Haruki Murakami is of the most popular writers in world literature today, whose newest novel in Japanese — The City and its Uncertain Walls — created a phenomenon in Tokyo in April this year. His fans in thousands rushed to clean out the shelves in a single swoop and took over the cafes over unprecedented coffee sales for all-night reading sessions. The English translation, too, is due this year, as readers the world over wait to immerse themselves in another rich and surreal narrative. Murakami is 74 and is still ahead of the pack. And he has been running for a very long time. It has been 45 years since he wrote his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, which began as a kind of a magical blessing. Murakami was transformed into a writer at a baseball game. It was April 1978, the Yakult Swallows against the Hiroshima Carp at Tokyo’s Jingu Stadium.
He is famously remembered saying: “I think Hiroshima’s starting pitcher that day was Yoshiro Sotokoba… Yakult countered with Takeshi Yasuda. In the bottom of the first inning, Hilton slammed Sotokoba’s first discipline, both with his writing and running regimen and a deep understanding and appreciation of the inexplicable magical mysteries that suddenly appear in our everyday reality has made Murakami one of the most soughtafter storytellers with staggering book sales globally. Murakami’s clarity in recalling that moment of otherworldly inspiration is what has undergirded each of his haunting stories of how magic and mystery coexist with harsh and mundane reality.
“I can still recall the exact sensation. It felt as if something had come fluttering down from the sky, and I had caught it cleanly in my hands. I had no idea why it had chanced to fall into my grasp. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. Whatever the reason, it had taken place. It was like a revelation. Or maybe epiphany is the closest word. All I can say is that my life was drastically and permanently altered in that instant — when Dave Hilton belted that beautiful, ringing double at Jingu Stadium.”
Now, over four decades later, life seems to have mimicked art: On June 26 2023, just a few days ago, Yuriko Koike, the governor of Tokyo, has approved a development plan that would demolish the ballpark, as well as Murakami’s “favourite jogging path”, along with pitch into left field for a clean double. The satisfying crack when the bat met the ball resounded throughout Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, for no reason and on no grounds whatsoever, the thought suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.”
Years of uncompromising Haruki Murakami. Picture courtesy Ministerio Cultura y Patrimonio, Ecuador discipline, both with his writing and running regimen and a deep understanding and appreciation of the inexplicable magical mysteries that suddenly appear in our everyday reality has made Murakami one of the most soughtafter storytellers with staggering book sales globally. Murakami’s clarity in recalling that moment of otherworldly inspiration is what has undergirded each of his haunting stories of how magic and mystery coexist with harsh and mundane reality. “I can still recall the exact sensation. It felt as if something had come fluttering down from the sky, and I had caught it cleanly in my hands. I had no idea why it had chanced to fall into my grasp. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. Whatever the reason, it had taken place. It was like a revelation. Or maybe epiphany is the closest word. All I can say is that my life was drastically and permanently altered in that instant — when Dave Hilton belted that beautiful, ringing double at Jingu Stadium.” Now, over four decades later, life seems to have mimicked art: On June 26 2023, just a few days ago, Yuriko Koike, the governor of Tokyo, has approved a development plan that would demolish the ballpark, as well as Murakami’s “favourite jogging path”, along with a rugby stadium used during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics in favour of skyscrapers and new stadiums.
“I’m strongly opposed to the Jingu Gaien redevelopment plan,” said Murakami on a radio show, the same Jingu Stadium where he had that epiphanic moment to write his first novel. “Please leave that pleasant jogging course full of greenery and the lovely Jingu Stadium as it is. Once something is destroyed, it can never be restored,”he has appealed.
It’s been six years since he had the expected rousing welcome to his book Killing Commendatore. A serious vendor of dreams and an equally adroit pusher of reality, Murakami has raised a rout in Japan with The City with Uncertain Walls, which is about books, libraries, reading in general, reading dreams, librarians and vaulting over walls with indomitable mental and physical volition.
With his curiously rich, magical realist, yet minimalist storytelling techniques, Murakami has kept the young and older Japanese reader in thrall.
Perhaps one of his most surreal, mysterious and sci-fi-like worlds is to be found in his most iconic novel, IQ84: “Why, though, Aomame wondered, had she instantly recognised the piece to be Janacek’sSinfonietta? And how did she know it had been composed in 1926? She was not a classical music fan, and she had no personal recollections involving Janacek, yet the moment she heard the opening bars, all her knowledge of the piece came to her by reflex, like a flock of birds swooping through an open window. The music gave her an odd, wrenching kind of feeling. There was no pain or unpleasantness involved, just a sensation that all the elements of her body were being physically wrung out. Aomame had no idea what was going on. Could Sinfonietta actually be giving me this weird feeling?”
As his readers at home devour his latest book, his Japanese publishers Shinchosha ordered an initial print run of 300,000 copies and had sold more than half by the end of the first week. Within a week they had demanded another 600,000 copies be printed. Both volumes of his previous novel, Killing Commendatore, published in February 2017, saw 700,000 and then 600,000 orders race off the shelves at lightning speed. The fact that Murakani’s work has been translated into at least 50 languages is proof enough of his global reach.
Born in Kyoto, Japan, in 1949, and educated at Waseda University, Murakami, after his time at Waseda, ran a jazz bar in Tokyo with his wife for seven years. His debut novel, Hear the Wind Sing, got him the Gunzou literary prize for new young writers in 1979. Then came the sequels Pinball (1973) and A Wild Sheep Chase, which together make up The Trilogy of the Rat. His other novels, Hard-boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, Norwegian Wood, Dance Dance Dance, South of the Border, West of the Sun, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle; Sputnik Sweetheart; Kafka on the Shore; After Dark; IQ84; Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage and Killing Commendotare make up his arresting body of novels.
Murakami has written several collections of short stories: The Elephant Vanishes; After the Quake and Blind Willow Sleeping Woman as well as an illustrated novella, The Strange Library. His non-fiction is flinty and persuasively argued: Underground and a collection of personal essays in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. With The Jerusalem Prize under his belt, Murakami is in august company — Milan Kundera, V.S. Naipaul and J.M. Coetzee were the other winners.
