Haruki Murakami's fierce imagination

As a reader of only The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I could hardly consider myself a devoted Murakami fan. However, my enjoyment of that one book did provoke some interest in Sam Anderson's profile of Murakami in the New York Times Magazine. On how he became a writer:

Murakami, age 29, was sitting in the outfield at his local baseball stadium, drinking a beer, when a batter — an American transplant named Dave Hilton — hit a double. It was a normal-­enough play, but as the ball flew through the air, an epiphany struck Murakami. He realized, suddenly, that he could write a novel. He had never felt a serious desire to do so before, but now it was overwhelming. And so he did: after the game, he went to a bookstore, bought a pen and some paper and over the next couple of months produced “Hear the Wind Sing,” a slim, elliptical tale of a nameless 21-year-old narrator, his friend called the Rat and a four-fingered woman. Nothing much happens, but the Murakami voice is there from the start: a strange broth of ennui and exoticism.

That line – "nothing much happens" – is true of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, too.