Murakami ran a jazz bar before his first novel
Haruki Murakami, born 12 January 1949, is read in 50 languages, yet he wrote nothing at all until he was 29. He was running a Tokyo jazz bar when a baseball game sparked his first novel in 1979. Japan's literary establishment has sometimes dismissed him as un-Japanese.
Murakami was born in Kyoto during the Allied occupation, an only child of two teachers of Japanese literature; his father, a Buddhist priest's son, was scarred by service in the war with China. The boy devoured Western books, from Kafka and Dostoyevsky to Vonnegut and Kerouac, a diet that sets him apart from most Japanese novelists. He studied drama at Waseda, worked in a record shop, married Yoko Takahashi straight out of university, and from 1974 to 1981 the couple ran Peter Cat, a coffee house and jazz bar in Kokubunji.
The decision to write came suddenly while he watched a baseball game, a warm feeling he says he can still sense; he began that night. Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 formed, with A Wild Sheep Chase of 1982, the Trilogy of the Rat, though he calls the first two immature and was slow to let them appear in English, which finally happened in 2015. Norwegian Wood, a nostalgic tale of loss and sex published in 1987, sold millions among young Japanese and made him so recognisable that he was mobbed in public and went abroad.
Fellowships at Princeton, Tufts and Harvard produced The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which tackles wartime atrocities in Manchukuo and won the Yomiuri Prize from Kenzaburō Ōe, once among his fiercest critics. He described it as his turn from detachment to commitment. After the Kobe earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyo subway gas attack he came home and wrote Underground, built largely from interviews with victims. In 2006 the World Fantasy Award went to Kafka on the Shore, and 1Q84, whose title sounds like 1984 in Japanese, followed in 2009.
He took up running at 33 and finished a 100-kilometre ultramarathon around Lake Saroma in 1996. He has translated Fitzgerald, Carver and Capote into Japanese and has encouraged translators to adapt rather than mirror his text; some German editions were even rendered from English.
Source: Haruki Murakami
