That first visit to Murakami took place on a muggy midmorning, midweek, in the middle of a summer. I had come to speak with Murakami, Japan's leading novelist, about the translation into English of his massive 1Q84—a book that has already sold millions of copies across Asia. At age 62, three decades into his career, Murakami has established himself as the unofficial laureate of Japan—arguably its chief imaginative ambassador, in any medium, to the world: the primary source, for many millions of readers, of the texture and shape of his native country.

This, no doubt, comes as an enormous surprise to everyone involved. Murakami has always considered himself an outsider in his own country. He was born into one of the strangest sociopolitical environments in history: Kyoto in1949—the former imperial capital of Japan in the middle of America's postwar occupation. "It would be difficult to find another cross-cultural moment," the historian John W. Dower has written of late-1940s Japan, "more intense, unpredictable, ambiguous, confusing, and electric than this one." Substitute "fiction" for "moment" in that sentence and you have a perfect description of Murakami's work. The basic structure of his stories—ordinary life lodged between incompatible worlds—is also the basic structure of his first life experience.

Murakami's Career as a Writer

Murakami grew up, mostly, in the suburbs surrounding Kobe, an international port defined by the din of many languages. As a teenager, he immersed himself in American culture, especially hard-boiled detective novels and jazz. He internalized their attitude of cool rebellion, and in his early 20s, instead of joining the ranks of a large corporation, Murakami grew out his hair and his beard, married against his parents’ wishes, took out a loan and opened a jazz club in Tokyo called Peter Cat. He spent nearly 10 years absorbed in the day-to-day operations of the club.

His career as a writer began in classic Murakami style: out of nowhere, in the most ordinary possible setting, a mystical truth suddenly descended upon him and changed his life forever. Murakami, age 29, was sitting in the outfield at his local baseball stadium, drinking a beer, when a batter—an American transplant named Dave Hilton—hit a double. It was a normal-enough play, but as the ball flew through the air, an epiphany struck Murakami. He realized, suddenly, that he could write a novel. He had never felt a serious desire to do so before, but now it was overwhelming. And so he did: after the game, he went to a bookstore, bought a pen and some paper and over the next couple of months produced Hear the Wind Sing, a slim, elliptical tale of a nameless 21-year-old narrator, his friend called the Rat and a four-fingered woman. Nothing much happens, but the Murakami voice is there from the start: a strange broth of ennui and exoticism. In just 130 pages, the book manages to reference a thorough cross-section of Western culture and contains not a single reference to a work of Japanese art in any medium.

Murakami submitted Hear the Wind Sing for a prestigious new writers’ prize and won. After another year and another novel, Murakami sold his jazz club in order to devote himself, full time, to writing.

For 30 years now, he has lived a monkishly regimented life, each facet of which has been precisely engineered to help him produce his work. He runs or swims long distances almost every day, eats a healthful diet, goes to bed around 9 p.m. and wakes up, without an alarm, around 4 a.m.—at which point he goes straight to his desk for five to six hours of concentrated writing.

"Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life," he said. "If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy. I'm not a fast thinker, but once I am interested in something, I am doing it for many years. I don't get bored. I'm kind of a big kettle. It takes time to get boiled, but then I'm always hot."

That daily boiling has produced, over time, one of the world's most distinctive bodies of work: three decades of addictive weirdness that falls into an oddly fascinating hole between genres (sci-fi, fantasy, realist, hard-boiled) and cultures (Japan, America), a hole that no writer has ever explored before, or at least nowhere near this deep. Over the years, Murakami's novels have tended to grow longer and more serious—the sitcom references have given way, for the most part, to symphonies—and now, after a particularly furious and sustained boil, he has produced his longest, strangest, most serious book yet.

1Q84: a Strange "Comprehensive Novel"

According to Murakami, 1Q84 is just an amplification of one of his most popular short stories, On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning, which is several pages long. "Basically, it's the same," he told me. "A boy meets a girl. They have separated and are looking for each other. It's a simple story. I just made it long." 1Q84 is not, actually, a simple story. Its plot may not even be fully summarizable—at least not in the space of a magazine article.

