Edinburgh International Book Festival 2014: Reflections on Murakami

The first thing most people know about Haruki Murakami is how hard it is to get to know anything about Haruki Murakami. News of the Japanese novelist's imminent appearance at this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival sparked a deafening media buzz, mostly to the theme of his infamous refusal to be famous: despite being about the closest thing to a true literary rockstar around, he shies from any kind of press attention, dodging the spotlight so effectively that a JD Sallinger-esque 'reclusive genius' mythos has built up around him. A few days before his scheduled appearance it was quietly but firmly made clear that his apparently uncharacteristic decision to attend such a public event would come with a few decidedly more characteristic clauses: there would be no photography or recording of any kind during his events and no interviews whatsoever after. He would turn up, see his scheduled event through, and depart. By the time the festival rolled around, the Murakami mystique had become so intensified it would have been no surprise if his appearance had concluded with him being swept into the back seat of a blacked-out Mercedes by men in dark suits and spirited silently away into the night. While this idea of him does have a certain otherworldly appeal, it's hard to see such a reticent, unreachable figure making for much of a Q&A. It's fortunate then that the truth of the matter and the man turns out to be far more satisfying than the myth.

As the event begins, there's an audible, tangible tension in the room while we wait for Murakami to appear. Everyone got here early and the anticipation seems almost nervous: his books are so beloved by so many who know so little about him, the fear that he won’t stack up in the flesh to the magic of his voice on the page radiates around the room. Each week of media build-up has grown him into a more towering figure: a shadowy genius whose books are read across the globe but who no-one ever sees or speaks to. By the time we're set to begin, he seems almost mythical. Rocking up in a casual t-shirt/hoodie combo, he makes his way on to the stage with a cheerful grin and an obvious warmth. The sombre, stand-offish image of him as an anti-social outsider is melted in an instant. It's a little like someone forgot to give him the script for who this Murakami guy is supposed to be as he quickly falls into an easy rapport with the interviewer and audience, answering in lackadaisical style and cracking jokes with a glittering smile. In seconds every bit of tension evaporates and the entire room relaxes, laughing along with a conversation that slowly covers all things Murakami.

“I’ve never had writer’s block. If I don’t want to write, I don’t write – it’s easy!” - Haruki Murakami

Although his warm and welcoming appearance pretty much shatters all previous idea of the author – the mysterious character his publicists have spent years cultivating – the man slumped back happily in front of us comes with a definite sense of familiarity. His chilled out demeanour, his grinningly glib humour and his ability to move from the smallest everyday topics to the biggest philosophical questions in the same simple, even tone: everyone in the room recognises this character. He’s gone by Tengo, Toru and Takahashi but it’s immediately clear how much of himself Murakami has put into his heroes, how much of his voice has echoing inside theirs. The standard Murakami protagonist is a man totally lost in life, totally aware of this and charmingly alright with it. He is ready to drift through each day as best he can and see if he can riddle some of it out. If he fails he can return home, crack a beer, put on a jazz record and not really feel the loss too much at all. It's fun to see just how much Murakami shares this outlook and, as the evening progresses, it's hard to shake the sense that we've all slipped somehow into one of his works. No matter how long he talks for, he always seems to retain that 'slightly-less-than-real' quality and the whole event kind of takes on the tone of a Murakami set-piece: a group of strangers wander into a duskily-lit tent, a seemingly ordinary individual finds himself drawn up on a stage backed by neon trees and does the best he can to answer questions from a nondescript figure on topics that range from macrobiotic food and the benefits of tofu to Plato's Symposium and back again via Bruce Springsteen and The Black Eyed Peas. It all washes with the dreamlike ease of Murakami's prose and it's not until it's over and you pull yourself back out of his world and into the regular one that you realise just how strange a dream it was.

The natural starting point is his latest novel, the newly-released Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. A best-seller in Japan within days of its release, his newest work focuses on a young man whose friends suddenly reject him, leaving him isolated and alone. This sense of alienation, of an unquenched thirst for human connection, has been the core of many of Murakami's novels. It's a condition that's widely seen as symptomatic of the modern world and one which Murakami believes to be universal and vitally important. Talking about the rationale behind his latest work, he says that, more than anything else, “I just wanted to write about that sentiment.” It is mentioned that the eponymous Tsukuru works as a railway line designer and this segues naturally into a discussion of how Murakami goes about his own work, revealing that he relates more to Tsukuru in this regard than many of his more obviously artistic characters: “I don't think of myself as an artist, I think of myself as a kind of engineer.” He is quick to dismiss any romantic idea of the muse descending and work bursting into existence out of sheer natural talent. His approach is turn up each morning at this desk and work away until the thing is done. For many this might look like an unartistic grinding approach to art and while his famous regime of rising each day at 5am to write typifies the type of discipline many great writers have extolled, for him it seems to be just a preferred way to live rather than Spartan sort of self-control. He gets up and writes because he wants to write. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t: “I’ve never had writer’s block. If I don’t want to write, I don’t write – it’s easy!”

The talk on his writing process deepens, looking into the actual process of his mind as he crafts his tales: “There is a big basement in my mind,” he says. “When I sit down at my desk in the morning, I go down to my basement. It’s dark and scary and I go down and down and down and I see the strange creatures that are there. Then I come back to the surface and write about them. That’s my essence.” It’s an idea he has touched on before and one which permeates his stories, almost all of which use their shiny, chic veneer to cover the shady subconscious ideas that lurk beneath. After blundering around in a modern world where meaning is hard to come by, his characters descend to dark places in order to find themselves and connect with others. In most cases, their journeys are fraught with both violence and strange sexual encounters, both of which Murakami sees as keys that can “open the door in your mind – the one that goes down.” It’s these ideas and the way he evokes them that make Murakami’s works so much more than just the sleek veneer he learned from Carver, Chandler and Fitzgerald (all of whom he makes humble nods to in the course of the evening). These deeper darker ideas make up the soul of what he does and, listening to him talk about them, you can see why no-one else does them quite as well.