The Crack of the Bat
At 1:30 in the afternoon on April 1, 1978, a twenty-nine-year-old jazz bar owner named Haruki Murakami sat alone in the outfield bleachers of Jingu Stadium in Tokyo, watching the Yakult Swallows play their opening game. He had a beer. The sun was warm. A journeyman American outfielder named Dave Hilton — who had failed to distinguish himself in either the American or Japanese leagues, a man stranded, you might say, between two countries and two careers — stepped to the plate and slammed the first pitch into left field for a clean double. The crack of the bat resounded through the stadium. Scattered applause. And in that instant, for reasons he has never been able to explain, Murakami was seized by a conviction that would rearrange the remainder of his life: I think I can write a novel.
He had never written anything. Not a poem, not a journal entry, not a letter of consequence. He was, by his own reckoning, a man who made very good sandwiches and passable cocktails, who spent his days and most of his nights in a tiny jazz club called Peter Cat, near the center of Tokyo, where a grand piano barely fit alongside the bar and a quintet could be squeezed in only if everyone held their breath. He had borrowed money from every bank that would have him. His wife, Yoko — whom he had married while still at Waseda University, before either of them had graduated, reversing the conventional Japanese order of school-then-work-then-marriage — ran the business end of things with an intuition he freely admitted he lacked. He was exhausted. He was going nowhere. And then Dave Hilton hit a double, and something fluttered down from the sky, and Murakami caught it.
After the game, he walked to a stationery store and bought a fountain pen and some manuscript paper. That night, after closing the bar at two in the morning, he sat down at his kitchen table and began to write. Six months later, he had a manuscript. He submitted it, almost absent-mindedly, to a new-writers contest. It won. He was, abruptly and without preparation, a novelist.
The Yakult Swallows — the perennial losers of Japanese baseball, a team Murakami had chosen precisely for their air of noble futility — won the championship that year. Dave Hilton hit over .310. And Haruki Murakami, the most unlikely candidate for literary fame in a country that has produced Mishima and Kawabata and Ōe, began a career that would, over the next four and a half decades, sell tens of millions of books in more than fifty languages, rewrite the grammar of Japanese fiction, and turn a pathologically private man into one of the most recognized writers on earth.
He still can't explain any of it. "Maybe I'd drunk too much beer," he says. "I don't know."
By the Numbers
The Murakami Phenomenon
50+Languages into which his work has been translated
6M+Copies of 1Q84 sold in Japan alone
2M+Copies of Norwegian Wood sold in Japan
15Novels published (1979–2023)
4:00 AMDaily writing start time during novel drafts
1,600English words written per day, without variation
40+Years of daily running since 1982
The Kitchen Table and the White Canvas
There is a mythology that accretes around origin stories, and Murakami's baseball epiphany has become, through decades of retelling, something close to a parable. But the thing about parables is that they compress. They leave out the years of trudging.
The jazz club had been a kind of refuge — from the corporate "company life" that most Japanese of his generation submitted to, from the lingering revolutionary fervor of the late-1960s student protests that Murakami had watched from a sympathetic but detached distance at Waseda. He had studied Greek drama, of all things, spending seven years earning a degree that should have taken four, working side jobs to pay for it, marrying Yoko Takahashi in 1971 when they were both still students. Peter Cat opened in 1974, first in Kokubunji — a student hangout in western Tokyo that still retained the counterculture fumes of the fading protest era — and later, after the building closed for renovation, in a location nearer the city center. It was a café by day and a bar by night, with live jazz on weekends performed by young musicians who were happy for the exposure and the small fees. Some of them became famous. Murakami sometimes runs into them in jazz clubs around Tokyo even now.
The work was brutal. Morning to midnight. The money was barely enough. On one occasion, he and Yoko were walking home late at night, trudging with their heads down, when they literally found money lying in the street — exactly the amount of the bank payment due the next morning. "Strange events like this have happened at various junctures in my life," he has written, with the peculiar equanimity that characterizes both his prose and his self-regard.
