On the translation side, I’m presently translating a collection of Grace Paley’s short stories. I really like her work. Translating her stories is very difficult, but I always do my very best.

"I encountered Kafka's work when I was 15 years old, the book was 'The Castle'. It was a great big incredible book. It gave me a tremendous shock," Murakami said in his acceptance speech.

I’m not too familiar with the geography of nineteenth century London, for instance, but I still enjoy reading Dickens.

Do you hope to translate any more of Salinger’s works?Murakami: I’d like to give “Nine Stories” a try, although I don’t know if I actually will or not. Other than that, I’ve been thinking on and off about a Kansai dialect translation of Franny and Zooey for a long time (laughs). To capture Zooey’s storytelling style in the Kansai dialect… (laughs). It’d never sell though.

Do you hope to translate any more of Salinger’s works?Murakami: I’d like to give “Nine Stories” a try, although I don’t know if I actually will or not. Other than that, I’ve been thinking on and off about a Kansai dialect translation of Franny and Zooey for a long time (laughs). To capture Zooey’s storytelling style in the Kansai dialect… (laughs). It’d never sell though.

When I was a high school student in the mid 60’s, reading Catcher in the Rye was something of a rite of passage. I don’t know how it is now, but at that time for young people not reading it was out of the question. So, I guess I must have come across it naturally somehow… ah, no that’s wrong. Oh right, I feel like it was recommended to me by a girl in my class. Although it wasn’t a girl who I had any particular relationship with (laughs).

I like Gabriel García Márquez very much, but I don’t think he thought of what he wrote as magic realism. It was just his realism. My style is like my eyeglasses: through those lenses, the world makes sense to me.

For the author, a devotee of the fiction of F Scott Fitzgerald since his teens, these ingredients combine to constitute “a homage to The Great Gatsby” – a claim that grows somewhat less improbable as the new novel proceeds.

He reads a lot and widely, from Dostoevsky to Agatha Christie. Raymond Chandler is another favourite.

Murakami also admires the Jungian mythographer Joseph Campbell, and Jung himself. He examines the structure of his own fantasies in forensic detail. "I've been married for 30 years. Sometimes I wonder what would it be like if I had been single . . . If and if and if. I could go along that passage and find new strange rooms."

hilip Marlowe is Chandler's fantasy but he's real to me. Partly, he made me." When he was younger, he explains, after a turbulent time as a student, "I just wanted to live like Marlowe