TOKYO — Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has never witnessed a tsunami. But he has imagined one.
In his 1988 short story "The Seventh Man," Murakami's narrator is a man damaged by the childhood memory of watching his best friend sucked away by a killer wave, the furious sea retreating, he wrote, as if "a gigantic rug had been yanked by someone at the other end of the earth." A stream of fiction has come from Murakami since that story. But its theme of inconsolable loss came back to the author while watching images of Southeast Asia's recent calamity, where anguish endures long after the calamity passes.
"The narrator in my story did not die but he did not escape the wave either," says the 55-year-old Murakami. "He is now 60 years old and has not been able to go close to any body of water -- not a river, not a lake -- for almost 50 years."
Murakami is speaking from his sparsely furnished office perched over the urban sheen of the fashionable Aoyama district. It is his working oasis but it also sits atop some of the shakiest ground on Earth, capable of shifting and swallowing up all those hip apartments and boutiques outside his window without notice or emotion.
"I wrote about the tsunami because it is an unreasonable catastrophe," Murakami says in his soft-spoken, carefully plotted English. "It comes literally out of the blue. And it has unreasonable power to take away our most precious something.
"It is," he adds with a smile, "a metaphor, of course."
Murakami has created a canon from the metaphors offered by giant waves and wars, terrorist gases and earthquakes. His disasters creep out of seemingly benign worlds to strike and traumatize us. Describing them has taken him into frightening and surreal fictional pastures. A Japanese soldier is skinned alive in 1930s Mongolia in "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle." A frog superhero battles a worm to save Tokyo from destruction in the short story collection "After the Quake." And in "A Wild Sheep Chase," the devil is a sheep needing a new human host now that a right-wing gangster businessman lies dying.
This dreaminess continues -- with fish falling from the sky at opportune times, among other weirdness -- in "Kafka on the Shore," Murakami's latest novel that has just been published in English. Reviews have been excellent, following bestselling runs in Germany and across Asia that reaffirmed Murakami's status as Japan's most bankable literary export. (It's currently on the bestseller lists in Los Angeles and New York).
