Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami was born on January 12, 1949, in Kyoto, Japan, the son of two teachers of Japanese literature. He grew up in Kobe, and his childhood reading was predominantly Western: American crime fiction, European literature, and above all the Anglo-American pop music that was flooding Japanese youth culture in the 1960s. He studied theater at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he ran a jazz bar called Peter Cat with his wife Yoko — a business that gave him his formation in American music and culture and delayed his literary debut until his late twenties. He has spoken about jazz and classical music as central influences on his understanding of structure, rhythm, and improvisation in fiction.

Murakami wrote his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, in 1979 on the kitchen table at night after closing the bar, winning the Gunzo Prize for New Writers. He sold the bar to write full time, and over the 1980s established himself as one of the most distinctive voices in Japanese fiction. His early novels — Pinball, 1973 (1980) and A Wild Sheep Chase (1982) — developed his characteristic blend of laconic first-person narration, magical or surreal events embedded in realistic surfaces, and an atmosphere of urban loneliness and yearning that drew on both American hard-boiled fiction and the Japanese literary tradition. Norwegian Wood (1987), his most commercially successful work in Japan, was a departure toward a more conventional realism, a tender coming-of-age novel set in the late 1960s student movement that sold millions of copies and made him a cultural phenomenon.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95, English translation 1997) is widely regarded as Murakami’s masterpiece. It follows Toru Okada, an unemployed Tokyo man whose cat has gone missing and whose wife subsequently disappears, as his search draws him into a series of increasingly strange encounters with people connected by mysterious subterranean links to Japan’s buried wartime history in Manchuria. The novel is Murakami’s most ambitious in scope: it weaves the quotidian loneliness of contemporary Tokyo with violence, memory, and the supernatural, and its investigation of personal identity against the backdrop of historical atrocity gives it a depth that his lighter works sometimes lack. The novel marks the full emergence of his mature style.

Murakami’s style is distinguished by a tone of cool detachment that contains intense emotional longing, a prose stripped of the ornamental density of traditional Japanese literary language in favor of a clean, conversational register indebted to his American reading. His characters are typically solitary urban men adrift in a world of jazz, whisky, and metaphysical unease, and his plots move between the realistic and the oneiric without the transitions that conventional fiction would require. He has been criticized by some Japanese critics for his cultural hybridity, but internationally he is one of the most widely translated and read authors alive.

Murakami’s other major works include Kafka on the Shore (2002), 1Q84 (2009–10), and Killing Commendatore (2017). He is a perennial front-runner for the Nobel Prize in Literature and has received the Franz Kafka Prize, the Jerusalem Prize, and the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award, among many others. He is also a prolific translator of American literature into Japanese — having translated Fitzgerald, Carver, and Salinger, among others — and a writer of nonfiction about running, music, and his own creative process. He remains one of the most significant and beloved literary novelists of the contemporary era.