Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami (born 1949 in Kyoto) is one of the most widely read novelists in Japan and abroad. He writes in Japanese, belongs to the generation born after the Second World War, and his work, translated into around fifty languages, has reached readers far beyond Asia. He matters because he blends Western popular culture with a Japanese literary tradition, and because his stories about loneliness, desire and the search for meaning speak to very different audiences.

He was born in Kyoto but spent most of his youth in Hyogo, near Kobe. His father was the son of a Buddhist priest, and his mother came from an Osaka merchant family; both taught Japanese literature. As a boy he read American writers such as Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, which set him apart from many of his compatriots. At Waseda University he studied Greek theatre and met his future wife, Yoko. While still a student he worked in a record shop and spent evenings in jazz bars. Shortly before graduating he opened Peter Cat, a jazz café in Kokubunji, which he ran with her from 1974 to 1981.

He began writing fiction at the age of twenty-nine, almost by chance. By his own account, the realisation that he could write came to him during a baseball game, and he started that same night. His first novel appeared in 1979 and was well received by critics. Two more followed, Pinball, 1973 and A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), which together with the first make up the so-called Rat trilogy. His breakthrough came with Norwegian Wood (1987), a nostalgic story of loss and desire that sold millions of copies among young Japanese readers. The sudden fame was so intense that he found public life difficult, and in the mid-1980s he left for Europe and then the United States, where he held writing fellowships at several universities.

His later work grew more engaged. After the Kobe earthquake and the sarin attack on the Tokyo subway, both in 1995, he returned to Japan. From that experience came Underground (1997), a book built from interviews with victims of the attack. He later described his change as a move from detachment to commitment. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994-95) marks that turn: it mixes realism and the fantastic and deals with wartime atrocities in Manchukuo. His style is humorous and surreal, and the dreamlike and the everyday slide into one another without warning. Music, especially jazz and pop, runs through his books, and many titles and chapters refer to specific songs.

Japan's literary establishment has sometimes treated him as too popular and too Western, a label he has taken with some irony. He is also a long-distance runner. He took up running at thirty-three and in 1996 completed his first ultramarathon, a hundred-kilometre race around Lake Saroma in Hokkaido. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007) collects his reflections on the sport and on writing.

His legacy is measured in readers and prizes. Kafka on the Shore (2002) won the World Fantasy Award in 2006, and in 2023 he received the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature. He has been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature many times without winning it. Many critics regard his work as one of the most representative expressions of contemporary postmodern fiction, and he has helped Japanese literature find a global readership.