Haruki Murakami

Born in Kyoto, Japan, Haruki Murakami was the son of Japanese literature teachers, but grew up reading works by Western writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan. Western culture held a particular fascination for the future author, due largely to a strong American naval presence in his hometown, the port city of Kobe, where he discovered jazz, Hollywood movies, and pulp fiction. He studied drama at Waseda University in Tokyo and opened a jazz club, Peter Cat, in the city shortly before completing his studies. The club was his primary focus until 1978 when, according to popular legend, Murakami was watching a baseball game between the Yakult Swallows and the Hiroshima Carp. When American third baseman Dave Hilton hit a double at bat, Murakami was suddenly seized with the idea that he could write a novel. He worked steadily over the next few months and completed his first book, Hear the Wind Sing, which captured the celebrated Gunzo Literature Prize and launched his literary career. In 1981, the novel was adapted into a feature film by director Kazuki Omori. Hear the Wind Sing follows the life of a young, unnamed narrator as he navigates a writing career and various relationships while struggling with bouts of loneliness, which became a recurring theme in much of Murakami's work. It was followed in 1980 by a sequel, Pinball, 1973, and a third book, A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), a more fantastic work which sent its narrator on a surreal search for a long-missing sheep. All three books, which were grouped together as "The Trilogy of the Rat" - named for a friend of the protagonist known as the Rat - were critical successes, as well as popular titles with young adults, who were drawn by his focus on companionship, purpose and ambition. That readership elevated him to superstar author status with his fourth book, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), a fantasy novel split between two narratives - a dystopian, technology-driven society and a surreal, Kafkaesque nightmare scenario - explored by different consciousnesses in the same narrator. Murakami scored a second best-seller with Norwegian Wood, a more straightforward novel about a college student's relationships with two diametrically opposite women, set against the protests of the 1960s. Enormously popular with college age readers, the book sold more than two million copies in Japan, and served as Murakami's introduction to Western readers through two English translations. Murakami resisted the widespread attention to his work and left Japan to travel through Europe before settling in the United States, where he became a writing fellow at Princeton University and later Harvard University. While in America, he penned two novels - a shorter work titled South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995), a more fantastical novel that used a trio of disappearances - the spouse, job and pet of its protagonist - as a broader canvas to address the long-ranging effect of Japan's occupation of China during World War II. He would continue to mine the subject of collective trauma in his next work, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (1998), a collection of interviews with Japanese citizens affected by the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, as well as with members of Aum Shinrikyo, the doomsday cult that carried out the attack. The new millennium found Murakami working on many of his major themes, from the alternate world fiction of Sputnik Sweetheart (1999) and the multiple narratives in Kafka on the Shore, to After the Quake (2002), a collection of short stories inspired by the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan. He also published the anthology Birthday Stories (2002), a collection of short stories by American authors including David Foster Wallace, Russell Banks and Raymond Carver, and the non-fiction book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007). A passionate runner, the book detailed Murakami's experiences in marathons and as a triathlete. By 2009, his status as one of the world's most popular writers was confirmed with the publication of the alternate reality novel IQ84, which sold its entire first printing on the day of its release. That same year, he made headlines for traveling to Israel to accept the Jerusalem Prize, a literary award given to writers who addressed themes of freedom and society. His visit generated protests and threatened boycotts of his work in Japan over Israel's politics, but he won over many naysayers by criticizing the Israeli government in his acceptance speech. The following year, French-Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung filmed an adaptation of Norwegian Wood (2010). Murakami's novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, about a railway engineer reflecting on rejections by friends and lovers throughout his life, was released in 2014. Like its predecessor, the novel was a major success, selling one million copies in a single month.