Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and grew up in Kobe, the son of two teachers of Japanese literature. He studied drama at Waseda University in Tokyo and ran a jazz bar called Peter Cat with his wife throughout the 1970s, an experience that suffused his fiction with its characteristic atmosphere of music, solitude, and late-night contemplation. He began writing his first novel at a baseball game in 1978 and published Hear the Wind Sing the following year. His early novels established his distinctive voice, but it was Norwegian Wood in 1987 that made him a literary superstar in Japan, a status that drove him to seek solitude abroad in Europe and the United States. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.