Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami was the only child of two parents who both had a love for literature. Murakami’s father was a soldier in the Second Sino-Japanese War, and this experience had a great impact on both his father and Murakami himself, with its influence appearing throughout Murakami’s fiction, and particularly in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Murakami grew up reading a great deal of Western literature, and his works are noted for their Western influence. Murakami studied drama in college and worked odd jobs before he decided to start writing professionally at the age of 29. Murakami’s first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, was released in 1979 and received considerable positive reception. It was the first book in Murakami’s “Trilogy of the Rat,” which is a thematic trilogy rather than narrative one. Murakami quickly followed up his debut with the trilogy’s second and third books: Pinball, 1973 and A Wild Sheep Chase. By this point, Murakami was a well-established figure in Japan, but his works were not yet known to the rest of the world. This all changed with the 1987 publication of his novel Norwegian Wood, which received universal acclaim and was translated into English in 1989. In the decades following the publication of Norwegian Wood, Murakami would go on to release some of the most important works in world literature, including The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in 1994–995 and Kafka on the Shore in 2002. Murakami’s latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, was released in Japan in April 2023, though it does not yet have an English translation.