When he sat down at the kitchen table after that first baseball game, he had no model for what he was attempting. No mentor, no literary friends, no writing teacher, no workshop. His parents — both teachers of Japanese literature — had saturated his childhood with the classics, but Murakami had drifted toward foreign writers: Chandler, Fitzgerald, Dostoyevsky, Kafka. His grandfather was a Buddhist monk. The family had moved from Kyoto, where Murakami was born on January 12, 1949, to Kobe — a bustling port city full of American sailors and foreign influences — when he was two. As an only child with no siblings, his companions were books, cats, and records. He played piano as a boy but lacked talent. When Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers came to Japan in 1964, the fifteen-year-old Murakami went to the concert and was converted instantly. He has been collecting jazz records for over fifty years. His wife, he reports, is always complaining about this.
The first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, came out in 1979 and won the Gunzo Literature Prize for new writers. It was slight — barely a novella — and Murakami has spent decades wincing at it. A beautiful girl once approached him on a Tokyo train. "I'm a great fan of your books," she said. "I loved your first book the most — that's the best one." Murakami thanked her. She added: "You have been getting worse." He tells this story often, with visible relish, as a man who has learned to hold criticism at arm's length by cradling it like a joke.
His second book, Pinball, 1973, arrived the following year. Both were written in snatched half-hours after the bar closed, exhausted fragments of prose composed at the kitchen table while the rest of Tokyo slept. They were inventive, fresh — and, Murakami knew, insufficient. "With this scattered approach I was able to write some interesting, fresh things," he later reflected, "but the result was far from a complex or profound novel." He was coasting on latent talent. He needed to change his life.
Against the advice of everyone — friends, family, business associates — he sold Peter Cat and became a full-time writer. The jazz club was doing well. Nobody understood. But Murakami had decided that he would write a big book, and to do that he needed to sit at a desk without watching the clock.
My whole body thrilled at the thought of how wonderful — and how difficult — it is to be able to sit at my desk, not worrying about time, and concentrate on writing.
The big book was
A Wild Sheep Chase, published in 1982, and it was the true beginning. Where the first two novels had been loose, impressionistic sketches — the literary equivalent of jazz noodling —
A Wild Sheep Chase was a full-length adventure, strange and propulsive, blending detective fiction, comedy, and fantasy in a way that bore no resemblance to anything in the Japanese literary canon. The narrator from the first two books returned, alongside his friend the Rat, but the scale had expanded enormously. Murakami had found his register: the deceptively casual voice, the quotidian details that curdle into the uncanny, the lonely protagonist drawn into a mystery he barely understands.
"When I wrote A Wild Sheep Chase, I was very excited, because I didn't know what was going to happen next," he has said. "I couldn't wait for the next day to come so that I could find out what would happen next. I wanted to turn the pages but there were no pages. I had to write them."
The Butter-Smelling Outsider
To understand what Murakami did to Japanese literature, you have to understand what Japanese literature was doing before he arrived.
The dominant tradition — the watakushi shōsetsu, or "I-novel" — was confessional, interior, concerned with the emotional and aesthetic refinements of a recognizably Japanese sensibility. It prized psychological depth over plot, restraint over spectacle, and the kind of cultural specificity that made a novel unmistakably a product of its national tradition. Writers like Ōe Kenzaburō, who would win the Nobel Prize in 1994, represented the serious end of this continuum: politically engaged, intellectually rigorous, deeply rooted in Japanese cultural soil.
Murakami's characters ate steaks and pasta. They listened to Ella Fitzgerald and Rossini. They wore sharp suits and Oxford broadcloth shirts, whistled "Danny Boy" in elevators, drove Alfa Romeos. The title of his biggest bestseller, Norwegian Wood, referred to the Beatles song. There is a Japanese word for this kind of thing: batakusai — literally, "stinking of butter." It described Japanese who adopted Western styles too self-consciously, who smelled, metaphorically, of the milk products that traditional Japanese did not consume.
Murakami reeked of butter. And he knew it.
