Murakami insists that, when he’s not writing, he is an absolutely ordinary man — his creativity, he says, is a “black box” to which he has no conscious access. He tends to shy away from the media and is always surprised when a reader wants to shake his hand on the street. He says he much prefers to listen to other people talk — and indeed, he is known as a kind of Studs Terkel in Japan. After the 1995 sarin-gas attacks, Murakami spent a year interviewing 65 victims and perpetrators; he published the results in an enormous two-volume book, which was translated into English, heavily abridged, as “Underground.”

At the end of our time together, Murakami took me for a run. (“Most of what I know about writing,” he has written, “I’ve learned through running every day.”) His running style is an extension of his personality: easy, steady, matter of fact. After a minute or two, after we found our mutual stride, Murakami asked if I would like to start with something he referred to only as the Hill. The way he said it sounded like a challenge, a warning. Soon I understood his tone, because we were suddenly climbing it, the Hill — not exactly running anymore but stumbling in place at a serious tilt, the earth an angled treadmill underneath us. As we inched our way toward the end of the road, I turned to Murakami and said, “That was a big hill.” At which point he gestured to indicate that we had only reached the first of many switchbacks. After awhile, as our breathing turned more and more ragged, I started to wonder, pessimistically, if the switchbacks would never end, if we had entered some Murakami world of endless elevation: ascent, ascent, ascent. But then, finally, we reached the top. We could see the sea far below us: the vast secret water world, fully mapped but uninhabitable, stretching between Japan and America. Its surface looked calm, from where we stood, that day.

And then we started running down. Murakami led me through his village, past the surf shop on the main street, past a row of fishermen’s houses (he pointed out a traditional “fishermen’s shrine” in one of the yards). For a while the air was moist and salty as we ran parallel to the beach. We talked about John Irving, with whom Murakami once went jogging in Central Park as a young, unknown translator. We talked about cicadas: how strange it would be to live for so many years underground only to emerge, screaming, for a couple of fatal months up in the trees. Mainly I remember the steady rhythm of Murakami’s feet.

Back at the house, after our run, I showered and changed in Murakami’s guest bathroom. As I waited for him to come back downstairs, I stood in the breeze of the dining-room air-conditioner and looked out a picture window that framed a little backyard garden of herbs and small trees.

After a few minutes, a strange creature fluttered into my view of the garden. At first it seemed like some kind of bird — a strange hairy hummingbird, maybe, based on the way it was hovering. But then it started to look more like two birds stuck together: it wobbled more than it flew, and it had all kinds of flaps and extra parts hanging off it. I decided, in the end, that it was a big, black butterfly, the strangest butterfly I had ever seen. It floated there, wiggling like an alien fish, just long enough for me to be confused — to try to resolve it, never quite successfully, into some familiar category of thing. And then it flew away, wiggling, off down the mountain toward the ocean, retracing, roughly, the route Murakami and I had taken on our run.

Moments after the butterfly left, Murakami came down the stairs and sat, quietly, at his dining-room table. I told him I had just seen the weirdest butterfly I had ever seen in my entire life. He took a drink from his plastic water bottle, then looked up at me. “There are many butterflies in Japan,” he said. “It is not strange to see a butterfly.”