“What is he like? Is he a kind man?” I was asked by an anxious administrator who had been assigned to guide me through Tokyo’s Aoyama neighborhood to Haruki Murakami’s office, which was in a discreet, unmarked building on a side street. She visibly deflated when Murakami’s assistant answered the door, accepted delivery of me, and sent her off to wait out our lunch meeting at a nearby train station. It was 2010, and in Japan at that point Murakami was a celebrity of a magnitude unrivalled in the literary world. His behemoth three-volume novel “1Q84,” published in 2009 and 2010, sold more than six million copies in the country. When he participated in the 2008 New Yorker Festival, tickets sold out in minutes, and fans claimed to have flown to New York from Japan, Korea, and Australia to see him in person. They had travelled so far because Murakami is also, famously, reclusive and rarely participates in public events.

He talks about being “surprised and confused” by the overwhelmingly enthusiastic response to his first attempts at fiction. That confusion may have fuelled something in him. His narratives are almost always inquisitive, exploratory. His heroes, hapless or directed, set off on missions of discovery. Where they end up is sometimes familiar, sometimes profoundly, fundamentally strange. A subtle stylist and a self-willed Everyman, Murakami is a master of both suspense and sociology, his language a deceptively simple screen with a mystery hidden behind it. In his fiction, he has written about phantom sheep, about spirits meeting up in a netherworld, about little people who emerge from a painting, but, beneath the evocative, often dreamlike imagery, his work is most often a study of missed connections, of both the comedy and the tragedy triggered by our failures to understand one another.

This interview has been adapted, with Haruki Murakami, from staged conversations we had at the New Yorker Festival in 2008 and 2018.

Haruki Murakami: The last time we did an interview was ten years ago, and many important things have happened in those ten years. For instance, I got ten years older. That’s a very important thing—at least to me. I’m getting older day by day, and as I get older I think of myself in a different way from in my younger days. These days, I’m trying to be a gentleman. As you may know, it’s not easy to be a gentleman and a novelist. It’s like a politician trying to be Obama and Trump. But I have a definition of a gentleman novelist: first, he doesn’t talk about the income tax he has paid; second, he doesn’t write about his ex-girlfriends or ex-wives; and, third, he doesn’t think about the Nobel Prize for Literature. So, Deborah, please don’t ask me about those three things. I would be in trouble.

Deborah Treisman: You just depleted my store of questions! Actually, I wanted to start with your most recent book, your new novel, “Killing Commendatore.” The book is about a man whose wife leaves him. He ends up living in the home of an old artist, a painter. Once he gets to that house, many strange things start to happen, and some of them seem to emerge from a hole in the ground—a kind of empty well. I’m wondering how you came up with this premise for the novel.

It’s a big book, you know, and it took a year and half or so for me to write, but it started with just one or two paragraphs. I wrote those paragraphs down and put them in the drawer of my desk and forgot about them. Then, maybe three months or six months later, I got the idea that I could turn those one or two paragraphs into a novel, and I started to write. I had no plans, I had no schedule, I had no story line: I just started from that paragraph or two and kept on writing. The story led me to the end. If you have a plan—if you know the end when you start—it’s no fun to write that novel. You know, a painter may draw sketches before he starts painting, but I don’t. There is a white canvas, I have this paintbrush, and I just paint the picture.

There’s a character—or an idea—in the novel that takes the shape of the Commendatore from the Mozart opera “Don Giovanni.” Why is this idea—this character—at the center of the book?

Usually I start my books with a title. In this case, I had the title “Killing Commendatore,” and I had the first paragraphs of the book, and I was wondering what kind of story I could write with them. There is no such thing as a “Commendatore” in Japan, but I felt the strangeness of the title and I appreciated that strangeness very much.

Is the opera “Don Giovanni” important to you?

The character is very important to me. I don’t use models, generally. In my career, I’ve used a model for a character only once—he was a bad guy, somebody I didn’t like much, and I wanted to write about him, but just that once. All the other characters in my books I have made up from scratch, from zero. Once I make up a character, he or she moves automatically, and all I have to do is watch him or her moving around and talking and doing things. I’m a writer, and I’m writing, but at the same time I feel as though I were reading some exciting, interesting book. So I enjoy the writing.

The main character in the book listens to opera as well as various other musical pieces that you mention in the book. Often your characters listen to specific bands or genres of music. Does that help you work out who they are?

I listen to music while I’m writing. So music very naturally comes in to my writing. I don’t think much about what kind of music it is, but the music is a kind of food to me. It gives me energy to write. So I write about music often, and mostly I write about the music I love. It’s good for my health.

The music keeps you healthy?

Yes, very much. Music and cats. They have helped me a lot.

How many cats do you have?

None at all. I go jogging around my house every morning and I regularly see three or four cats—they are friends of mine. I stop and say hello to them and they come to me; we know each other very well.

When The New Yorker published an excerpt from “Killing Commendatore,” I asked you about the unreal elements in your work. You said, “When I’m writing novels, reality and unreality just naturally get mixed together. It’s not as if that was my plan and I’m following it as I write, but the more I try to write about reality in a realistic way, the more the unreal world invariably emerges. For me, a novel is like a party. Anybody who wants to join in can join in, and those who wish to leave can do so whenever they want.” So, how do you invite people and things to this party? Or how do you get to a place when you’re writing where they can come uninvited?