Haruki Murakami was shocked and depressed to find his normal six-figure readership exploding into the millions when he published Norwegian Wood in 1987. Fame was one thing, superstardom another, and the craziness of it sent him back to the anonymity of Europe (he had written the book in Greece and Italy). In 1991 he moved to the United States. Not until 1995 was he prepared to resume living in Japan, but strictly on his own terms, without the television appearances and professional pontificating expected of a bestselling Japanese author. Norwegian Wood is still the one Murakami book that "everyone" in Japan has read, but Murakami's young audience has grown up with him as he has begun wrestling with Japan's dark past (in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle) and the 1995 double punch of the Kobe earthquake and, in Underground, the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. Accustomed to his cool, fragmented, American-flavoured narratives on mysterious sheep and disappearing elephants, some of Murakami's early readers were dismayed to find that Norwegian Wood seemed to be "just" a love story - and one that bore a suspicious resemblance to the kind of Japanese main stream autobiographical fiction that Murakami had rejected since his exciting debut in 1979. As Murakami himself tells it, "Many of my readers thought that Norwegian Wood was a retreat for me, a betrayal of what my works had stood for until then. For me personally, however, it was just the opposite: it was an adventure, a challenge. I had never written that kind of straight, simple story, and I wanted to test myself. I set Norwegian Wood in the late 1960s. I borrowed the............