Anime, manga and Haruki Murakami may form an unlikely trinity, but outside of Japan they¡¯re responsible for filling Japanese Studies departments and sprawling convention halls with generations of the devoted. They¡¯re at the core of Japan¡¯s global allure, the center of its soft power, and last month I was immersed in all three in the span of two weeks in two countries: the United Kingdom and the United States.
In Japan, of course, they¡¯ve all been around a while, yet they continue to draw young audiences abroad. It was 40 years ago that Murakami decided he could write a novel after watching an American baseball player hit a double for the Yakult Swallows, his favorite Japanese team. That novel, 1979¡¯s ¡°Hear the Wind Sing,¡± won Japan¡¯s Gunzo Prize for New Writers and launched the literary career of a rarity: a bona-fide international best-selling writer who is now short-listed annually for the Nobel Prize in literature.
Twenty years ago, I met Murakami for the first time. Our one-hour interview at his Tokyo office spilled into three hours of free-form conversation that touched upon rare jazz recordings, Japanese youth culture, American individualism ¡ª and that epiphanic baseball game.
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