Globetrotter turned wage slave Niall Murtagh found life in a Japanese multinational a little strange. But it grew on him, he tells Donald Clarke
If you didn't know that Niall Murtagh had spent the last decade and a half working in Japan you would find the peculiar kink in his manners somewhat puzzling. Speaking very quietly, his timbre taut and contained, he manages to come across as superhumanly well-mannered, even by the formidably middle-class standards of his native Clontarf.
"Now you have this nice recorder," he says, pointing to my mini-disc player. "I was interviewed by the Observer and the guy actually had an old tape recorder. You would never see that in Japan."
Murtagh, who looks a little like a gentile Woody Allen, is visiting Dublin to promote his book The Blue-Eyed Salaryman, a very entertaining review of his years working for the Mitsubishi Corporation. The publishers seem to have decided that Murtagh's story is that of a beatnik bum who embraced The Man.
After graduating from UCD in 1981, Niall did indeed travel the world before settling in Japan to pursue a career in computing. But he says he was never a hippy.
"It is nice that they have an angle to sell it," he says. "I did hitchhike to India, but I didn't have long hair or smoke marijuana. And I always had it in the back of my mind that I would get a job."
The book's main value is as a record of the paternalistic habits of large Japanese companies. Murtagh explains how Mitsubishi arranged his accommodation, supervised his dietary habits and demanded that he seek permission to ride a bike to work. We Irish like to think of ourselves as pretty independently minded and he must have been tempted to tell his employers to get stuffed.
"Some of the time it was a little bit humorous," he says cautiously. "And sometimes it was plain frustrating. We were told not to put our hands in our pockets, which was ridiculous."
But some of those attitudes must rub off. Niall, who has two children by his Japanese wife and has recently moved into freelance translation, must surely now find brusque, informal Ireland a little discomfiting.
"There are some things I notice. Like people walking into your house without taking off their shoes. That, to me, seems like walking on someone's clean, white tablecloth. And the bathroom technology. In Japan heated toilet seats came in around the 1980s and now they have all these buttons and things. Western bathrooms seem to come from the 19th century."
The Blue-Eyed Salaryman, by Niall Murtagh, is published by Profile Books at £16.99
