From his interview with John Wray at The Paris Review:
INTERVIEWER--Marshal Zeringue
I’ve just read After the Quake, your newest story collection and I found it interesting how freely you mixed stories that were realistic, in the style of your novel Norwegian Wood, let’s say, with others that had more in common with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Do you see a fundamental difference between those two forms?.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
My style, what I think of as my style, is very close to Hard-Boiled Wonderland. I don’t like the realistic style, myself. I prefer a more surrealistic style. But with Norwegian Wood, I made up my mind to write a hundred percent realistic novel. I needed that experience.
INTERVIEWER
Did you think of that book as an exercise in style or did you have a specific story to tell that was best told realistically?
MURAKAMI
I could have been a cult writer if I’d kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book. That’s why I wrote that book. It was a best-seller in Japan and I expected that result.
INTERVIEWER
So it was actually a strategic choice.
MURAKAMI
That’s...[read on]