"I was an outsider — a black sheep, an intruder in the world of mainstream, traditional Japanese literature," he told Deborah Treisman at the 2018 New Yorker Festival. "Some people said that I was a new voice in Japanese literature, and some people called me a punk." The literary establishment was hostile. Ōe dismissed his early work as entertainment. Critics found his perceived lack of political or intellectual stance irritating. But young Japanese readers — bored with the self-confessions that formed the mainstream, craving the cool detachment and ironic energy of Murakami's voice — devoured his books.
The paradox that nobody quite acknowledged was that Murakami's apparent Westernization was itself a deeply Japanese act. Japan has a long history of cultural absorption — of taking foreign forms and metabolizing them into something unmistakably domestic. The jazz that Murakami loved was itself a product of this process: American music filtered through Japanese sensibility, played in Tokyo clubs for Japanese audiences, producing something that was neither American nor traditionally Japanese but a third thing, alive in the gap. Murakami's prose operated the same way. He wrote his first novel, he has explained, by composing the opening passages in English first — in stumbling, simplified sentences — and then translating them back into Japanese, stripping away the ornamental complexity that characterized literary Japanese prose. The result was a new kind of Japanese sentence: spare, rhythmic, with the off-kilter clarity of a translation.
"I learned three important elements from music about writing," he has said. "Rhythm, harmony, and free improvisation. I learned these things from music, not from literature. And when I started to write, I tried to write as though I were playing music."
The Norwegian Wood Problem
In 1987, Murakami did something unexpected: he wrote a realistic novel. No phantom sheep, no surreal passages, no wells leading to other dimensions. Norwegian Wood was a coming-of-age story, a tender and melancholic account of young love and loss set against the backdrop of late-1960s Tokyo, and it sold more than two million copies in Japan. Overnight, Murakami went from a cult figure admired by cool young readers to a literary megastar — the de facto "voice of his generation," Japan's J. D. Salinger.
He hated it. Not the book — though he would return to the bizarre milieu of his earlier work almost immediately, with Dance Dance Dance in 1988 — but the fame. "People hated that book in Japan," he told the New Yorker audience, and then corrected himself with a wry twist: "It sold more than two million copies, but people hated me." The literary establishment was scandalized. The public was obsessed. Murakami was trapped in the particular hell of Japanese celebrity culture, where writers occupy a strangely elevated social position — flashy, visible, more akin to pop stars than to the cloistered figures of Western literary life.
So he left.
First to Italy and Greece, where he spent two or three years writing. Then to the United States — Princeton University from 1991 to 1993, Tufts University from 1993 to 1995. "Princeton is a boring place," he has said, with the flat directness that passes, in his register, for devastating criticism. "Beautiful, but boring." Boston was better. There was Fenway Park.
The exile was productive. At Princeton and Tufts, he wrote The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, published in Japanese between 1994 and 1995 — his most ambitious novel to that point, a sprawling narrative that departed from his usual themes by confronting Japan's military brutality in Manchuria during World War II. It was the first of his books to reckon directly with Japanese history, to use the machinery of his surreal imagination in service of a national reckoning. The protagonist, the quintessential Murakami Everyman, searches for his missing wife and descends — literally, into a dry well — through layers of reality into a nightmare where Japanese militarism and personal trauma are inextricably fused.
It was also, perhaps not coincidentally, the first book he wrote at enough distance from Japan to see the country clearly.
Underground
The phone call that brought him home came from the television.
On January 17, 1995, a catastrophic earthquake struck Kobe — Murakami's hometown, the city where he had spent his adolescence hunting for cheap paperbacks in used bookstores, hanging out in jazz cafés, watching Art Theatre Guild films. His parents' house was destroyed. The entire city was flattened. He watched the footage from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was living with Yoko, and felt the axis of his life creak.
Two months later, on March 20, 1995, members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin nerve gas on five lines of the Tokyo subway during the morning rush hour. Thirteen people died. Thousands were injured. The two events — the earthquake and the gas attack, nature's violence and human malice, separated by sixty-two days — shattered something in the Japanese national consciousness. They also changed Murakami.
