Japanese author Haruki Murakami is interviewed by The Guardian as the release of 1Q84 nears. I saw someone write yesterday that he is a ‘cult’ author – how can he be a cult author when his work sells millions of copies and he is translated into many, many languages?

1Q84, Haruki Murakami’s new novel, is 1,000 pages long and is published in three volumes. It took the author three years to write and it is possible, on an 11-hour flight from New York to Honolulu, to get through about half of it. Murakami looks crestfallen on receipt of this news – the ratio of writing to reading time is never very encouraging for a writer – and yet if anything tests a novel’s power to transport, it is reading it at the back of economy on a full flight over long haul. For those 11 hours, you disappear wholly into Murakami world.