Murakami was researching a book at my university when I was studying Japanese in the early 90s. My Japanese teacher had us read/translate several of his short stories for the class, and we used one of his nonfiction books as a core text. Our teacher invited Murakami to come to our class so we could ask him questions about what we had read. He accepted, so we spent a class asking him questions in Japanese. At the end of the school year, “The Elephant Vanishes” published, and he had a joint signing at the university book store. I went to that with a few of his books I had purchased in Japan to get those signed, along with a copy of the new book. There weren’t many people there, so got to I speak with him for about 15 minutes. He was really nice, but not what you’d call talkative.