He responded to the earthquake with fiction: After the Quake, a collection of six short stories exploring the psychological aftershocks of the disaster. Kobe was too raw, too personal for journalism. "If I had interviewed those people, I would have been so depressed, so sad," he explained. "But in fiction I could make up my own world, so it was easier for me."
The subway attack was different. Murakami read everything he could find about it — newspaper reports, magazine articles — and couldn't find what he needed. He wanted to know what it had actually been like. What it smelled like. What ordinary people had experienced on an ordinary morning when plastic bags of nerve gas were punctured on a packed commuter train. So he did something a novelist almost never does: he became a journalist.
Over the course of a year, he interviewed sixty-four victims of the attack. One by one, face to face, asking them his own questions. What had happened. What they had felt. Who they were. The interviews were published in 1997 as Underground — a work of nonfiction that remains, alongside his novels, one of the most remarkable books he has ever produced. He also interviewed members of the Aum cult, seeking to understand how ordinary, serious young people had been recruited into an organization that committed mass murder. He found the cult members "very pure people" — serious, sincere, far from the commuters on the train — but felt no sympathy for them. "I got the impression that they lost something very important."
After I interviewed those people, I didn't know how to feel, because I got the impression that they are different, but they are I. I was feeling some empathy for them, but at the same time, I hate them. That's a very complex feeling, the mixture of love and hate.
The year of interviews changed him. He didn't write a word of fiction during that time. He just listened. "The voices are still in me," he told the New Yorker in 2018, more than two decades later. "I trust those voices, those real voices." The experience taught him something about the relationship between the ordinary and the surreal that his fiction had been circling for years: that the most terrifying disruptions happen to the most mundane people, that violence can drive a hole through reality and open a passage to something else, that the ground beneath your feet — which you always assumed was solid — can turn soft and unpredictable in an instant.
He came home to Japan. Not for the country, he was careful to say. Not for the nation, not for society. "For my people." What was the difference? "People buy my books. The country doesn't."
The Daily Machine
Every profile of Murakami eventually arrives at the routine, because the routine is the thing. It is the engine, the discipline, the almost monastic framework within which the dreaming occurs.
When writing a novel, he wakes at four in the morning. He brews coffee — real coffee, in the real world, he is always careful to specify — and writes for five to six hours. In the afternoon, he runs ten kilometers or swims fifteen hundred meters, or both. He reads. He listens to music. He goes to bed at nine. He keeps to this routine every day without variation for the six months to a year that a novel requires. "The repetition itself becomes the important thing," he told the Paris Review in 2004. "It's a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind."
His daily output is fixed: ten Japanese manuscript pages, roughly sixteen hundred English words. On days when he wants to write more, he stops. On days when he doesn't feel like writing, he forces himself. "I punch in, write my ten pages, and then punch out, as if I'm working on a timecard," he has written. "That's not how an artist should go about his art, some may say. It sounds more like working in a factory. And I concur — that's not how artists work. But why must a novelist be an artist?"
The question is not rhetorical. Murakami has spent decades dismantling the image of the writer as a tortured bohemian — the Baudelairean figure, ravaged by vice, producing art from the wreckage of a self-destructive life. "Writers and artists are supposed to live a very unhealthy, bohemian kind of life," he has said. "But I just wanted to do it differently." He has never had writer's block. He doesn't drink to excess. He goes to bed early unless the baseball game is still on. He has been running daily since 1982 — full marathons every year for more than two decades, his personal best around three hours and twenty-five minutes — and has completed at least one triathlon. He does not socialize.
The running began when he sold the jazz bar and became a full-time writer. "Once I was sitting at a desk writing all day I started putting on the pounds. I was also smoking too much — sixty cigarettes a day. My fingers were yellow, and my body reeked of smoke." He decided to run every day to see what would happen. "I think life is a kind of laboratory where you can try anything." What happened was that he became, in his own word, tough.
I sometimes write very unhealthy things. Weird things. Twisted things. I think you have to be very healthy if you want to write unhealthy things. That's a paradox, but it's true.
