Met Murphy at a Temple Univ seminar a few years back. His "The Weight of the Yen" from ten or twelve years ago is still quite relevant (though Richard Katz's "Japan: The System that Soured", published around the same time, is still primus inter pares among books attempting to explicate Japan's comatose economy).
"If there's a river, we'll dam it, and if there's a tree, we'll ram it - 'cause we Japanese are talkin' progress!"