The Kobe earthquake and the subway gas attack of 1995 were a watershed for Japanese society, writer Haruki Murakami tells Penelope Dening inLondon.
Bar the odd foray into South America or India, the English-speaking world is notoriously inward-looking when it comes to fiction. And as for the Far East, the main Japanese name familiar to the general book-buying public would until recently have been Yukio Mishima, whose death by suicide shocked the literary world in 1970.
Then along came Haruki Murakami.
Although his novels began to appear in the UK in the 1990s, thanks to foreign-fiction specialists Harvill, they needed to be sought out. However the recent re-issue in paperback of the whole Murakami canon (six novels, two volumes of short stories and one non-fiction account of the Tokyo underground gas attack) should open up Murakami's heady mix of the psychological and metaphysical - Jung written by Chandler to a soundtrack of Jimi Hendrix or John Coltrane - to the wider audience his writing deserves.
Among the international avant-garde, his name draws comparisons with Auster, Salinger, Borges, Chandler and Kafka. Among the initiate young he simply draws crowds: a talk at a large London cinema two days before we meet was sold out. His fourth novel, Norwegian Wood, has sold three million copies worldwide and is seen as a Japanese Catcher in the Rye.
We meet in an anonymous London hotel that could be the setting for one of his novels. (We don't take the lift, for which I am grateful: in Murakami's fiction, lifts are regularly portals to parallel worlds.)
Murakami, now 54, looks 10 years younger: his face unlined, his hair thick and black above a sturdy, muscled body - not surprising given that his hobby is running marathons. His background is middle-class: his father was a teacher of Japanese literature, his mother the daughter of an Osaka merchant.
At 16, he rebelled. It was 1965 and western pop culture was everywhere. He stopped reading Japanese literature and switched to European authors in translation. He devoured anything American he could find, frequenting second-hand bookshops, where he discovered Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan and Raymond Chandler. He listened to The Beach Boys, The Beatles, The Doors. He began a love affair with jazz. After leaving university he ran a jazz club in Tokyo for seven years.
It was a good time to be young in Japan, he remembers. The hard post-war years were over and the economy was booming; it was easy to be idealistic and full of hope.
"But after that came disillusion and disappointment, and I became kind of frozen and I just wanted to get away from reality for a while. So I started to write," he says.
For Murakami, writing has always been a way both of escape and of finding himself through digging deep into his own psyche. "I am looking for my own story in myself. Without stories, people can't live their lives," he says.
So far, Murakami's novels could be said to fall into two loose groupings: the wildly surreal and the comparatively naturalistic love story. Yet even within the latter the narrative dances a lyrical line between dream and reality. However, in all his fiction it is death - particularly suicide - that remains a constant theme. Where did this preoccupation - and his way of dealing with it: elegiac and far from nihilistic - come from?
"For me, the work of writing is just a kind of descending into the underground," he says. "It is a dark area. You can meet people who are dead there. The deeper I go, the deeper I can see."
Although the author is no longer religious, Murakami's paternal grandfather was a priest in Kyoto and he accepts that the Buddhist influence remains. "In Japan, the land of the living and the land of the dead are very close. And sometimes we can go through the walls. It's easy for us; not at all like the western tradition, where Orpheus has to face many trials in order to get to the underworld. And, in me, these two worlds are side by side."
As for suicide, it does not have any sinful connotations in eastern countries, he says. It is only sad. "If somebody kills themselves in Japan, it is the responsibility of the survivors to memorise their presence in this world. Over the years several of my friends have killed themselves. I often think about them. I like to write something for them."
Not, he insists, that his characters are ever based on real people. "My stories are not autobiographical at all. The sentiment is real, but the stories themselves and the characters are very different. Readers think that it would be easier for me to use real people as models, but for me that isn't the case. It's easier to start from scratch, to just make it up."
Murakami writes as if in a dream. Not a sleeping dream - he is no richer in night dreams than anyone else, he says - but a waking dream, one he can control. And he demonstrates - hands outstretched, fingers moving on an imaginary keyboard, eyes drooped.
"And dreaming like this, this is fiction," he says. "It is exciting. I don't do any planning when I start to write. I just begin and follow my dream."
"Take Norwegian Wood. When I had written 50 pages or so, I had six characters. All I knew was that three of them would die and three would survive. But I don't know who is to survive, who is to die. If I knew everything, I'd get bored."
Murakami's most ambitious novel to date, The Wind-up Bird Chronicles, took him three years to write, after which, he says, he felt empty and in need of a totally different project. Usually at such times, he translates - among others, Raymond Carver and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
It was the spring of 1995. He was at Harvard, in self- imposed exile from the unwanted celebrity Norwegian Wood had brought him in Japan. On television, he watched the news first of the Kobe earthquake (January), then of the sarin gas attack (March). "And I thought it is time I went back to my country, to do something."
The result was Underground, made up of a series of interviews with both survivors and members of the Aum cult that carried out the gas attack. It makes salutary reading. Murakami dealt with the Kobe disaster in a series of short stories, After the Quake.
"Kobe is my home town - my father's house was totally destroyed by the earthquake - so everybody thought that I would write something about that," he says. "But I decided to do the sarin gas attack because I didn't want to go back to Kobe. It would have meant seeing my parents, my friends. It was too complicated."
Not only did these two events mirror Murakami's own preoccupations; they were also a watershed in Japanese life, he explains. The economic bubble had burst several years before and the economy was showing no sign of improvement.
"Although we had lost the belief, the purpose, the confidence, at least we thought that our society was safe: very little crime, no guns, no drugs," he says. "We still believed that Japan was the safest country in the world. But not any more. So we lost everything in 1995. In these days somehow I remember the days of idealism, and those idealistic notions we had in the 1960s could be used now in this chaotic time, the age of terrorism and high-tech killing.
"Young people today are so helpless. The world they are in is so controlled it's not easy for them to find a way out. They are very thirsty and they absorb anything, naturally and eagerly. And stories, if they are good, they offer a way out. Not in reality perhaps, but in their heads, and that's a help. In that inner-space world you can find a special place for yourself. My books offer a sense of freedom from the real world."
His latest novel, not yet translated into English, has as its first-person protagonist a Radiohead-listening 15-year-old boy.
Twenty-five years after Murakami's first book (A Wild Sheep Chase), young people continue to constitute his core readership, perhaps as, within a dizzying range of storytelling structures, the issues he deals with are those of perennial interest to young adults: love, sex and relationships,life and death. His books are also very easy to read.
" I believe the purpose of writing a novel is to write in a very simple, neutral prose and to write a very complex, deep story," he says. "Some writers do the reverse. They are using very complex language to make up a very simple - I would even say shallow - story. And I don't think that's right."