Haruki Murakami poses with Danish Crown Princess Mary after receiving Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award 2016 at the Odense City Hall on October 30, 2016 in Odense, Denmark.
Haruki Murakami poses with Danish Crown Princess Mary after receiving Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award 2016 at the Odense City Hall on October 30, 2016 in Odense, Denmark.
Haruki Murakami poses with Danish Crown Princess Mary after receiving Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award 2016 at the Odense City Hall on October 30, 2016 in Odense, Denmark.
Haruki Murakami outside the house of Danish author Hans Christian Anderson prior to Murakami's receival of the prestigious Hans Christian Anderson Literature Award at the City Hall in Odense on October 30, 2016, in Demark.
Haruki Murakami arrives to the museum Hans Christian Anderson House where a memorial plaque will be revealed in Odense on October 30, 2016, in Denmark.
Haruki Murakami arrives to the Hans Christian Anderson Literature Award presentation where he will receive the prestigious award at Odense City Hall in Denmark on October 30, 2016.
Haruki Murakami arrives to the Hans Christian Anderson Literature Award presentation where he will receive the prestigious award at Odense City Hall in Denmark on October 30, 2016. Murakami is received by Mayor Anker Boye and council member Jane Jegin. Hans Christian Anderson wrote among other story's The Ugly Duckling.
Haruki Murakami attends a press conference at Waseda University on November 04, 2018 in Tokyo, Japan. Murakami announces to archive his manuscripts and other materials at the university he graduated.
Haruki Murakami attends a press conference at Waseda University on November 04, 2018 in Tokyo, Japan. Murakami announces to archive his manuscripts and other materials at the university he graduated.
Haruki Murakami expresses his gratitude for a memorial plaque with his name at he museum Hans Christian Anderson House on October 30, 2016 in Odense, Denmark.
Photo taken in Tokyo on June 26, 2019, shows Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami and jazz clarinetist Eiji Kitamura after a recording of a radio show Murakami hosts.
(The man was leading an aimless life, time passing, one bi...)
The man was leading an aimless life, time passing, one big blank. His girlfriend has perfectly formed ears, ears with the power to bewitch, marvels of creation. The man receives a letter from a friend, enclosing a seemingly innocent photograph of sheep, and a request: place the photograph somewhere it will be seen. Then, one September afternoon, the phone rings, and the adventure begins. Welcome to the wild sheep chase.
(On his way home from school, the young narrator of The St...)
On his way home from school, the young narrator of The Strange Library finds himself wondering how taxes were collected in the Ottoman Empire. He pops into the local library to see if it has a book on the subject. This is his first mistake. Led to a special 'reading room' in a maze under the library by a strange old man, he finds himself imprisoned with only a sheep man, who makes excellent donuts, and a girl, who can talk with her hands, for company. His mother will be worrying why he hasn't returned in time for dinner and the old man seems to have an appetite for eating small boy's brains. How will he escape?
(When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe r...)
When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.
(High-class call girls billed to Mastercard. A psychic 13-...)
High-class call girls billed to Mastercard. A psychic 13-year-old dropout with a passion for Talking Heads. A hunky matinee idol doomed to play dentists and teachers. A one-armed beach-combing poet, an uptight hotel clerk and one very bemused narrator caught in the web of advanced capitalist mayhem. Combine this offbeat cast of characters with Murakami's idiosyncratic prose and out comes Dance Dance Dance.
(Hajime has arrived at middle age with a loving family and...)
Hajime has arrived at middle age with a loving family and an enviable career, yet he feels incomplete. When a childhood friend, now a beautiful woman, shows up with a secret from which she is unable to escape, the fault lines of doubt in Hajime’s quotidian existence begin to give way. Rich, mysterious, and quietly dazzling, in South of the Border, West of the Sun the simple arc of one man’s life becomes the exquisite literary terrain of Murakami’s remarkable genius.
(When a man's favourite elephant vanishes, the balance of ...)
When a man's favourite elephant vanishes, the balance of his whole life is subtly upset. A couple's midnight hunger pangs drive them to hold up a McDonald's. A woman finds she is irresistible to a small green monster that burrows through her front garden. An insomniac wife wakes up in a twilight world of semi-consciousness in which anything seems possible - even death.
