HARUKI MURAKAMI is the very picture of the Japanese writer-prophet. He gazes out over the rooftops of Tokyo's chichi suburb of Aoyama, speaking in low, urgent tones about Japan's rightward lurch. 'I'm worrying about my country,' says the 57-year-old writer, widely considered Japan's Nobel laureate-in-waiting. 'I feel I have a responsibility as a novelist to do something.'
He's particularly concerned about Tokyo's popular governor, the novelist Shintaro Ishihara. 'Ishihara is a very dangerous man. He's an agitator. He hates China.'
As Murakami discusses plans to make a public statement opposing Ishihara, and weave an anti-nationalist subtext into his next novel, it's hard to recognise the writer often derided by the Tokyo literati as an apathetic pop-artist - a threat to the political engagement of Japanese fiction. Yet Murakami always distanced himself from the Japanese tradition of the writer as social admonisher. 'I thought of myself as just a fiction writer.'
Murakami's resistance to literary cliques has led to him being seen as thumbing his nose at Japan and its literature. He refuses to fulfill the public duties of writers - participating in talk shows, judging panels and literary festivals - and declines all requests for television and telephone interviews. As dreamy and introverted as his disaffected protagonists, Murakami has no literary friends and never attends parties.
He's spent large parts of his adult life in Europe and the US. We meet, in Murakami's unassuming Aoyama office, during a brief return to Tokyo from Harvard, where he holds a writers' fellowship. 'I'm not interested in Japanese literature or literary people. I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way. They don't appreciate this.'
As a teenager, Murakami rebelled against the reading tastes of his parents - both lecturers in Japanese literature - by consuming pulpy American mystery novels in English. He read 'to get away from Japanese society'. Murakami's idols remain American writers - F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Chandler. His offhand prose, studded with references to American low culture, contrasts with the formal elegance of Japan's literary lodestars - Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe and Junichiro Tanizaki.