Curiouser and curiouser

Haruki Murakami must be one of the most successful novelists in the world, from the point of view of readership; he has a very substantial following in this country, but it is still much smaller than the enormous readership he has in much of Europe. He is not one of those writers who appeals most to foreign readers; his status in Japan, after the publication of Norwegian Wood, rose to such a level that he was forced to leave the country to flee his own celebrity.

At first sight, he seems to have attained this global status with a kind of global style. The manner of his writing is simple, clear and direct; the trappings of his novels are strikingly international. Though they are mostly set in Japan, his novels talk principally of McDonalds, café au lait, Rossini overtures, Lennon and McCartney, Jack Kerouac and Dostoevsky; their political concerns, if any, are deliberately international ones.