The paradox is central. Murakami's fiction descends regularly into darkness — into wells, underground passages, psychic labyrinths where identity dissolves and the boundary between the real and the unreal vanishes. His characters encounter talking cats, phantom sheep, two-foot-high samurai, little people who emerge from paintings, worlds where clocks have no hands and shadows live independently of their hosts. To sustain this kind of imaginative excavation, day after day, month after month, for four decades — to go down into the underground every morning at four and come back by nine — requires, he insists, a physical stamina that most people associate with athletes rather than artists. "To write one book is not so difficult," he says. "But to keep writing for many years is very close to impossible. You need the power of concentration and endurance."
The three qualities essential to a novelist, as Murakami sees them, are talent, focus, and endurance. Talent cannot be taught or controlled. But focus and endurance can be cultivated, strengthened, maintained — like muscles. This is what the running is for. Not inspiration. Not meditation. Not thought. "When I'm running, I'm just running. I empty my mind." The running is the structural support for the dreaming. It is the scaffolding around the well.
Through the Door
The process of writing, as Murakami describes it, is less composition than expedition.
He begins with almost nothing. A sentence or two. A title. A strange image.
Killing Commendatore started with one or two paragraphs that he jotted down and put in a desk drawer, then forgot about for months. He had the title before he had a story — borrowed, with deliberate strangeness, from the opening scene of
Mozart's
Don Giovanni — and found the mismatch between the word "commendatore" and the Japanese literary landscape irresistible. "There is no such thing as a 'Commendatore' in Japan, but I felt the strangeness of the title and I appreciated that strangeness very much."
He does not plan. He does not outline. He does not know where the story is going. "If you have a plan — if you know the end when you start — it's no fun to write that novel." A painter, he says, may draw sketches before beginning a canvas, but he does not. "There is a white canvas, I have this paintbrush, and I just paint the picture."
The characters emerge unbidden. Once created, they "move automatically," and Murakami's job is to watch. "I'm a writer, and I'm writing, but at the same time I feel as though I were reading some exciting, interesting book." He calls the process "the Automatic Dwarfs" — a name borrowed from his experience of driving automatic-transmission cars after years of stick shift. He imagines tiny workers inside the gearbox, each operating a separate gear, laboring away in his unconscious while he sits at the desk and transcribes what they produce. "All I do is diligently copy it down."
This is, of course, partly a performance — the constructed modesty of a man who has been polishing his image of artlessness for four decades. But the testimony of his work supports the claim. His novels have the quality of dreams reported with unusual fidelity: the associative logic, the recurring images, the sense that something enormously significant is happening just beneath the surface but cannot be captured by rational analysis. "When I'm writing a novel, I wake up around four in the morning and go to my desk and start working," he told the New Yorker. "That happens in a realistic world. I drink real coffee. But, once I start writing, I go somewhere else. I open the door, enter that place, and see what's happening there."
The underground — it is always the underground for Murakami, always descent — is where the work happens. Wells, subway tunnels, subterranean passageways, caves. "When I write novels, I have to go down into a very deep, dark, and lonely place," he told an interviewer as early as 1999. "And then I have to come back, back to the surface. It's very dangerous. And you have to be strong, physically and mentally strong, in order to do that every day." The protagonists of his fiction undergo the same process, though more literally. They climb down into dry wells and find other worlds. They descend emergency staircases from elevated highways and enter alternate realities. They fall into holes in the ground and encounter spirits.
"Coming back is important," Murakami says. "If you cannot come back, it's scary. But I'm a professional, so I can come back."
Does he bring anything back with him? "No, that would be scary. I leave everything where it is."
The Missing and the Sought
The driving force of his fiction, Murakami has said, is "missing and searching and finding." His characters are almost always looking for something that has been lost. Sometimes it is a woman. Sometimes a cause, a purpose, a cat. The protagonist of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle searches for his wife and his cat simultaneously. The narrator of A Wild Sheep Chase pursues a phantom sheep of mystical significance across the mountains of Hokkaido. The two interlocking heroes of Kafka on the Shore — a fifteen-year-old runaway and a simpleminded old man who can talk to cats — spiral toward each other through layers of mythology, metaphor, and meteorological impossibility. (Sardines fall from the sky. Leeches rain down on suburban Tokyo. "Maybe it's a metaphor?" one character suggests. "Maybe," his friend replies. "But sardines and mackerel and leeches raining down from the sky? What kind of metaphor is that?")
