Haruki Murakami

Born on January 12, 1949, in Kyoto, Japan, the only child of two teachers of Japanese literature, Haruki Murakami grew up in Ashiya, near Kobe, preferring American detective novels and jazz records to the classical Japanese canon his parents revered. He developed a passion for jazz at fifteen after attending an Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers concert, and the music's improvisational rhythms would later shape his prose. At Waseda University in Tokyo he studied drama, married Yoko Takahashi in 1971, and in 1974, still without a degree, opened a small jazz bar called Peter Cat in the suburbs of the city, which he ran for seven years. The epiphany came in April 1978 at a baseball game: watching a batter connect with a pitch, he was struck by the sudden, inexplicable conviction that he could write a novel. He began that night, writing at the kitchen table after closing the bar, and six months later completed Hear the Wind Sing (1979), which won the Gunzo Prize for new writers. Norwegian Wood (1987), a realistic love story set among students in 1960s Tokyo, sold millions of copies and made him a celebrity he had no desire to be. He left Japan in 1991 and spent years teaching at Princeton and Tufts while writing The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–1995), a sprawling, surreal meditation on violence, memory, and the hidden wells of consciousness. Kafka on the Shore (2002), 1Q84 (2009–2010), and The City and Its Uncertain Walls (2023) have continued to explore his signature terrain: loneliness, parallel worlds, vanished cats, mysterious women, and the strange passages between surface reality and what lies beneath it. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, making him the most widely read Japanese author alive.

On June 23, 1996, Murakami ran one hundred kilometres around Lake Saroma in Hokkaido, alone on the northern coast for eleven hours and forty-two minutes. He had taken up running only when he became a full-time writer; this was his first ultramarathon, and somewhere past the sixtieth kilometre he felt himself pass through the wall and out the other side.