“Haruki Murakami would seem the very picture of the Japanese writer-prophet… 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… As dreamy and introverted as his disaffected protagonists, Murakami has no literary friends and never attends parties. He has spent large stretches of his adult life in Europe and America,” and his writing often seems more at home in the pop culture-soaked West than in his native land.