All Intensive Purposes

Yesterday's New York Times had a long article about Haruki Murakami, and his popularity outside Japan. Apparently he is particularly popular in China, South Korea, Germany, and the Baltic states.

Still, for all his success, Mr. Murakami, 55, speaks with a bitter edge toward the Japanese literary establishment, which has kept him at bay as much as he has distanced himself from it.

"I don't consider myself part of the establishment," he said. "I don't deal with the Japanese literary circle or society at all. I live totally separate from them and still rebel against that world."

Indeed in Japan, the traditional literary critics regard his novels as un-Japanese and look askance at their Western influences, ranging from the writing style to the American cultural references. (In the United States his work is taught in colleges and has been reviewed by John Updike in The New Yorker.)

But surely it is Murakami's departures from traditional Japanese literary forms that have helped him become popular elsewhere.

During a recent interview at his office, a barefoot Mr. Murakami, wearing jeans and an orange shirt, spoke on a variety of subjects, from his place in contemporary literature to his writing habits. He appeared at ease, since he was preparing to take one of his periodic breaks, both from his writing and from Japan. He will spend the next year at Harvard as a writer in residence.

"Kafka on the Shore" tells two alternating and ultimately converging stories. Mr. Murakami said he had become bored writing about urban dwellers in their 20's and 30's, and so in "Kafka" he decided to create two different types: a 15-year-old boy named Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home to rural western Japan; and a mentally defective man in his 60's, Satoru Nakata, who has the ability to talk to cats.

The novel has Mr. Murakami's signature surrealism, as fish rain from the sky, and characters named Johnnie Walker, a cat killer, and Colonel Sanders, a pimp, play critical roles.

My thoughts about Kafka on the Shore, such as they were, are here. OK, actually I didn't post any thoughts there, but I did post a bunch of good links.

Like his other novels this one is filled with references to American culture, but Mr. Murakami said he regarded Coca-Cola and Colonel Sanders, for instance, as worldwide references. "References such as Colonel Sanders or Johnnie Walker are in a way Western and everybody tends to fix their eyes on that," he said. "But as for the essence of a story, my stories have strong Japanese or Oriental elements. I think the structure of my stories is different from so-called Western stories."

His storytelling, he said, "does not develop logically from A to B to C to D, but I don't intentionally break up or reverse episodes the way postmodernists do. For me, it is a natural development, but it is not logical."

Mr. Murakami's attachment to American literature is longstanding. As a high school student in Kobe, in western Japan, he read, in the original, Kurt Vonnegut, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote and Raymond Chandler. Like many Japanese of his generation, he became passionate about jazz and rock.

"American culture," he said, "became ingrained in my body." By contrast, he never read Japanese novels until he was an adult. "I didn't read them when I was young because they were boring," he said.

Hard to understand why the traditional literary critics in Japan don't like him, eh?

In Japanese, Mr. Murakami speaks in declarative, sometimes blunt, sentences that convey exactly what he means. He eschews the expressions that most Japanese use to soften their speech and that tend to make the language vague.

His writing is infused with the same directness, which makes it easy to translate into English, but which many critics here say lack the richness of traditional literary Japanese. And there are readers here who say that his writing reads as if it had been translated from English into their own language.

Mr. Murakami - who translated English-language novels into Japanese before he wrote them, and two years ago offered a new Japanese translation of "The Catcher in the Rye" - said he has chosen to write in a "neutral" Japanese, explaining:

"There was a notion in Japan that novelists write in a certain style. I totally ignored it and created a new style. Therefore, in Japan, there was resistance. I was much criticized."

When "Kafka" was published in Japan in 2002, it was popularly acclaimed. But some of this country's top literary critics dismissed it as an example of the impoverishment of Japanese literature, with language devoid of depth and richness.

Among readers, however, his novels are wildly successful, allowing him to write fiction full time - something he said he had never imagined possible.

He wrote "Kafka" in six months, starting, as he usually does, without a plan. He spent one year revising it. He follows a strict regimen. Going to bed around 9 p.m. - he never dreams, he said - he wakes up without an alarm clock around 4 a.m. He immediately turns on his Macintosh and writes until 11 a.m., producing every day 4,000 characters, or the equivalent of two to three pages in English.

He said that his wife has told him that his personality changes when he is writing his first draft, and that he becomes difficult, nontalkative, tense and forgetful.

"I write the same amount every day without any day off," he said. "I absolutely never look back and go forward. I hear Hemingway was like that."

Unlike Hemingway, Mr. Murakami leads a healthy lifestyle. In the afternoons, to build up his stamina to keep writing, he works out for one or two hours. Whenever he is in Tokyo, he also visits old-record stores, especially ones in the youth mecca of Shibuya, which appears to be the unnamed setting of "After Dark," published last fall to relatively little attention here.

A short novel, which has yet to be translated into English, "After Dark" centers on the stories of several characters over the course of one night as seen, neutrally and coldly, through a camera eye. The novel could be easily adapted into film, unlike Mr. Murakami's other novels. He has resisted selling his novels to filmmakers, though he said he would hand them over unconditionally to Woody Allen or David Lynch.

He may now be enjoying the big break in the United States that he has worked for since spending two years in the country in the early 1990's.

"I went to New York myself, found an agent myself, found a publisher myself, found an editor myself," Mr. Murakami said. "No Japanese novelist has ever done such things. But I thought I had to do that."

He added: "I wanted to test my ability overseas, not being satisfied with being a famous novelist in Japan."

So I wish someone would hurry up and translate After Dark. (Thanks for the tip, G.)