(Toru Okada's cat has disappeared. His wife is growing mor...)
Toru Okada's cat has disappeared. His wife is growing more distant every day. Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has recently been receiving. As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out, and he embarks on a bizarre journey, guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell.
(In spite of the perpetrators' intentions, the Tokyo gas a...)
In spite of the perpetrators' intentions, the Tokyo gas attack left only twelve people dead, but thousands were injured and many suffered serious after-effects. Murakami interviews the victims to try and establish precisely what happened on the subway that day. He also interviews members and ex-members of the doomsdays cult responsible, in the hope that they might be able to explain the reason for the attack and how it was that their guru instilled such devotion in his followers.
(Sumire is in love with a woman seventeen years her senior...)
Sumire is in love with a woman seventeen years her senior. But whereas Miu is glamorous and successful, Sumire is an aspiring writer who dresses in an oversized second-hand coat and heavy boots like a character in a Kerouac novel. Sumire spends hours on the phone talking to her best friend K about the big questions in life: what is sexual desire, and should she ever tell Miu how she feels for her? Meanwhile K wonders whether he should confess his own unrequited love for Sumire.
Then, a desperate Miu calls from a small Greek island: Sumire has mysteriously vanished...
(For the characters in after the quake, the Kobe earthquak...)
For the characters in after the quake, the Kobe earthquake is an echo from a past they buried long ago. Satsuki has spent thirty years hating one man: did her desire for revenge cause the earthquake? Miyake left his family in Kobe to make midnight bonfires on a beach hundreds of miles away. Fourteen-year-old Sala has nightmares that the Earthquake Man is trying to stuff her inside a little box. Katagiri returns home to find a giant frog in his apartment on a mission to save Tokyo from a massive burrowing worm. 'When he gets angry, he causes earthquakes,' says Frog. 'And right now he is very, very angry.v
(Kafka on the Shore displays one of the world’s great stor...)
Kafka on the Shore displays one of the world’s great storytellers at the peak of his powers. Here we meet a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who is on the run, and Nakata, an aging simpleton who is drawn to Kafka for reasons that he cannot fathom. As their paths converge, acclaimed author Haruki Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder, in what is a truly remarkable journey.
(The midnight hour approaches in an almost-empty diner. Ma...)
The midnight hour approaches in an almost-empty diner. Mari sips her coffee and reads a book, but soon her solitude is disturbed: a girl has been beaten up at the Alphaville hotel, and needs Mari's help. Meanwhile Mari's beautiful sister Eri lies in a deep, heavy sleep that is 'too perfect, too pure' to be normal; it has lasted for two months. But tonight as the digital clock displays 00:00, a hint of life flickers across the television screen in her room, even though it's plug has been pulled out. Strange nocturnal happenings, or a trick of the night?
(Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, an ice man, a...)
Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, an ice man, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things we wish for. Whether during a chance reunion in Italy, a romantic exile in Greece, a holiday in Hawaii or in the grip of everyday life, Murakami's characters confront loss, or sexuality, or the glow of a firefly, or the impossible distance between those who ought to be closest of all.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
(Tsukuru Tazaki had four best friends at school. By chance...)
Tsukuru Tazaki had four best friends at school. By chance all of their names contained a colour. The two boys were called Akamatsu, meaning ‘red pine’, and Oumi, ‘blue sea’, while the girls’ names were Shirane, ‘white root’, and Kurono, ‘black field’. Tazaki was the only last name with no colour in it. One day Tsukuru Tazaki’s friends announced that they didn't want to see him, or talk to him, ever again. Since that day Tsukuru has been floating through life, unable to form intimate connections with anyone. But then he meets Sara, who tells him that the time has come to find out what happened all those years ago.
(When a thirty-something portrait painter is abandoned by ...)
When a thirty-something portrait painter is abandoned by his wife, he holes up in the mountain home of a famous artist. The days drift by, spent painting, listening to music and drinking whiskey in the evenings. But then he discovers a strange painting in the attic and unintentionally begins a strange journey of self-discovery that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a precocious thirteen-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt and a haunted underworld.
Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer. He has been known for most of his career as the leading representative of a hip generation of Japanese who grew up in the postwar years, were disenchanted with their traditional culture, and sought freedom by emulating American pop culture. Murakami's novels have been translated into 40 languages. He is well-read in China, South Korea, and Germany.
Background
Murakami was born on January 12, 1949, in Kyoto, Japan, though he grew up in Kobe. Murakami’s grandfather was a Buddhist priest, while his mother and father both taught Japanese literature. Murakami’s parents raised him in a household with strong cultural traditions and a reverence for the past, which he questioned early on. His parents also exposed him to Japanese writers, but Murakami never felt a connection to their work.
Education
In 1968, Murakami enrolled at Waseda University in Tokyo. He loved literature, but he did not think he had enough talent to make it as a writer. Instead, he turned to music and dreamed of opening a jazz club, quitting college to pursue that dream. Both he and his wife spent the next few years working—days at record companies and nights at coffee bars. They scraped and saved, borrowed money from friends and relatives and, in 1974, opened a small jazz bar in Tokyo called Peter Cat, named after Murakami’s pet.
Peter Cat was located in a basement rental. During the day, Peter Cat served coffee and at night it served jazz, with young musicians performing live. It was a small operation. Murakami made the drinks, washed the dishes, spun the records, and booked the acts. When business was slow, he read and worked toward finishing his degree, which he completed in 1975.
One day in 1978, Murakami felt the urge to write. In an essay he penned for the New York Times Book Review, Murakami described the epiphany.
Murakami bought a fountain pen and some paper and started writing. For the next six months, he wrote late into the night, sharing passages and ideas with his wife. The work resulted in 1979’s Kaze no uta o kike or Hear the Wind Song. The book—its title borrowed from a Truman Capote short story and featuring Beach Boys lyrics on the back cover— became an instant success among the average young Japanese reader. With an oddball sense of humor and impassive tone, the book covered student dissent and coming-of-age through the eyes of an unnamed narrator.
In 1980, Murakami’s second novel, Pinball, 1973, hit the shelves in Japan. Around this time, Murakami decided to close the jazz club to concentrate on writing. A Wild Sheep Chase followed in 1982. A standout, this novel revealed the depth of Murakami’s unique style. The fantasy-mystery-comedy follows the exploits of a divorced Japanese yuppie on the hunt for a mystical sheep. The book’s translations garnered international attention and sold more than a million copies worldwide.
Murakami wrote A Wild Sheep Chase without any predetermined plot. He simply sat down and his unique, off-the-cuff style emerged. Murakami prefers to write this way.
During his free time, Murakami translates English novels into Japanese. He often works with Motoyuki Shibata, a professor of American literature at the University of Tokyo. Over the years, Murakami has translated Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald, J. D. Salinger, Tim O’Brien, and Grace Paley so his fellow Japanese readers can enjoy the works that so inspired him. As Murakami’s fame grew, demand for his translated books grew as well and the authors he translated gained popularity in Japan.
By the late 1980s, Murakami was living in Rome and working on Norwegian Wood. Published in Japan in 1987, the book sold approximately two million copies its first year and catapulted Murakami into pop-icon status. Norwegian Wood diverged from Murakami’s previous efforts. The novel was written in a more straightforward, sentimental style and attracted a new demographic of readers—teens and women in their 20s.
Norwegian Wood delves into the life and psyche of an emotionally detached 37year-old who is delivered back to his college days when he hears a Muzak version of the Beatles song this book is named for. The book covers his journey toward adulthood and the women he loved and lost. Like many of Murakami’s works, the book references American culture, conjuring up everything from The Great Gatsby to Thelonious Monk. While the book proved to be a hot seller, Japanese critics dismissed it because it bucked many literary conventions and contained what they thought was too much sex.
Murakami became so popular he decided to leave Japan again because he did not like the attention. In the early 1990s, he lived in the United States, serving as a visiting scholar at Princeton University from 1991-93 and as a writer-in-residence at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts from 1993-95. During the time Murakami was away from Japan, the country experienced enormous change. In the early 1990s, Japan’s economic bubble burst and a recession hit. In 1995, an earthquake in Kobe killed thousands. That same year, the country witnessed its first act of domestic terrorism when a dissident group attacked the Tokyo subway system by releasing sarin gas. Twelve people died and more than 1,000 were injured.
