It's the birthday of the
novelist Haruki Murakami (books by this author),
born in Kyoto, Japan (1949). He is best known in America as the author of The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle (1995).
Murakami is
the child of Japanese literature teachers, but he was more interested in
American literature as a boy. He studied literature and drama at Waseda
University in Tokyo, and after graduation, Murakami operated a jazz bar called
the "Peter Cat" in Tokyo for eight years. During this time, he became
familiar with Western music, and that is why so many of his novels have musical
themes.
Murakami did
not write at all until after age 30. He claims that he was inspired to write
his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing (1979), while watching a baseball
game. He worked on the novel for many months, usually after finishing his
workdays at the jazz club, and the finished book had short chapters and a
fragmented style. Murakami sent the novel to a writing contest and won first
prize.
He
published Norwegian Wood (1987), which sold millions of copies in
Japan and made Murakami a literary sensation. To escape the fame, he and his
wife lived abroad for several years, in Europe and in the United States, where
Murakami taught at Princeton University. They returned to Japan in 1995. In
2002, he published Kafka on the Shore, a novel John Updike called "a
real page-turner, as well as an insistently metaphysical mind-bender."
It's about a teenager named Kafka Tamura, a "cool, tall, 15-year-old boy
lugging a backpack and a bunch of obsessions."
His latest
book is 1Q84 (2011).
Haruki
Murakami said: "I write weird stories.
Myself, I'm a very realistic person. [...] I wake up at six in the morning and
go to bed at 10, jogging every day and swimming, eating healthy food. [...] But
when I write, I write weird."
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