TOKYO

Haruki Murakami is worried. A heavy, gray smudge of cloud hangs over an equally ashen urban scene visible from his sixth-floor office window in the leafy district of Minami Aoyama. He points in the direction of Meiji Jingu Stadium, the home of his beloved Yakult Swallows baseball team. "I'm going to the ballpark this evening, but it's raining so I don't know if there's a game or not," he mutters.

So long as the rain holds off, Murakami, recently awarded the coveted Franz Kafka Prize in Prague, will be making one of his regular visits to the place where he experienced his "epiphany" 28 years ago. It was while watching the Swallows play the Hiroshima Carp that he was struck with the realization that he could write. "It was a very strange feeling," he says of that pivotal moment. "I had read many books, but didn't think I had the ability to write. I'm a natural-born reader, I guess. I worked hard through my 20s and just found that I could write."

He immediately headed to a stationery store after the game (which the Swallows won) and bought some pens and paper. His first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, was published the following year and heralded the beginning of Murakami's writing odyssey.

Barefoot and wearing jeans and an orange T-shirt, Murakami sits at a plain wooden table in a simply decorated room. Shelves, neatly stacked with boxes of papers, take up much of the space. A framed picture hangs on the wall behind him. In the bottom right-hand corner of the surreal sketch sits a lone cat with an absurdly long reefer dangling from its mouth. It looks like the kind of feline that might well inhabit Murakami's warped fiction.

Opening the mind

His fantastical tales conjure up plots in which the unlikely becomes likely, the unimaginable, imaginable. Humble protagonists leading unfulfilling lives are dragged into dreamlike worlds where cats can talk and people live down wells. "Sometimes very unnatural things are very natural to me when I'm writing a story," he says. "It's a paradox. If you want to write a good story, you have to open your mind, and, if you open your mind, anything could come to you." Such stories have brought Murakami worldwide acclaim and popularity.

Writing in an online translators' roundtable, Jay Rubin, Harvard University professor and longtime Murakami translator, described his first encounter with the writer's work: "I can still see the colors of the dreams escaping into the atmosphere from the unicorn skulls near the end of the book when I think back to that first reading of Hard-Boiled Wonderland, and I remember how much I regretted closing the last page and realizing I couldn't live in Murakami's world anymore."

Murakami's 14th book to be translated into English, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, was published earlier this year. The collection of short stories includes many examples of the author's trademark approach to storytelling, weaving everyday banality with plot twists and mystery, wrapped up with jarring, inconclusive endings. Inspired by the books of American author Raymond Carver, Murakami says he wants readers to be aware that there is life before and after a short story. "At the end of [Carver's] stories you are left in that spot, and you have no idea where you are or any idea of where you are going," he says. "I love that kind of bleak feeling."

Such an approach to storytelling garnered Murakami the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award in September. And, while he says it was a great honor to receive in the Kafka Prize, an accolade named for an author he admires, he adds that he is not a fan of awards in general. "My readers are my prize — the only real prize," he says. "I have been writing my books for my readers, not for critics. Also, I am not fond of appearing in public places. ... However, I had a good time in Prague. The beer was fantastic!"

Although the past two recipients of the Franz Kafka Prize (Harold Pinter in 2005 and Elfriede Jelinek in 2004) picked up the Nobel Prize in Literature the same year, the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk recently prevented Murakami making it three in a row. But Murakami remains typically cryptic about his interest in the prize. "Stockholm is too cold to visit," he says. "It is a little bit warmer in Prague, isn't it?"

Yet, despite Murakami's fascination with realms where anything is possible, his biggest selling novel, Norwegian Wood, is a simple love story. Completed in 1987 after the surrealistic A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Murakami says the novel was a personal test. "After I completed it, I knew I could do anything. I could have been a first-rate author if I stuck to that realistic style, but I didn't want to," he says. "I'm not interested in writing that kind of story anymore."

The book's unexpected success propelled him into the limelight. The public and media demanded to know more about the man behind the words. It was all too much for Murakami, who had been shuffling back and forth between Europe (Greece and Italy) and Japan. His self-imposed exile eventually lasted seven years, including two years as a visiting professor at Princeton University followed by two years as writer-in-residence at Tufts University.

Two catastrophic events in 1995 — the Great Hanshin Earthquake and the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system — prompted his return to Japan. But he remains fiercely protective of his privacy, refusing to do public appearances in Japan and remaining wary of interviews. "I don't like to appear on TV or radio, and I don't like to do readings or lectures," he says. "I'm a writer, and, when I'm writing my fiction, my best side appears in public." The resulting anonymity, he says, allows him to ride the subway and indulge in his two passions unmolested: watching baseball and scouring the city's record stores for jazz and classical vinyl.