But the searches, Murakami insists, do not resolve happily. "When the character finds it, there will be some kind of disappointment. I don't know why, but that is a kind of motif in my fiction — looking for something and finding it, but it's not a happy ending." This is the wound at the center of his work, the thing that distinguishes it from genre fiction despite its genre trappings: the recognition that the thing you have lost cannot be recovered in its original form, that the act of searching transforms both the seeker and the sought, that the underground passage leads somewhere but never back to where you started.
His protagonists are, almost without exception, men who are "somehow lost, emotionally or existentially," who "don't seem very at home in the world." Murakami's response to this observation, when it was put to him, was brisk: "You know, if the protagonist is happy, there's no story at all." But the alienation runs deeper than narrative necessity. These are men who have been emptied out — by loss, by modernity, by the particular loneliness of a society in which, as Murakami sees it, individuals are constantly at risk of losing their personal narratives and becoming hollow inside. The greatest danger in a Murakami novel is not death but vacancy. The wells and tunnels and underground chambers are frightening not because monsters live there but because the self might dissolve in the dark.
"In Japan, I think that other world is very close to our real life," he has said. "And if we decide to go to the other side it's not so difficult. In the Western world it isn't so easy to go to the other side; you have to go through some trials to get to the other world. But, in Japan, if you want to go there, you go there."
The Translator's Mirror
There is another Murakami, one the public rarely sees: the translator. He has rendered into Japanese the works of Raymond Carver (the complete short fiction), Raymond Chandler (all the novels, including
The Long Goodbye, which he has read five or six times), F. Scott Fitzgerald (including
The Great Gatsby, whose Japanese translation sat atop the bestseller list for seven weeks), Truman Capote, J. D. Salinger (
The Catcher in the Rye), John Irving, Grace Paley, Tim O'Brien, Ursula K. Le Guin, and, most recently, the short stories of John Cheever.
He translates what he loves. The choices reveal a map of his sensibility more precisely than any interview. Chandler's hard-boiled style, Fitzgerald's doomed lyricism, Carver's minimalist precision, Cheever's suburban melancholy — these are the cardinal points of Murakami's literary compass. "I love F. Scott Fitzgerald — and I have translated many of his books — but his style is so different from mine, so beautiful and complex," he has said. "Still, I have learned so many things from his writing — his attitude, I suppose, his way of looking at the world."
Of The Great Gatsby specifically, he has gone further: "Had it not been for Fitzgerald's novel, I would not be writing the kind of literature I am today (indeed, it is possible that I would not be writing at all, although that is neither here nor there)."
The act of translation, for Murakami, functions as a form of cross-training — the literary equivalent of his afternoon swim. It uses a different part of the brain than creative writing. It keeps his prose limber. It provides companionship during the solitary months of novel-drafting. And it serves a larger cultural purpose: bringing the American vernacular tradition that shaped his own imagination to Japanese readers, many of whom are encountering these writers for the first time.
The Cheever project is characteristic. Murakami knows that Cheever is "not popular in Japan" — "too American, too nineteen-fifties, too middle-class" — and suspects that Japanese readers will not appreciate the stories. He doesn't care. "I love them, so it's a challenge." This is the translator's version of the novelist's stubbornness: the insistence on following personal obsession rather than market logic, the willingness to labor for years on a project whose audience may be tiny.
The Wall and the Egg
In February 2009, Murakami travelled to Jerusalem to accept the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. Israel was in the midst of its military operation in Gaza. Many writers and intellectuals urged him to boycott the ceremony. He went anyway, and delivered a speech that became, against all expectation, the most widely quoted statement of his career.
"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg," he told the audience, which included Israeli President Shimon Peres. "No matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg."
The wall, he explained, was the system — any system: political, military, ideological. The egg was the individual soul, fragile and irreplaceable. The novelist's job was to stand with the egg, to write stories that affirmed the irreducible complexity of individual experience against the crushing uniformities of state power, ideology, and collective identity.
