Why Haruki Murakami won't win the Nobel prize for literature this year again

Marathon runner Haruki Murakami is well-accustomed to the repetition that can accompany running. He even wrote a book about it – What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. With the Nobel season upon us, the writer is jogging around familiar circles once more. In the years 2012 and 2013, it was Murakami who had emerged frontrunner.

British betting agency Ladbrokes had then given him odds of 10/1 and 3/1 respectively. At 4/1 this year, he is again pitted to leave others behind. But this déjà vu already seems a tad cruel. There is something about this annual hype that seems to always set up the novelist and his steadfast fans for disappointment.

In 2007, a city library in Japan’s Hyogo Prefecture had already used the homepage of its website to congratulate Murakami on winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. When quizzed, the chief librarian confessed that they had designed and readied their homepage in hope that their local son would soon be receiving the high honour.

They had unfortunately jumped the gun. In 2012, a TV network in Japan dedicated a programme to Murakami days before the Nobel was announced. Fans from across the world were asked to declare their love for all things Haruki.

On the day the prize itself was announced, loyal readers took to neighbourhood bars. With copies of Norwegian Wood in one hand and glasses of beer in the other, they cheered on their literary superstar. Their cries of encouragement were emphatic, but the Nobel committee was unmoved.

Murakami has of course won his share of accolades. For his novel Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, he received the prestigious Yomiuri Prize from Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe. He picked up the World Fantasy Award for Kafka on the Shore in 2006, and yet, despite these laurels, he was circumspect about the Nobel – “No, I don’t want prizes. That means you are finished.”

The same cannot be said for a physics student in the writer’s latest work of fiction, Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage. “A Nobel prize or something,” he says, can be the only source of material comfort for someone in his profession. The same, though, can’t be said for Murakami.

His books sell in the millions. He is forced to appear at a Barnes & Noble with a bodyguard, and he is as much a rock star as the rock 'n’ roll inspirations he mentions in so many of his books.

Author of 14 works of fiction, Murakami has been writing since 1978. He has, since then, been doggedly seeking to blend the real and the surreal.

In his oeuvre, we are almost inevitably introduced to melancholic narrators, confused by the perils of life, even more perplexed by the terms of its living. There’s jazz, there’s tragedy and a good measure of silent angst, but it doesn’t take long for this territory to get deranged. Cats begin to talk (Kafka on the Shore).

Fitness instructors double up as assassins and inhabit worlds with two moons (IQ84). Six-foot frogs discuss destruction over tea ("Superfrog Saves Tokyo", After the Quake). A pianist is even able to see people’s auras (Colourless Tsukuru).

Murakami had once said, “I’m obsessed with the well and the elephant, the refrigerator, the cat and the ironing. I can’t explain it.” If one reads the man enough, it’s easy to see how his obsessions can be so entertainingly compulsive.

There can be no doubt that Murakami knows how to tell a story, but after reading much of his work, you could perhaps wonder if you are trapped in the narrative logic of the same one.

In an interview in which he had absolved himself of arrogance and claimed humility, he had also quoted the author John Irving as saying, “Once they’re addicted, they’re always waiting.”

For thousands across the world, the reading of a new Murakami offering is comparable to the consumption of a narcotic substance. The writer’s imagination is both predictable and surprising enough to keep the large contingent of his fans hooked. Surprisingly, however, it is this popularity that seemingly stands between Murakami and his Nobel.

Acclaim and Stockholm's approval have seldom been directly proportional. Jorge Luis Borges, Graham Greene, Arthur Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth – there was a loud clamour for each of these writers, but the Swedish Academy remained by and large unimpressed. Haruki Murakami’s talent may well be beyond question, but his Nobel chances certainly aren’t.