For decades now, Murakami has been talking about working himself up to write what he calls a "comprehensive novel"—something on the scale of The Brothers Karamazov . This seems to be what he has attempted with 1Q84: a grand, third-person, all-encompassing mega-novel. It is a book full of anger and violence and disaster and weird sex and strange new realities, a book that seems to want to hold all of Japan inside of it—a book that, even despite its occasional awkwardness, makes you marvel, reading it, at all the strange folds a single human brain can hold.

I told Murakami that I was surprised to discover, after so many surprising books, that he managed to surprise me again. As usual, he took no credit, claiming to be just a boring old vessel for his imagination.

Murakami's Work: Shuttling from One World to Another

Murakami's fiction has a special way of leaking into reality. He often hears from readers who have "discovered" his inventions in the real world: a restaurant or a shop that he thought he made up, they report, actually exists in Tokyo. After publishing 1Q84, Murakami received a letter from a family with the surname "Aomame," a name so improbable he thought he invented it. He sent them a signed copy of the book. The kicker is that all of this—fiction leaking into reality, reality leaking into fiction—is what most of Murakami's fiction is all about. He is always shuttling us back and forth between worlds.

This calls to mind the act of translation—shuttling from one world to another—which is in many ways the key to understanding Murakami's work. He has consistently denied being influenced by Japanese writers; he even spoke, early in his career, about escaping "the curse of Japanese." Instead, he formed his literary sensibilities as a teenager by obsessively reading Western novelists: the classic Europeans (Dostoyevsky, Stendhal , Dickens) but especially a cluster of 20th-century Americans whom he has read over and over throughout his life— Raymond Chandler , Truman Capote , F. Scott Fitzgerald , Richard Brautigan , Kurt Vonnegut . When Murakami sat down to write his first novel, he struggled until he came up with an unorthodox solution: he wrote the book's opening in English, then translated it back into Japanese. This, he says, is how he found his voice.

You could even say that translation is the organizing principle of Murakami's work: that his stories are not only translated but about translation. The signature pleasure of a Murakami plot is watching a very ordinary situation turn suddenly extraordinary—watching a character, in other words, being dropped from a position of existential fluency into something completely foreign and then being forced to mediate, awkwardly, between those two realities. A Murakami character is always, in a sense, translating between radically different worlds: mundane and bizarre, natural and supernatural, country and city, male and female, overground and underground. His entire oeuvre , in other words, is the act of translation dramatized.

Murakami: 99 Percent a Fiction Writer and 1 Percent a Citizen

The title of 1Q84 is a joke: an Orwell reference that hinges on a multilingual pun . (In Japanese, the number 9 is pronounced like the English letter Q.)

I asked him if he felt any kinship with Orwell.

"I guess we have a common feeling against the system," Murakami said. "George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I'm 100 percent fiction writer.... I don't want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don't state my political messages to anybody."

And yet Murakami has, uncharacteristically, stated his political messages very loudly over the last couple of years. In 2009, he made a controversial visit to Israel to accept the prestigious Jerusalem Prize and used the occasion to speak out about Israel and Palestine. Last summer, he used an awards ceremony in Barcelona as a platform to criticize Japan's nuclear industry. He called Fukushima Daiichi the second nuclear disaster in the history of Japan, but the first that was entirely self-inflicted.

When I asked him about his Barcelona speech, he modified his percentages slightly.

"I am 99 percent a fiction writer and 1 percent a citizen," he said. "As a citizen I have things to say, and when I have to do it, I do it clearly. At that point, nobody said no against nuclear-power plants. So I think I should do it. It's my responsibility."

The defining disasters of modern Japan— the subway sarin-gas attack , the Kobe earthquake , the recent tsunami—are, to an amazing extent, Murakami disasters. He is notoriously obsessed with metaphors of depth: characters climbing down empty wells to enter secret worlds or encountering dark creatures underneath Tokyo's subway tunnels. He imagines his own creativity in terms of depth as well. Every morning at his desk, during his trance of total focus, Murakami becomes a Murakami character: an ordinary man who spelunks the caverns of his creative unconscious and faithfully reports what he finds.

"I live in Tokyo," he told me, "a kind of civilized world. If you want to find a magical situation, magical things, you have to go deep inside yourself. So that is what I do. People say it's magic realism—but in the depths of my soul, it's just realism. Not magical. While I'm writing, it's very natural, very logical, very realistic and reasonable."

