Haruki Murakami on Cold Beer, Nothingness and F. Scott Fitzgerald

It’s hard to think of a living writer who has a more adoring international following than Haruki Murakami. Examine any bookshelf of a serious reader and you’re bound to find a copy of Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, or Kafka on the Shore. Experimental postmodernists idolize him, as do sci-fi fanatics, philosophers, uncloseted romantics, hippies, Kafkaian realists, and basically anyone else who allows themselves to slip a few pages into the 73-year-old Japanese master’s ethereal yet visceral fictional universes. No matter how beloved Murakami is, the man himself remains to his fanbase something of a mystery, beyond his admitted obsessions with baseball, running, and jazz. Murakami’s latest book, Novelist as a Vocation, sheds some light on the clever, ever-turning brain behind the novels, offering practical advice to aspiring writers from his decades of dreaming up hidden worlds. Above all, it is an ode to the day-to-day rigors of stoking the imagination. Ever greedy for more answers, we asked the novelist about magic, happiness, and time travel.

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When you’re writing, do you ever get so lost in the world you’ve created that it’s hard to come out of it? 

HARUKI MURAKAMI: Usually as I’m writing a novel, I’m completely immersed in that world. But once I finish the day’s work I go back to living normally in the ordinary world. I do the ironing, take the subway, and stop by used record shops. I’ve never had the…