The speech distilled something that had been implicit in Murakami's work since Underground — a conviction that literature's deepest function is not aesthetic but ethical: to create, through the act of storytelling, a "secret passageway" between writer and reader, a subterranean connection that bypasses the walls of nationality, language, and culture. "When I write a good story, we can better understand one another," he told the New Yorker. "If you are a reader and I'm a writer, I don't know you, but in the underground world of fiction there is a secret passageway between us: we can send messages to each other subconsciously."
The wall metaphor returned, with deepened urgency, in his 2023 novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls — a book whose origins stretched back four decades, to a novella he had written in 1980, at thirty-one, and had never allowed to be republished because he knew it was immature. The novel imagines a town surrounded by high walls, where clocks have no hands, people have banished their shadows, and a man works in a library "reading" old dreams. The protagonist must choose: stay within the walls, safe and tranquil but drained of desire, or venture beyond them into a world of pain and contradiction and vitality.
Murakami began rewriting the novella in March 2020, as the pandemic locked down the world and literal walls — quarantine barriers, border closures, the psychological fortifications of fear — rose everywhere. He finished in December 2022, as Russia's invasion of Ukraine entered its tenth month. "The two big events combined and changed the world in dramatic ways," he said. The book's central question — whether to shelter behind walls or risk the chaos beyond them — had become, without Murakami planning it, the defining question of the age.
"Going to the other side of the wall requires determination, belief and physical strength," he said. "You have to squeeze out all your might, or you can't go to the other side of the world."
The Wife's Post-its
There is one collaborator Murakami acknowledges without reservation, and she is the one most readers know nothing about.
Yoko Murakami — née Takahashi, the fellow Waseda student who married him in 1971, whose family's business sense helped keep Peter Cat afloat, who has been with him through every phase of his career from the kitchen-table scribbling to the six-million-copy phenomenon — is his first reader. When he finishes a manuscript, he passes it to her. She reads it. She returns it covered in Post-it notes. Two hundred of them.
"I hate Post-its very much," Murakami says.
She tells him to rewrite certain passages. He rewrites them. He hands the manuscript back. She reads it again. This time, one hundred Post-its. "Fewer Post-its — that's good." The process continues until the Post-its dwindle to an acceptable number.
She is not, she has informed him, his biggest fan. She does not consider him her favorite writer. But her criticism is, by his account, the most serious and consequential editorial input his work receives. In a career defined by solitude — by a man who has built an elaborate fortress of routine around the act of descending alone into his subconscious every morning — the Post-its are a tether. Someone is reading. Someone is paying attention. Someone is unimpressed enough to be honest.
Murakami's public statements about Yoko are few and characteristically oblique, but they reveal a partnership of unusual structural importance. She ran the business side of Peter Cat. She managed the financial intuition he lacked. She has accompanied him through every voluntary exile — Italy, Greece, Princeton, Tufts — and every reluctant return. When he describes his ideal life — "a quiet place with a lot of records and, possibly, cats. And cable TV, to watch the baseball game" — the listener hears a man describing a life organized by someone else, someone who has created the conditions in which this peculiar and specific form of productivity can flourish.
"Ask my wife," he says, when questions about his inner life become too probing. It is his most reliable exit.
The Harukists and the Prize
Every October, a ritual unfolds in Tokyo. The Nobel Prize in Literature is announced in Stockholm, and Murakami's most ardent fans — the Harukists, as they have come to be called — gather in bars and bookstores, clutching copies of his novels and framed photographs of the author, drinking wine and beer and waiting for the news. Television networks air special segments. Oddsmakers in the UK adjust their odds. Chinese readers, Korean readers, Australian readers weigh in. The Harukists are a global phenomenon, a readership united not by nationality or language but by the experience of having discovered, in Murakami's fiction, a sensibility that seems to speak directly to their private selves.
The Nobel has not come. Year after year, the Harukists sigh. In 2012, when China's Mo Yan won, a female Harukist told the Mainichi newspaper, "I'm very happy the winner was someone from Asia," and walked home. Polite to the end.
