I don't have to dream, because I can write: Japanese author Haruki Murakami

Sarah Lyall speaks to Haruki Murakami on the writing life, his fantastical new novel and the joys of the mundane

The new novel by the great Japanese author Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore, features (for a start) a mysterious bell that rings by itself; an abstract idea that steals the body of a two-foot-tall man in a painting; and an odd trip to an underworld frequented by, among other things, some scary Double Metaphors. As the author himself writes at one point, “a number of things made no sense”.
 
But this is Murakami, whose intensely popular fiction plays at the boundary between the real and the surreal, the mundane and the fantastical, regular life and irregular happenings. Killing Commendatore is