As he detailed recently in his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami rises at 4am on most mornings, writes until noon, spends the afternoon training for marathons and browsing through old record stores and turns in, with his wife, at 9pm. Murakami's cool benefits from an un-nerdy background running a jazz club in his 20s, and his equally un-nerdy Ironman routine. 'I don't think of myself as an artist,' says the author more than once in the interview. Before I leave for Hawaii a friend confesses his enthusiasm for Murakami is partly based on a desire to be the kind of person who likes Murakami. This is where he disappears every morning while writing his novels, a place populated by the kind of characters who have come to define the Murakami style: enigmatic, deadpan, full of big emotions sheared flat by repression and presented with a detachment that, unusually for a novelist who sells in the millions, has given him a cult-like status. Murakami, who at 63 still looks like an adolescent skateboarder, divides his time between homes in Hawaii, Japan and a third venue he calls Over There. We are in the presidential suite of the Hyatt, Waikiki, overlooking an ad-perfect beach framed by mountains.

For those 11 hours, you disappear wholly into Murakami world. Murakami looks crestfallen on receipt of this news – the ratio of writing to reading time is never very encouraging for a writer – and yet if anything tests a novel's power to transport, it is reading it at the back of economy on a full flight over long haul.

It took the author three years to write and it is possible, on an 11-hour flight from New York to Honolulu, to get through about half of it. 1Q84, Haruki Murakami's new novel, is 1,000 pages long and is published in three volumes.

1084 haruki murakami