The annual autumn buzz here in Tokyo for the Nobel Prize in Literature was more intense last week than in any years past. The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, whose global audience and literary stardom confound conventional publishing wisdom (he’s not American, doesn’t write in English, and not a single vampire or wizard appears in his oeuvre), has been in the running several times, but this year he topped everyone’s list of favorites. Leading up to the word from Stockholm, early evening local time, a major domestic TV network aired a segment in which Murakami readers worldwide expressed their love for him and his books in a babel of languages. One Chinese reader declared that the latest China/Japan spat over disputed island territories had zero impact on China’s love for Murakami, despite the author’s recent newspaper article calling for both sides to lay off the liquor of nationalism. (Some Japanese newspapers were reportedly banned in China last month, so the reader may not have seen it.)

Speaking of liquor: At least one bar in Tokyo hosted a special Murakami Nobel gathering for so-called “Harukists,” the label at home and abroad for Murakami’s most ardent fans. They were shown clutching copies of his books and framed photographs of the author, and half-finished glasses of wine and beer. Only the World Cup and the Olympics have occasioned similar events in the past. For the first time, oddsmakers, scholars, critics, readers, and publishing pros in and beyond Japan seemed united in nodding their belief that this was “his year.” But it wasn’t. China’s Mo Yan won, and the disappointed Harukists managed only sighs, followed by half-hearted applause for their neighbor’s accolade. “I’m very happy the winner was someone from Asia,” one female Harukist told the Mainichi newspaper on her way home, polite to the end.

“When I write novels, I have to go down into a very deep, dark, and lonely place,” Murakami told me the first time we met, in the summer of 1999, describing his creative process with an image he has now repeated in conversations many times since. “And then I have to come back, back to the surface. It’s very dangerous. And you have to be strong, physically and mentally strong, in order to do that every day.” Readers of Murakami’s fiction will likely recognize his description instantly: it’s the very same process many of his characters undergo, though for them the experience is more literal, involving wells, subway tunnels, and other subterranean passageways into secondary realms, where they struggle to connect two realities. In last fall’s “1Q84,” his latest and longest novel, the female protagonist, a fitness instructor and part-time assassin, descends from a raised expressway on a set of emergency stairs and encounters a time-warped alternate reality, with two moons, doppelgangers, and a murderous cult, that may or may not be happening in the Orwellian year 1984.

Little wonder that Murakami’s single major work of nonfiction is called “Underground,” an exhaustive account of his interviews with the victims and perpetrators of one of modern Japan’s darkest days: the 1995 poisoning of Tokyo subway commuters by, yes, a murderous cult. But what most readers don’t know is that Murakami himself inhabits parallel realities, and not just at his writing desk. One is inside Japan; the other is nearly everywhere else, but especially in the United States. And in each, his behavior and reputation, and perceptions of both, are in many ways starkly divergent.

I first met Murakami thirteen years ago, at his central Tokyo office. I was living in Osaka at the time and was there on a wager—literally—after a group of editors from a local English-language magazine assigned me the interview, then placed a good-natured bet on me not being able to meet him. “He’s a recluse,” they told me, an observation later confirmed by several of my Japanese friends.

I had read some of Murakami’s short stories and novels and had reviewed his then most recent book, “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” but I knew little about the author. I sealed a photocopy of my review, a few short stories I’d published, and a brief cover letter into an envelope and sent it to his office. A fax arrived the following week listing his dates of availability and adding, “but you’ll have to come to Tokyo,” as if I might find that a deal-breaker. The Murakami I met had already produced, in 1987, a bestseller that sold millions in Japan, a novel called “Norwegian Wood,” but he spoke of the occurrence with detachment and even, at times, displeasure. “I couldn’t go out to dinner or to the train station without being photographed,” he said. “It was terrible. That will never happen again.” The resulting media crush prompted Murakami and his wife, Yoko, to escape the entire country, moving first to Greece, and later to the U.S., and it was clear that the experience still evoked painful memories. (He was wrong about the sales, but right about the invasion of privacy. A decade later, when “1Q84” became his second million-plus seller in Japan, its famous author was nowhere to be found.)

Murakami was also ambivalent about his native land. He spoke of how much he hated the Japanese literary establishment, with its cliques and obligations, how he had always wanted to “get away from Japan—first from Kobe, then Tokyo,” and how he saw himself as a professional writer, a craftsman who worked hard and delivered on time, and that that was enough. When I asked him about his youth, he talked about feeling betrayed when the political protests of the nineteen-seventies were crushed by the authorities, and their leaders, his peers, bought suits and became corporate salarymen, their passions subsumed into money-making. About Japan’s activist Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe he offered: “He was a powerful writer to me when he was young, but I’m not interested in politics or making statements. I let him do that. What I care about is my readers.”

“Every book I publish,” he noted, “even before it is promoted or reviewed, it sells three hundred thousand copies in Japan. Those are my readers. If you’re a writer and you have readers, you have everything. You don’t need critics or reviews.” When I asked him about the possibility of being awarded the Nobel Prize, he laughed. “No, I don’t want prizes. That means you’re finished.” Since that first meeting, I have spent a lot of time with Murakami, in Tokyo, Boston, New York, and San Francisco, where I was asked to read with and interview him onstage before a sold-out audience of more than three thousand at the University of California, Berkeley. As a longtime Tokyo and New York resident, I became increasingly aware of a schism that defines his public persona. In Japan, he is a best-selling commercial writer, with all the implications of the label: he’s an entertainer who can afford, both financially and otherwise, to protect his privacy. In the rest of the world, and especially in the U.S., he is a literary alchemist who fuses East to West, and who greets his readers when he can, with a generosity he would never proffer at home in Japan.

The Murakami that exists in Japan is reclusive and, for some, especially older readers, a tad too Westernized, or, as the Japanese used to say, batakusai—stinking of butter. My Japanese uncle and aunt were both in their mid-sixties when they told me they simply couldn’t read his prose, that it wasn’t really Japanese. My seventy-year-old Japanese mother sat me down at home in Boston and opened two books, one by the literary lion Yasunari Kawabata, the other by Murakami. “This,” she said, pointing to Kawabata’s stoic lines of traditional kanji characters, logographs inherited from the Chinese, “is Japanese literature. This,” showing Murakami’s mish-mash of katakana and hiragana, syllabary writing systems used for words with no kanji, or borrowed (usually) Western terms, “is something else.” Murakami said that he found his voice by writing the first pages of his first novel in English—then translating them into Japanese. (He is also a professional translator of American fiction.) “It’s a strange thing,” he often jokes. “As I get older, my readers get younger.”