We imagine inspiration as a lightning strike: a perfect opening line, an unforgettable character or a plot that arrives fully formed. Sometimes it happens like that, but rarely. More often, ideas appear in fragments: a conversation overheard in a café, a song lyric overheard, an expression on a face glimpsed from a passing train or a memory that resurfaces in a moment of stillness.

This is the last of my articles on literary icons - Haruki Murakami. The enigmatic writer, Haruki Murakmai. (Author's website) Haruki Murakami never set out to become a literary phenomenon. He didn’t apprentice under an old master, purposefully cultivate a mystique or even study literature. Instead, he watched a baseball game, had an epiphany, and decided he should write a novel. He went home and did exactly that. This unlikely origin story mirrors the tone of his fiction where mundane...

Both Irving and Murakami embrace absurdity, but to different ends. Murakami uses absurdity to dissolve reality. Irving uses absurdity to heighten it.