Murakami insists that, when he's not writing, he is an absolutely ordinary man—his creativity, he says, is a "black box" to which he has no conscious access. He tends to shy away from the media and is always surprised when a reader wants to shake his hand on the street. He says he much prefers to listen to other people talk.

At the end of our time together, Murakami took me for a run. He is a member of a running club in Hawaii, by far the oldest in the group, he says. He runs, as he writes, every day. "Most of what I know about writing," he has written, "I've learned through running." His running style is an extension of his personality: easy, steady, matter of fact. "I like to read books. I like to listen to music," he told me as we run. "I collect records. And cats. I don't have any cats right now. But if I see a cat while running or taking a walk, I'm happy."

第一次拜访村上春树是在一个闷热而潮湿的日子，恰逢上午刚刚过半、一周刚刚过半、夏天也刚刚过半的时候。我来找村上这位日本重要小说家是为了洽谈将他的长篇巨著《1Q84》译成英语的事宜——这部小说在亚洲已经有了数百万册的销量。在从事文学创作30年之后，62岁高龄的村上确立了自己作为日本民间桂冠作家的地位（编注：英文原文刊发于2011年10月）。或许，无论以何种媒介而言，他都是日本在全世界富于想象力的首席代言人：对上千万的读者来说，他是人们了解日本社会及其风貌的主要信息源泉。

对每一个了解他的人和他本人来说，这毫无疑问都是巨大的意外。村上一直把自己看做是身在日本的异乡人。他出生于日本历史上最为奇怪的一种社会政治环境中：1949年的京都——战后美国占领期间的日本前帝国首都。历史学家约翰·W·道尔在谈到20世纪40年代末的日本时曾这样写道：“很难再找到第二个比这一时刻更让人觉得感受深刻、难以预测、模糊不清、困惑而又兴奋的跨文化时刻了。”将上面这句话中的“时刻”替换为“小说”，就是对村上作品的完美描述。他小说的基本架构——夹在两个水火不容的世界中的平凡人生——也是他早期人生经历的基本架构。

村上的写作生涯

在村上的成长历程中，他大部分时间是在神户周边的郊区度过的。那是一个国际港口，可以听到许多不同的语言。十几岁时，村上就沉浸于美国文化之中，尤其迷恋那些硬汉派侦探小说和爵士乐。他内化了这些冷峻的叛逆精神。在20岁刚出头时，他放弃了在一家大公司工作的机会，而是蓄起了头发和胡须，不顾父母反对结了婚，贷款在东京开了一家爵士乐俱乐部，取名为“皮特猫”。在将近十年的时间里，他一直全身心地投入到这个俱乐部的日常运营中。

村上的写作生涯是以经典的村上式风格开始的：在一个最普通不过的合理的场景中，一个神秘的真理突然降临到他身上，从而永远地改变了他的人生。村上那年29岁，正坐在当地棒球场的外场喝啤酒。突然，一位击球员——那是一个移居当地的名叫戴夫·希尔顿的美国人——打出了一个二垒。这是非常普通的一击，但当棒球在空中划过之时，村上脑海里突然闪现出一道灵光。他突然意识到自己可以写小说。以前他从未有过如此强烈的写作欲望，但现在这一想法让他欲罢不能。于是他就开始动手。比赛结束后，他去了一家书店，买了笔和纸，在随后的几个月时间里写出了《且听风吟》。这是一本篇幅不长、叙事简略的书，讲的是一位21岁的无名叙述者、他的名叫“耗子”的朋友以及一位四个手指的女性的故事。尽管情节并不复杂，但村上式的风格从一开始就展露无遗：那种奇怪的混合着倦怠和异国情调的味道。在仅仅130页的篇幅里，小说成功地截取了西方文化一个完整的横断面，但其中没有提到任何一种日本艺术作品，任何形式的都没有。

村上拿《且听风吟》去角逐一个威望很高的新作家奖，并赢得了这一奖项。一年后，村上的另一部小说问世，之后他便卖掉了自己的爵士乐俱乐部，以便能够将全部时间都投入到写作中。