He is, he claims, just a regular guy, a one-time owner of a Tokyo jazz club (Peter Cat) who happens to have a "special skill." Murakami is quick to dismiss any talk of his being an artist and scoffs at academic discussions about Jungian theory or symbolism in his books. "I think I'm a very unique writer," he says. "I don't have many writer friends. I'm not so comfortable around other writers. Actually, I don't want to talk about writing or novels when I'm not writing."

The man behind the words

Born in Kyoto in 1949, Murakami, an only child, grew up in Kobe. Although he says he had a happy childhood, by the time he hit puberty in the 1960s he was turned off by traditional Japan. Hungrily devouring English books and Western music, a young Murakami grew excited at the revolutionary scenes exploding across his TV. "My father was a teacher, but at the same time he was a Buddhist priest," he says. "And I was strongly influenced by those circumstances when I was a kid. I was trying to escape from those kinds of things, but it's still in my mind. You cannot escape from your childhood."

His books, Murakami contends, are the results of unconnected personal experiences that sit fermenting in his head. Much like his Jingu Stadium "visitation," Murakami says he instinctively knows when it's time to write. He starts with no blueprint or master plan, just a vague notion of how the first few pages might look. As if he were turning on a faucet, the ideas begin to flow. "For instance, when I wrote Kafka on the Shore ... I had an image of the first three or four pages," he says. "I didn't know what was going to happen next, but, as I was writing those three or four pages, I had the next idea." Having never experienced writer's block, his faith in the process, he says, is such that he never reworks or rewrites.

This wasn't always the case, however. Murakami says his first efforts at writing were misguided. "When I wrote my book Hear the Wind Sing, I was trying to write literature," he says. "But I found what I wrote was boring. I realized that I didn't enjoy writing that story so I decided to enjoy myself, enjoy the writing."

A keen runner (his personal best for the marathon is 3 hours, 21 minutes) and swimmer, Murakami has a smooth face, toned torso and thick, lightly grayed hair that belie his 57 years and are a testament to a healthy lifestyle. Unlike the unpredictability in his stories, Murakami follows a strict daily regimen. But, to take on the mammoth task of writing a novel (which he equates to turning a giant wheel), Murakami says he has to be fit. "Routine is a very important thing to keep that wheel going. It's like long-distance running," he says.

Turning 40, Murakami says, was a watershed. Describing the period as a "very difficult time of life," he says he felt a need to change parts of his life and writing style to reflect his older self. The fruit of his midlife crisis were borne a few years later with the release of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Believed by many to be Murakami's magnum opus, the book brings together a typically unusual collection of characters in a detective tale that touches on Japan's dark history in China before and during World War II.

"I think that book is a kind of breakthrough," he says, clasping a coffee cup. "I had written A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland. Looking back on those books, they were well written, but I had a feeling I could have written better. But talking about The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I don't think I could have written better. That was the best I could do."

After graduating from Tokyo's prestigious Waseda University, Murakami rejected a life as a corporate cog, a "salaryman," in one of Japan's business behemoths. A similar attitude pervades the characters of his books. Through choice or illness, they live on the fringes of society. His decision, therefore, to write a nonfiction book about the attack on the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult through interviews with survivors and cult members seems a natural one.

In Underground, Murakami finds suffering victims marginalized by friends and colleagues who fear being "contaminated" by their misfortune, and disillusioned cult members looking for a place in a society that values consensus and sacrifice. The tragedy, he says, taught him that nothing is ever clear-cut. "Those victims who were commuting on the train for one hour or one hour and a half everyday, you could say that their souls were stolen, more or less, by the companies," he says. "And, if you don't want your soul stolen by the company, you have to find another area. Those cult people found an area, but it was wrong."

'The best is yet to come'

Each book he writes represents a journey inside himself, he says. "I'm just sketching what I saw in the darkness," he says. "Sometimes it's fun, [but] sometimes it's dangerous, so I have to protect myself. That's why I'm running every day. You have to be physically strong to survive that darkness."

Having ditched what he calls the "irresponsibility" of his youth, Murakami says he has become more aware of the kind of literary legacy he would like to leave. "You know, I don't have children, and that's why I feel a responsibility to the next generation," he says. And, in a Japan still unsure of how it should confront its wartime past, Murakami believes that fiction can be a powerful tool to educate. It was through A Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, he says, that many Japanese learned about their country's brief war against the Soviet Union at Nomonhan on the Manchuria-Siberia border in the summer of 1939.