Who is Haruki Murakami?

Haruki Murakami was born on January 12, 1949, in Kyoto. Both of his parents taught Japanese literature, and his father also served as a Buddhist priest. Two years after his birth, the family moved to Ashiya, a suburb of Kōbe. Murakami did not start writing until he was twenty-nine years old. Legend has it that he was attending a baseball game in Tokyo when he had a revelation regarding writing. Murakami suddenly realized that he was capable of writing a book after seeing American ballplayer Dave Hilton hit a double. Following the publication of his first novel in Japanese in 1979, he sold the jazz bar he ran with his wife and became a full-time writer. It was with the publication of Norwegian Wood – which has to date sold more than 4 million copies in Japan alone – that the author was truly catapulted into the limelight. Known for his surrealistic world of mysterious women, cats, earlobes, wells, Western culture, music and quirky first-person narratives, he is now Japan’s best-known novelist abroad.

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