That funny guy called Watanabe

It was probably during the winter of 2004 that I first discovered Murakami.

You could really blame it on an old friend of mine, whom I haven't seen in years. Despite our inability to meet up, we occasionally exchange rambling emails in which we talk about our lives, loves & losses, and which I will admit I save in the event that should someone ever try to publish a compendium of my more significant correspondences, these emails must surely be included. In these potentially historic emails, we often talk about the books we're reading at the moment, those we aspire to read, and those we strongly recommend the other stay away from. These emails have often provided both of us with some unexpected finds. I was able to redirect my friend to look up some more obscure Albanian writers, or that Kundera that is often overlooked on the bookshelf. In return, my friend mentioned Murakami.

In all honesty, he'd mentioned the name several times, but I hadn't really paid attention. I finally did make my way across to the local bookstore, where I couldn't help notice that Norwegian Wood was on sale. There really wasn't much of an excuse to not buy it, so I did.

To quote Casablanca, the movie, that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Norwegian Wood was perhaps the first book, after a long hiatus, where I actually felt the author speaking out to me from the pages. Very few books have that honesty in the narration that really stand out, to the point that you can almost hear them speak directly to you through their characters. Only a few books have that feel: Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, The Madwoman of Jogare by Sohaila Abdulali, Paula by Isabel Allende...

And so I was hooked. I went almost as soon as I finished Norwegian Wood to track down some other classics. I must have spent two weeks reading Murakamis from cover to cover: The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, Sputnik Sweetheart, The Wild Sheep Chase, and then Dance, Dance, Dance.

And then the agonising wait for Kafka on the Shore. It was hard to explain that frisson of anticipation that ran down my spine as soon as the posters came up on the Tube during autumn last year. All I could do was look forward to December, when his latest work would hit the bookstores in the UK, and I could go satiate my Murakami desire. Kafka, when it finally came out, did not disappoint. Perhaps the most mature of all his surreal works, the story was a poignant achievement in the art of telling a story of a young man coming of age.

So sometime back, when my sister asked me why I read so much Murakami, I had to sit back and really give it a lot of thought. Finally though (long after the sister had left) I came one with one word to explain it- simplicity.

Perhaps what I find most reassuring about picking up a new Murakami story, especially after having read so many, is that no matter what his story, no matter how or where or when he chooses to place his characters, there is a reassuring constancy about them. (It's almost like a Yash Chopra movie.) They are very different people from each other, but essentially they are gentle, gravely flawed human beings who just want to lead ordinary lives - have friends, fall in love, have sex, maybe have kids, be moderately successful, build fairly straightforward, simple, constant lives. Whether or not this comes to pass is not the issue - his characters always seem to hover at the margins of a classic story-book normal existence, but are somehow thrust towards the opposite direction, one where things are never simple, where complications arise and cannot be explained away, where things are never easy to understand or to resolve.

In a sense, the actual situations that the characters find themselves in are almost irrelevant in the grander scheme of things. Once we've determined that the person we're talking about is a middle aged man, who has had a few girlfriends, is in a job that pays reasonably, but with which he is somewhat dissatisfied (nothing serious, just that back of the head uncomfortable feeling), we don't need to worry whether we're talking about Toru Watanabe or K. The baseline is drawn - we know this character from before, and now that we have a friend of the landscape, we can see how he deals with his often very complicated problems. Once the similarities are recognised, the differences fade away. It no longer matters whether K is in love with a woman debating her own lesbian identity, or whether Toru is in a loveless marriage.

Perhaps this, then, is Murakami's greatest legacy. He has an innate ability to create characters that are so human that we can immediately recognise them - they are shorn free of any exotic trimming that can make them different enough from us to be removed from our own reality. No matter how much you love Harry Potter, you will never be an English adolescent orphan in a private (and secret) school of magic. You could, however, very easily be K - that shy, awkward guy who is painfully in love with his best friend, but cannot tell for a variety of reasons.

And so perhaps this is why I can read almost the entire canon of a single Japanese writer, and step away from it feeling as if he has written stories that could have happened to me, to my friends, or to any one of the thousands of people I have met in my lifetime. And that is probably why I will keep going back to read him, again & again, & again.