Murakami himself has established, with characteristic preemptive humor, that the Nobel is off-limits: "A gentleman novelist doesn't think about the Nobel Prize for Literature." He has won virtually every other major prize — the Tanizaki Prize, the Yomiuri Literary Prize, the Jerusalem Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award, the Princess of Asturias Prize — and in December 2024, Waseda University awarded him an honorary doctorate, its highest honor, at a ceremony attended by a thousand people in Okuma Auditorium. "If I hadn't come to Waseda University," he told the audience, "I feel like I might never have written novels."
His influence extends beyond the page. Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's film Drive My Car — adapted from a story in Murakami's collection Men Without Women — won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 2022, introducing Murakami's sensibility to millions of viewers who had never read his novels. The three-hour film, about a theater director processing grief through a production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, captured something essential about Murakami's aesthetic: the long silences, the slow accumulation of meaning, the sense that the most profound truths emerge not through dramatic confrontation but through patient, almost accidental proximity.
Jonathan Lethem, introducing Murakami at the New School in November 2000, offered what remains perhaps the most precise critical assessment of his achievement: "It's been clear that Haruki Murakami is the one contemporary writer who, if he'd failed to exist, we would have failed utterly to invent for ourselves. What chance was there that the most persuasive synthesis of American vernacular forms would emerge in translation from the Japanese?"
What chance indeed. The man who makes very good sandwiches, who follows three or four neighborhood cats on his morning jog, who goes to bed at nine unless the baseball is still on — this man has become, improbably and without quite meaning to, one of the defining literary voices of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Not by claiming importance, but by insisting on ordinariness. Not by explaining his themes, but by descending into the well every morning and reporting, with deceptive simplicity, what he finds.
Four A.M. in Tokyo
He is seventy-seven years old now. The routine continues. The alarm sounds at four. The coffee brews. The desk waits.
In October 2023, accepting the Princess of Asturias Prize in Oviedo, Spain, Murakami spoke about walls again — about Gaza, about Ukraine, about a world in which "feelings of suspicion replacing mutual trust" were building barriers faster than anyone could dismantle them. He was careful, as always, to distinguish between the novelist's scope and the activist's: "There is not much a novelist can do." But he believed — still believed, after forty-five years and fifteen novels and the earthquake and the sarin gas and the pandemic and the war — that fiction could help. That the secret passageway between writer and reader, the underground channel that bypasses all walls, was still open. That stories, if they were good enough, could teach people "the wisdom found in refraining from making quick judgments."
He has a radio show now. An FM station in Tokyo asked him to DJ for fifty-five minutes, playing whatever he liked and talking about whatever he wanted, and he said yes. "Why not?" His selections are eclectic: Billie Holiday to Maroon 5. The man who refused public events for decades, who fled his own country to escape celebrity, who built his entire life around the principle of solitary descent — this man now plays records for strangers on the radio, as if he had never left the jazz club at all.
At Waseda, in a building designed by the architect Kengo Kuma, there is now a library — the Waseda International House of Literature, better known as the Haruki Murakami Library — that houses his personal archive: manuscripts, drafts, translations, and tens of thousands of vinyl records accumulated over more than fifty years of collecting. Students browse the stacks. Scholars study the papers. The records play. Murakami donated everything, wanting the materials to be available "for those who want to study my works," wanting the place to have "a positive and open atmosphere."
It is, if you think about it, the jazz club reborn. A space where music plays and people gather and something passes between strangers that cannot quite be named. The circle closes — or rather, spirals. The man at the kitchen table, thirty years old, writing in borrowed time after the bar closed, has become the man whose archive fills a building at his alma mater. But the essential act has not changed. He still sits down. He still opens the door. He still goes through.
"When I'm not writing, I'm a very ordinary person," Murakami insists. "I'm nothing special."
In Jingu Stadium, on an April afternoon in 1978, a mediocre American ballplayer hit a clean double into left field, and a man who had never written a word felt something flutter down from the sky. He has spent the rest of his life trying to describe what it was.
