peopled by anonymous, conformist salarymen subsuming their desires for the good of the state. The literary establishment turned up its collective nose, even as he outsold them. For them, Murakami's worst crime may have been that his novels – which fused a hard-boiled tone with science fiction, surrealism and metaphysics – contain few mentions of Japanese culture; they are stuffed with references to Western films, restaurants, books, hobbies and clothes. This isn't just name-dropping; Murakami loves blues, rock and opera, and is a voracious collector of jazz records, preferably on vinyl. He has translated the works of many American writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, into Japanese.
Among the first generation of Japanese youth to have unfettered access to American pop culture, then, Murakami is a hero, a J.D. Salinger figure who gave voice to their disenchantment and detachment, their malaise and their desires. Murakami says that he prefigured and then articulated the upheaval that shook his country in the mid-nineties with the Kobe earthquake, the Tokyo subway sarin-gas attack, and the collapse of the economic bubble.
“In Japan after the war, after 1945, people were working so hard, and the people believed the world is getting better, we are getting richer, and the richer we become, we thought, the happier we become,” he offers. “In those old days, people thought the ordinary world is healthy, and unordinary life must be unhealthy. But these days, the ordinary people's lives are in chaos. So that comparison doesn't mean anything at all these days. People have a kind of despairing.”
“Now, we are not so sure we are getting better. I think things are almost the same around the world, in America, Canada, Europe. The younger generation is happier than the older generation. So that is what I mean when we are in chaos, more or less. What is ordinary life? What is unordinary life? So this distinction is not so vivid.”
The seeds of that generational turnaround are explored in Norwegian Wood, his most famous book, which came out in Japanese in 1987. (On Thursday, producers in Tokyo announced that filmmaker Tran Anh Hung, director of Scent of Green Papaya, would make a screen adaptation to be released in 2010.) Nostalgic and frankly sexual, the novel looks back at the student protests of the late 1960s in Japan. Forgoing Murakami's usual metaphysical flourishes, the book sold more than three million copies, and brought him so much attention – from frenzied fans and editors demanding his time – that he and his wife fled Tokyo for the United States and Europe until the mid-1990s.
Even now, he says, the teenage children of his friends often ask to meet him. “I'm getting old, but the reader stays young,” he says. “That's a very strange situation. Sometimes, parents and their sons, daughters, are reading my books at the same time.”
But after outraging the older generation, Murakami now seems to have upset his younger readers with What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which strips away any hint of romanticism about his life and his chosen line of work. In the book, a straightforward series of reflections about the relationship between his life as a runner and as a writer, Murakami recalls his first marathon – an almost accidental one, run between Athens and Marathon – as well as his one and only ultramarathon, a 100-kilometre endurance test run in one day. He explains that he began running to ward off the ill effects of writing, which only became apparent after he sold the jazz club and spent several sedentary years working on his fiction.
Quitting smoking, he gained weight; he had to do something to keep himself fit if he wanted to stay in the game for very long. So he began running, eating well, going to bed regularly at 9 p.m., and rising early to write: So much for the popular image of a writer as a dissolute, dishevelled genius. Furthermore, he cut off most of his personal relationships in favour of the general one with his unseen readers. He and his wife have no children.
“You can write a book or two easily,” he says, “but if you want to keep on writing for 10 years, for 20 years, you have to be practical, you have to be strong, physically.”
Murakami has now run more than 25 marathons, but since reaching his personal best time of 3:27 hours in the 1991 New York City Marathon, he has been slowing down. There is nothing he can do about this, he says: It is the simple result of age. So he has taken up triathlons, which involve running, swimming and bicycling, in part because his swimming and bicycling were at first so poor that he could only improve.
As he speaks, it emerges that running doesn't just keep him physically healthy; it is also his mental lifeline. For the book is shot through with suggestions that writing can be emotionally dangerous work.
“I'm writing unusual stories, kind of surrealistic, kind of weird,” he says now. “When I'm writing, I'm going into the dark side sometimes. I'm not the kind of weird, wicked person myself [like his characters]. Only sometimes I go into that area, that world, in my head, in my mind. But you have to be strong to go into that area and to come back to this world. To go into that world is not so hard, but the hardest part is to come back to this world with something.
“That is my notion of writing something, something deep,” he says. “The deeper you go, the more dangerous it gets.”
There is something unexplored here that seems to be poking at the edges of our conversation, just as it pokes its head into the book itself without showing itself fully. Creativity, he writes in the book, comes from a toxin; does he have a sense of the source of that poison? At first, he slyly bats away the question. Later, I ask him about his parents, both of whom were professors of Japanese literature. Given his antagonism to the classical Japanese novel, I jokingly ask him if there isn't something Oedipal in his life's work. “I guess so,” he responds quickly, then adds with an embarrassed laugh, “I don't want to talk about that with them.”
What does he mean? “I am shy, I am embarrassed,” he explains.
This seems bizarre; has he never discussed his books with them? “I have been avoiding that topic,” he says, with a thin laugh deployed to paper over the moment. Then he asks to change the subject.
Later, I learn he is estranged from his parents, and I am reminded of a sentence in the memoir in which he warns readers that it is extremely painful to form the unique point of view required to be a writer, because it means separating yourself from others. “Emotional hurt,” he cautions, “is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.”