30年来，直到现在，他一直过着一种苦行僧般充满清规戒律的生活，生活的每个方面都经过精确的规划，以辅助他完成创作。他几乎每天都要进行长跑或者长距离游泳，饮食健康，每晚9点左右睡觉，早上4点左右不需要闹钟就能自然醒来，然后就径直走到书桌旁，伏案五六个小时，专心致志地写作。

“专心致志是我生活中最快乐的事之一，”他说，“如果不能专心，你就不会如此快乐。我不是一个思维敏捷的人，但我一旦对什么有了兴趣，就能坚持多年不变。我不会感到厌倦。我有点像一只大水壶，需要多花点时间才能烧开，但烧开之后就会一直热下去。”

就这样，随着时间的流逝，这种日复一日的沸腾成就了世界上最独具一格的一批批作品：三十载令人爱不释手的离奇故事——这些故事仿佛都落入一个古怪而又迷人的、存在于各类文体（科幻体、奇幻体、现实体、硬汉体）和文化（日本文化、美国文化）之间的深洞。这个深洞以前从没有哪个作家探索过，或者至少远没有探索得这么深。多年以来，村上的小说变得越来越长，越来越严肃——对情景喜剧的借鉴大部分都已消失，取而代之的是交响曲一般的严肃风格。如今，在经历了一段特别激烈而持久的沸腾之后，他创造出一部迄今为止最长、最奇怪也最为严肃的作品。

《1Q84》：奇怪的“综合型小说”

据村上说，《1Q84》只是他最受欢迎的短篇小说之一——《四月一个晴朗的早晨，遇到百分之百的女孩》——的扩展版，原作长度只有几页。“从根本上说，情节是一样的，”他告诉我，“一个男孩遇见一个女孩，两人分手后又在寻找着对方。这是一个简单的故事，我只是把它变得很长。”事实上，《1Q84》并不是一个简单的故事。人们甚至可能无法完整地总结出它的情节——至少无法在一篇杂志文章的篇幅内总结出来。

几十年来，村上春树一直在说要致力于写出一部他称之为“综合型小说”的作品——一部像《卡拉马佐夫兄弟》那样的鸿篇巨制。《1Q84》似乎就是这一尝试的结果：一部恢弘的、第三人称视角的、包罗万象的超级小说。这是一部充满愤怒、暴力、灾难、变态性爱和奇怪新现实的小说，一部似乎要将整个日本囊括进去的小说。这部小说尽管有时显得生硬，却仍然使你在阅读中惊叹不已：一个人的大脑中怎么会有那么多奇奇怪怪的褶皱呢！

我告诉村上说，我惊讶地发现，尽管我读了许多令我惊异的书，但他成功地让我再次感到了惊异。和以往一样，他并不以此为荣，他说他不过是盛放自己想象力的一个老而无趣的容器而已。

村上作品：从一个世界穿梭到另一个世界

村上的小说有一种特别的渗透现实的方法。他常常收到读者来信，说他们在现实世界里“发现”了他的创造物：一家饭店或者商店，他原本以为这是自己的创造，但读者却说它们真实地存在于东京。在《1Q84》出版之后，村上收到了一个姓“青豆”（编注：《1Q84》中的女主角也叫“青豆”）的家庭的来信，这个姓氏非常罕见，村上以为是自己虚构出来的。他给这家人寄去了一本带有自己亲笔签名的《1Q84》。问题的关键是，这一切——小说融入现实以及现实融入小说——正是大多数村上作品的意旨所在。他总是让我们往来穿梭于不同的世界之间。

这不禁使我们想起翻译行为——也是从一个世界穿梭于另一个世界——从许多方面来说，这就是我们理解村上作品的关键。他一直否认自己曾受到日本作家的影响；在他创作早期，他甚至说自己曾躲避“日语的诅咒”。相反，他的文学敏感性是在十几岁时沉迷于阅读西方小说家的作品而形成的。那些小说家有经典的欧洲作家（陀思妥耶夫斯基、司汤达、狄更斯），但更多的是20世纪的一些美国作家——雷蒙德·钱德勒、杜鲁门·卡波特、F·斯科特·菲茨杰拉德、理查德·布朗蒂甘和库尔特·冯内古特等——这些作家的作品他一生都在反复阅读。当村上坐下来创作第一部小说时，他一直难以下笔，直到他找到了一条颠覆传统的创作途径：先用英语写出作品的开头，然后再翻译回日语。他说他就是这样找到了自己的表达方式。

