I just held Haruki Murakami’s hand in my own ink-stained, callused paw. I looked him in the eye and I told him how important he is to me. I don’t like to crowd celebrities or make them uncomfortable, but I happened to see Murakami come out from backstage and took the opportunity to speak to him. He looked in my eyes and I could tell that he understood his significance in my life, and even in the whole world of modern literature. Murakami, the celebrated author of novels such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Norwegian Wood, A Wild Sheep Chase as well as, most recently, the memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, spoke at a New Yorker Festival event this afternoon–an event that sold out in 11 minutes and garnered audience members who traveled from Canada, Australia, Austria, and Korea just to see him. Murakami demonstrated tremendous eloquence and, though he clearly understands his gift for writing and his international importance, a sense of real modesty, a rare self-awareness without arrogance.

Murakami began by relating an anecdote about a jazz saxophonist who played just like Charlie Parker. One day, someone took it upon himself to tell the saxophonist that he played just like Charlie Parker. The saxophonist looked at his critic and turned his saxophone over to him. There are, Murakami deliberated, three things to take from this story: one, that it is easy to criticize people; two, that to make something truly original is very difficult; and three, but someone has to do it. So that is what he is doing: just the work that someone has to do. “Don’t be hard on me,” he implored the audience.

Success came quickly to Murakami, who only began to write at age 30, while he was the owner of a jazz club. His first book, Hear the Wind Sing, sold something like 150,000 copies. Norwegian Wood, published a few years later in 1987, has sold millions. Initially, he says, writing came easily to Murakami. “I just could do it,” he said, “it was easy for me. I just sent it to the publisher, and he gave me the prize. It was easy.”

In the New York Times Book Review this summer, Geoff Dyer, neither a Murakami fan nor a runner, slammed What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. He criticized the author for being overly equivocal, for saying “sort of” and “pretty” and “vague” too many times. But I find the honesty hidden in these phrases refreshing: Murakami made it clear that for him there is no such thing as a certain truth. He doesn’t even see what is going to happen next in his writing. He wakes up each morning around 4 o’clock to write and just continues his work. He is excited about whatever he is writing, he said, because he doesn’t know what will come next. “I wanted to turn the pages, but there were no pages,” he said of writing A Wild Sheep Chase, the novel which he thinks marks the beginning of his individual style, “I have to write it.”

Murakami’s characters all seem to have some kind of sense of loss, a lingering sadness, and I think that Murakami can capture the nuances of depression and the empty feeling of lost love better than anyone else. Still, the author did not come off as depressed as he discussed his work. He said, “If the protagonist is happy, there is no story at all.” These characters aren’t him, he said, but rather what he imagines he could have been. He looked down contemplatively at his clasped hands between questions from moderator and New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, as if embarrassed to be seated in front of so many adoring people. “I just write what I want to write,” he said at one point. “I cannot imagine what kind of people read my books.”

The author just finished his latest novel after a year and ten months of working. It is longer than his six-hundred page tome The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and twice as long as Kafka on the Shore, he said. It felt great to finish it. If, one audience member queried, he doesn’t know what is going to happen next in the course of his works in progress, how does he know when the book is over? “It’s like making love,” he said. You just know.