‘The scale of the celebrity of the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami is impossible to convey’, reflects Philip Hensher in his review of the Japanese writer's novel 1Q84 (2009‑2010). The illustrations of Murakami's fame that follow this remark indicate that Hensher is referring both to the author’s phenomenal commercial success and global popularity. For example, 1Q84 sold 1,5 million copies in the month after its publication in Japan. English translations of Murakami's work are usually also bestsellers, as fans queue up in front of bookstores into the evening in order to purchase their copy at midnight launches. His novels have been turned into feature films and multimedia theatre productions, there are Murakami festivals and fan clubs, and there is even a growing group of readers who have Murakamiinspired tattoos – a bird with a wind-up key lodged in its back, inspired by the author's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994‑1995), is apparently a tattoo-parlour favorite.

There is, however, something else about Murakami's celebrity that is more difficult to convey: its many antinomies. The author is in the news constantly, but at the same time he is portrayed as a media-shy recluse, even a ‘Japanese J.D. Salinger’. He has been attacked in his home country for his supposed American tastes, even to the extent that some critics suspect Murakami of being a ‘cynical entrepreneur’ who ‘custom-tailors his goods to his readers abroad’, whilst others label his work as ‘a mandatory read for anyone trying to get to grips with contemporary Japanese culture’. Such tensions are characteristic of Murakami's authorial self-fashioning as well. At times, he presents himself as a media-savvy careerist, strategically planning his continuing push for fame and success; on other occasions, he takes on a pose of artistic reticence and criticizes the workings of the publishing industry. In a similar vein, Murakami alternates between a vision of the act of writing as a day-to-day job, requiring skill and planning, and a conception of authorship as a gift from the heavens, beyond the control of the writing individual. Whilst his literary universe seems inhabited by a plethora of faceless characters, paradoxically, the author himself appears to be a man with many different faces.