Abrief resume of his career is necessary for form’s sake, but is unlikely to reveal much not already known, so ubiquitous is the coverage he draws. He was born in Kyoto in 1949 and raised in Kobe, the only son of two teachers of Japanese literature. His own cultural interests were distinctly Western—literature of course but also music (rock, jazz, classical) and gastronomy, from fast food to fine wine. These proclivities determined his first occupation—he owned a Tokyo jazz club called Peter Cat—and they infuse his fiction. His characters are perpetually reading, eating, and listening to music, and what they read, eat, and listen to is a clue to who they are. We are more likely to know what music is playing in the background while a character cooks spaghetti or reaches for a beer than we are to know the character’s name.

Between his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing (1979), and his latest, 1Q84 (2009), are some 20 books— novels, short stories, occasional nonfiction. Among the best known are A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), Norwegian Wood (1987), Dance, Dance, Dance (1988), South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994-5), Underground (1997), Sputnik Sweetheart (1999), After the Quake (2000), Kafka on the Shore (2002), and After Dark (2004). Millionsellers are the rule rather than the exception. 1Q84 sold 2 million copies within a month of its release.

An output this vast is a full-time job by most standards, but Murakami has yet another claim to fame— his Japanese translations of the American writers whose influence on his work is so pronounced: F. Scott Fitzgerald, J.D. Salinger, John Irving, Truman Capote and Raymond Carver, to name just a few.

There is scarcely a language spoken in the non-tribal part of the world into which his own fiction has not been translated, and in which the “Murakami boom” does not resonate. Literary committees vie with each other to award him prizes— the Tanizaki Prize in 1985, the Franz Kafka Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2006, the Berkeley Japan Prize in 2008, the Jerusalem Prize last January. A future Nobel is considered possible; by his fans, inevitable.

The Fly in the Ointment
Why Murakami?

How to account for the spell he has cast on the world? How to explain his immense standing, his almost universal appeal? What chord is it that Murakami, more than any other living writer of adult literary fiction, has struck to set the world dancing to his tune?

To his legions of devotees, followers, fans, “Murakami tribes,” “Murakami children,” “Harukists” and so on, the question scarcely arises, or if it does is easily answered. For example:

“He deals with the Big Questions—the meaning of life and death, the nature of reality… the search for identity, the meaning of love—and all in an easily digestible form….”—Jay Rubin, Harvard University professor of Japanese Humanities and Murakami translator and biographer (in his Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words);

“Murakami is the first Japanese novelist I know who has been able to straddle East and West. He disarms us by writing as if he were just down the neighborhood….”—Pico Iyer, author (quoted in A Wild Haruki Chase, compiled by The Japan Foundation);

“Unlike the works of his Japanese predecessors such as Junichiro Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata, Murakami’s works are not being translated and consumed overseas as those of an author who represents Japanese culture. In every society, his works are first accepted as texts that assuage the political disillusionment, romantic impulses, loneliness and emptiness of readers.”—Inuhiko Yomota, professor of Motion Picture History and Comparative Literature, Meiji Gakuin University (in A Wild Haruki Chase).

Granted all that; still, to a reader not wholly under Murakami’s spell—to a non-Harukist, in...