After these events, Murakami felt an urge to do something for his own country, for his own people. He returned to Japan and began work on 1997’s Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, a journalistic look at the sarin gas attacks. Murakami spent a year interviewing 63 victims who were on the train that day.
The experience changed Murakami’s perceptions of his fellow Japanese and he felt compassion toward them for the first time. Murakami never could understand business people and why they worked so hard for corporate entities, but once he heard their stories, he understood their humanity. He realized that the businessmen and the Aum Shinrikyo cult members who launched the attack were more alike than different. He believes they all did what they did because they saw no alternative.
Murakami continued writing fiction. He scored another hit with Ubime no Kafka, or Kafka on the Shore, published in Japan in 2002. The book simultaneously follows the journeys of a teenager named Kafka who runs away from home and an elderly man named Satoru Nakata who lost his ability to read after a bizarre childhood accident. He can, however, communicate with cats. The book’s English translation was released in 2005 to rave reviews.
In 2007, After Dark was released in English. The book, with dark undertones, takes place over the course of a single night and explores loneliness and alienation—two common themes for Murakami. While Murakami’s international popularity among young readers has seen tremendous growth the past few years, older Japanese readers have been slow to accept his style.
The year 2009 was remarkable for the publication of the new trilogy “1Q84”. The first two parts of the book were sold out on the first day of sales. In his work, Murakami touched on religious extremism, the divergence of views of different generations, a combination of reality and illusion. The third volume of the essay, published in 2010, also became a bestseller.
With some interruption, in 2013 the philosophical drama Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage was released. This is the remarkable story of a young man haunted by a great loss; of dreams and nightmares that have unintended consequences for the world around us; and of a journey into the past that is necessary to mend the present. The bestseller traditionally received enthusiastic responses from fans of modern literature, once again breaking a sales record.
In 2014, a storybook Men Without Women was published. The main characters of the short stories are strange men and fatal women, and the main theme is the relationship between them, their losses and gains.
Killing Commendatore is Murakami's most recent work. It was published in 2017. It is a historical fiction that has caused controversy in Hong Kong. The novel was labeled under "Class II – indecent".
Throughout his career, Murakami has often incorporated a range of ideas from all manner of religious systems, specifically Buddhism, Christianity, and folk mythology.
Murakami said in an interview with "Die Zeit" that he was not religious. He only believes in the power of imagination. And the fact that there isn't only one reality.
Politics
Murakami claims that it is natural for China and the Koreas to show discontent with Japan over its military aggression during World War II.
Views
In 2009, Haruki Murakami criticized Israel for the counter-terrorist operation in the Gaza Strip.
Quotations:
“Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.”
“No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.”
“Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It's like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven't seen in a long time.”
“I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.”
Personality
Haruki Murakami is the philanthropist and humanitarian. He is deeply concerned about the state of the world, for which he has great compassion and idealism.
Physical Characteristics:
Murakami himself is not very tall. He is about 168 cm (5'6") high.
When he is writing, Haruki follows a strict regimen. He goes to bed at 9 p.m. then wakes up at 4 a.m.—without the aid of an alarm—to start writing. He works until around 11 a.m., producing about 4,000 characters a day, which is equivalent to about two or three pages of English. In the afternoons, he writes a little more or works on translations. He also runs every day and says the physical workouts fuel his writing mind. For more than 20 years, Murakami has run at least one marathon annually.
Interests
Western Literature, crime novels, marathon run and triathlon
Writers
American writers, such as Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan
Music & Bands
Western Music, jazz
Connections
In 1971, Haruki married Yoko Takahashi, with whom he studied at school.
Spouse:
Yoko Takahashi
References
Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words
Jay Rubin reveals the autobiographical elements in Murakami's fiction, and explains how he developed a distinctive new style in Japanese writing. In tracing Murakami's career, he uses interviews he conducted with the author between 1993 and 2001, and draws on insights and observations gathered from over ten years of collaborating with Murakami on translations of his works.