Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Anthony Trollope followed a similar routine. He was woken at four by his Irish servant, with a candle and a cup of tea. He wrote until breakfast time, then went to work at the post office, where he was a senior official. Though elfin (or even phocine) compared to the ursine Trollope, Murakami has Trollopian gusto and good humor and an appetite for work. His curiosity and knowledge of Western culture and American literature are boundless. Besides his twelve works of fiction and the nonfiction Underground, Murakami has also translated many American writers into Japanese—among them Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, Truman Capote, and me (World's End).

Murakami rebelled early. In Underground, speaking of Japanese conformity, he quoted the Japanese adage "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down." He was unfazed. He did not follow the usual route into a company and a job for life. He married his college sweetheart, Yoko, when he was twenty-two ("my parents were disappointed"), worked at part-time jobs ("very disappointed"), lived in his father-in-law's house, and started a jazz club, naming it after his cat, Peter Cat.

"It was lots of fun."

But he had no clear idea of where he was going, except against the grain. His father was a professor of Japanese literature. Haruki did not read Japanese literature. Instead, he read Truman Capote and Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, while listening to Thelonious Monk.

Seven years went by. One day, he was visited by an epiphany. It was springtime, the start of the baseball season. The year was 1978. He was twenty-nine, sitting in Jingu Stadium, watching a game.

A thought came to him (as he told me): "I'm going to write something. I'm going to be a writer. I had a feeling I was blessed."

He had never written a word. His major at Waseda University had been theater arts.

"I went home and started a novel."

And in time he finished it. Called Hear the Wind Sing, it was published in 1979. The story of the epiphany at the baseball game is one that he has told many of his interviewers. It has the elements of a traditional creation myth—a suddenness of spontaneous combustion, a vastation of utter certainty. But its mystical quality is in keeping with the mood of Murakami's fiction, which often has an ungraspable serenity in the narrative shifts, his characters with one foot in Eden, the other in Japan, their motives enigmatic. The other aspect of this story of inspiration in the bleachers—the downdraft of afflatus, a Diamond Sutra in the baseball sense—is that Murakami believes it.

"The book is—what?—not the best. Then I wrote Pinball. And then my first good book, A Wild Sheep Chase. After that, I've never stopped. It's my passion. It's my love. I have never had writer's block. I've never wanted to do anything else."

He is Japan's best-known and most widely translated writer. Bursting with health, full of ideas, deeply curious, he is beloved in Japan. Yet he is invisible, never recognized, so he told me; another ghost figure.

The cold day I met him in Tokyo he was wearing blue jeans and a leather jacket, a wool scarf, and leather track shoes. Of medium height, mild by nature, watchful and laconic, he radiated innocence as well as toughness. In a profession notable for its self-doubt, Murakami's belief in himself—the sense of his literary vocation being part mission, part love affair—is one of his most remarkable traits. He is so sure of himself you might mistake his confidence for arrogance, but it is mental toughness, of a kind that helps a person run up and down hills for sixty-five miles without letup, rising the next day to continue a long fictional narrative.

"You've probably already written a chapter today," I said when we met that day. It was ten in the morning.

"Not a whole chapter," Murakami said and smiled. "What do you want to do?"

"Just walk." I had told him once, some time before, in an aside, that I was curious about Japanese implements—cookware, woodworking tools, and knives. The paraphernalia unique to Japanese culture—soba bowls and pots, chisels and carving knives—is still made in Japan. Strangely shaped saws, highly specific, for shaping cedar boards, for trimming the edges of chests and tansus, are never seen anywhere else. They are the last designs of traditional tools.

Murakami remembered that I'd mentioned this, and reminded me of it. He said some of these things were sold on a particular street. He showed me the street on a map he'd downloaded from the Internet. It was in a file folder with a set of maps that he planned as a long day's tour of alternative Tokyo—underground in every sense.