Haruki Murakami (村上 春樹, Murakami Haruki, born January 12, 1949) is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and short stories have been bestsellers in Japan as well as internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages and selling millions of copies outside Japan. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Gunzou Prize for New Writers, the World Fantasy Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize, whose previous recipients include J.M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, and V.S. Naipaul.
Haruki Murakami (村上 春樹, Murakami Haruki, born January 12, 1949) is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and immediate stories have been bestsellers in Japan as skillfully as internationally, with his play a part translated into 50 languages and selling millions of copies external Japan. He has customary numerous awards for his work, including the Gunzou Prize for New Writers, the World Fantasy Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize, whose previous recipients put in J.M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, and V.S. Naipaul.
Growing in the works in Kobe before moving to Tokyo to attend Waseda University, he published his first novel Hear the Wind Sing (1979) after full of zip as the owner of a small jazz bar for seven years. His notable works count up the novels Norwegian Wood (1987), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95), Kafka upon the Shore (2002), and 1Q84 (2009–10), with 1Q84 ranked as the best feign of Japan’s Heisei era (1989-2019) by the national newspaper Asahi Shimbun’s survey of scholastic experts. His sham spans genres including science fiction, fantasy, and crime fiction, and has become known for its use of magical realist elements. His ascribed website lists Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Brautigan as key inspirations to his work, while Murakami himself has cited Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy, and Dag Solstad as his favourite currently sprightly writers. Murakami has in addition to published five curt story collections, including his most recently published work, First Person Singular (2020), and non-fiction works including Underground (1997), inspired by personal interviews Murakami conducted in the same way as victims of the Great Hanshin Earthquake and the Tokyo subway sarin attack, and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007), a series of personal essays nearly his experience as a marathon runner.
His fiction has polarized hypothetical critics and the reading public. He has sometimes been criticised by Japan’s intellectual establishment as un-Japanese, leading to Murakami’s recalling that he was a “black sheep in the Japanese literary world”. Meanwhile, Murakami has been described by Gary Fisketjon, the editor of Murakami’s collection The Elephant Vanishes (1993), as a “truly extraordinary writer”, with Steven Poole of The Guardian praised Murakami as “among the world’s greatest vibrant novelists” for his oeuvre and achievements.
Murakami was born in Kyoto, Japan, during the post-World War II baby boom and raised in Nishinomiya, Ashiya and Kobe. He is an without help child. His father was the son of a Buddhist priest, and his mother is the daughter of an Osaka merchant. Both taught Japanese literature.
His father, according to an article published for Japanese magazine BungeiShunju titled “Abandoning a Cat: What I Talk About When I Talk About My Father”, was on the go in the Second Sino-Japanese War, and was intensely traumatized by it, which would in turn piece of legislation Murakami.
Since childhood, Murakami, similarly to Kōbō Abe, has been heavily influenced by Western culture, particularly Western as well as Russian music and literature. He grew in the works reading a wide range of works by European and American writers, such as Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, Kurt Vonnegut, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Richard Brautigan and Jack Kerouac. These Western influences distinguish Murakami from the majority of new Japanese writers.
Murakami studied substitute at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he met Yoko, now his wife. His first job was at a folder store. Shortly before realization his studies, Murakami opened a coffee house and jazz bar, Peter Cat, in Kokubunji, Tokyo, which he ran afterward his wife, from 1974 to 1981. The couple decided not to have children.
Murakami is an experienced marathon runner and triathlon enthusiast, though he did not start running until he was 33 years old, after he began as a way to stay healthy despite the hours spent at his desk writing. On June 23, 1996, he completed his first ultramarathon, a 100 km race all but Lake Saroma in Hokkaido, Japan. He discusses his attachment with meting out in his 2008 memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.