你甚至可以说翻译是村上作品的组织原则：他的故事不仅是翻译过来的，而且也是和翻译有关的。村上式的故事情节带给我们的独特乐趣就是看着一个十分普通的场景突然变得不同寻常——换句话说，就是看着一个人物从一帆风顺的生存状态突然跌落到某个完全陌生的状态，然后不得不狼狈地斡旋在两种现实状态之间。从某种意义上说，村上作品的人物总是要在截然不同的世界间“翻来译去”：平凡世界和荒诞世界，自然世界和超自然世界，农村与城市，男人与女人，地上与地下。换言之，他的全部作品就是戏剧化的翻译行为。

村上：99%是小说家，1%是公民

《1Q84》这个书名就是一个玩笑：它不仅指向奥威尔的《1984》，更是取决于一个多语双关。（在日语中，数字“9”的发音和英语字母“Q”相似。）

我问他是否认为自己受到了奥威尔的影响。

“我想我们对于制度都有一种共同的反感，”村上说，“但乔治·奥威尔一半是记者，一半是作家，而我则100%是个小说家……我不想传达什么观点。我只想写出好的故事。我觉得自己是个关心政治的人，但我并不向任何人表达我的政治观点。”

然而，在最近几年，村上也曾一反常态地高调表达过自己的政治观点。2009年，他在一片争议声中前往以色列，去接受享有盛誉的耶路撒冷文学奖，并利用这一场合公开表示了他对以色列和巴勒斯坦的看法。今年夏天，他利用巴塞罗那的一个颁奖典礼作为平台批评了日本的核工业。他将福岛第一核电站的泄露事件称为日本历史上第二次核灾难，但这是首次完全自找的核灾难。

当我问起他在巴塞罗那的演讲时，他略微修正了他曾提到的百分比。

“我99%是个小说家，还有1%是个公民，”他说，“作为一个公民，我有话要说。当我必须说的时候，我就要清楚地说出来。那个时候，没有人对核电站说不，所以我觉得我应该说出来。这是我的责任。”

现代日本那些标志性灾难——发生在东京地铁的沙林毒气袭击案、神户地震以及最近的海啸（编注：指发生在2011年3月的日本海啸）——都是村上春树式的灾难，其相似程度令人震惊。他对有关深度的比喻极为迷恋，这一点人尽皆知：他笔下的人物爬到空的井下，进入神秘的世界，或者在东京地铁隧道下面遭遇邪恶生物。他在想象自己的创作时也是以深度为标准的。每天早上，在书桌边，当他聚精会神地陷入创作的恍惚状态时，村上春树就变成了一个村上春树式的人物：一个普通人在自己创作潜意识的幽深洞穴里摸索探险，然后忠实地汇报自己的发现。

“我生活在东京，”他告诉我，“一个文明世界。如果你想发现某种魔幻场景或者魔幻事物，你就必须深入自己的内心。我就是这么做的。人们称之为魔幻现实主义， 但在我灵魂深处，它就是现实主义，不是魔幻的。在我写作的过程中，它非常自然，非常合乎逻辑，非常现实、合理。”

村上坚持认为自己不写作时是个地地道道的普通人——他说他的创造力是个“黑匣子”，无法在有意识的状态下进入。他经常躲避媒体，当读者在大街上要和他握手时，他总是感到很意外。他说他更喜欢听别人说话。

在我们见面快要结束时，村上带上我去跑步。他是夏威夷一家跑步俱乐部的成员，他说目前在成员中数他年龄最大。正如他每天都要写作一样，他每天也要跑步。他曾经写道：“我的大部分写作知识都是通过跑步学到的。”他的跑步风格就是他个性的延伸：放松，稳定，务实。“我喜欢读书，喜欢听音乐，”我们跑步时他告诉我，“我收藏唱片，也喜欢猫。我现在没养猫。但如果在跑步或者散步时看到猫，我会非常高兴。” 6RNCoSCqeEMX4e0sXqMYDWoIdUzZrOagvAI5RrBfQr7LvDTMh8zw35or6GRBgxL1