Haruki Murakami is a Japanese novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. His works, characterized by a signature blend of the otherworldly and the mundane, have been bestsellers in Japan and across the world.
Born in Kyoto in 1949, Murakami studied at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he met his wife, Yoko. The two married and upon graduating ran a jazz bar called Peter Cat from 1974 to 1981. After a moment of inspiration at a baseball game, Murakami began writing, and published his debut novel, Hear the Wind Sing (1979), at age thirty. Influenced by American writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, and Richard Brautigan, Murakami has said that he wrote passages of the...
