Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami is the most internationally recognised Japanese author of his generation and one of the most widely read novelists in the world — a writer whose books sell in the millions, generate global fandom, and appear on syllabi from Tokyo to São Paulo. Born in Kyoto in 1949 and raised in Kobe, he opened a jazz bar in Tokyo before writing his first novel at thirty, and something of the improvisational quality of jazz — its digressions, its repetitions, its willingness to follow a line wherever it leads — has stayed in his prose ever since.

His early novels Norwegian Wood (1987) and A Wild Sheep Chase established him as a writer of loneliness, memory, and the strangeness that lurks beneath the surface of ordinary life. Later works — The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, 1Q84, Killing Commendatore — grew in ambition and scale, weaving together the mundane and the surreal, the personal and the historical, into novels that reward multiple readings. He has translated F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, and Truman Capote into Japanese and runs marathons. He has been a perennial Nobel contender for over a decade.