Contents
Haruki Murakami
Writing surreal novels including Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84.
Norwegian Wood · Kafka on the Shore
- Born
- 12 January 1949
- Birthplace
- Kyoto, Japan
More people
Haruki Murakami
A Japanese novelist and translator whose ordinary settings open into unsettling parallel possibilities. Music, solitude, memory and missing people recur across his fiction.
Early life
Kansai upbringing
Grew up around Kobe and Ashiya with strong interests in Western books and music.
Tokyo years
Studied at Waseda University and ran the Peter Cat jazz bar with his wife.
Career
- 1979
First novel
Published Hear the Wind Sing while running the bar.
- 1987
Wider readership
Norwegian Wood became a major commercial success.
- 1990s
Fiction and testimony
Wrote The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and interviewed people affected by the Tokyo subway attack.
- 2000s
International audience
Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84 expanded his readership.
Selected work
Norwegian Wood
A realist novel about youth, memory and loss.
Kafka on the Shore
Interweaves a runaway teenager’s journey with an older man’s strange experiences.
1Q84
An altered reality connects two protagonists in a sprawling narrative.
Beyond writing
Running
A distance runner who wrote What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.
Translation
Translated English-language authors including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Carver into Japanese.
Sources & photo credit
Life, career and references ↗Photo: Ministerio Cultura y Patrimonio from Quito, Ecuador. Public domain · Original image. Cropped and displayed in monochrome.
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