Haruki Murakami has built an international almost cult like fan base because his stories move so seamlessly between the reality of his characters mundane life and a surreal existence only found deep within our own imagination. He uses a flat realistic prose and what might be called psychological metafiction to create his first-person narrations which are both realistically sane and at the same time, a complete fantasy but all the while remaining completly beleivable.
Murakami was born in 1949 and spent most of his youth in Kobe. His father was the son of a Buddhist priest, his mother the daughter of a merchant, both taught Japanese literature.
Being greatly influenced by Western culture, particularly Western music and literature, Murakami grew up reading a variety of works by writers such as Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan.
Murakami studied theater in Tokyo and his first job was in a record store, which is where one of his main characters, Toru Watanabe in Norwegian Wood, works. Shortly before finishing his degree, Haruki opened the coffeehouse / jazz bar, called "Peter Cat", in Tokyo with his wife, Yoko. They ran the bar from '74 until '82.
Many of his novels have musical themes and titles referring to classical music, for example, the three books comprising The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: The Thieving Magpie (after Rossini's orchestral overture), Bird as Prophet (after a piano piece by Robert Schumann), and The Bird-Catcher (a protagonist in Mozart's opera The Magic Flute). Some of his novels take their titles from songs: Dance, Dance, Dance (from The Beach Boys), Norwegian Wood (after the Beatles' song) and South of the Border, West of the Sun (the first part being the title of a song by Nat King Cole).
Although he did not start running until the age of 33, Murakami is a keen marathon runner and triathlete. On June 23, 1996, Murakami completed his first and only "ultramarathon", a 100 km race around Lake Saroma, Hokkaido, Japan. (What I Talk About When I Talk About Running).
At the age of 29, Murikami said he was suddenly and inexplicably inspired to write his first novel (Hear the Wind Sing, 1979) while watching a baseball game in 1978. Murakami was watching a game between the Yakult Swallows and the Hiroshima Carp when Dave Hilton, an American, came to bat. According to an oft-repeated story, in the instant that Hilton hit a double, Murakami suddenly realized he could write a novel. He went home and began writing that night. Murakami worked on it for several months in very brief stretches after working days at the bar. After finishing, he sent his novel to the only literary contest that would accept a work of that length, and won first prize. Even in this first work, many of the basic elements of Murakami's mature writing are in place: Westernized style, idiosyncratic humor, and poignant nostalgia.
His initial success with Hear the Wind Sing encouraged him to keep writing. A year later he published Pinball, 1973, a sequel. In 1982 he published A Wild Sheep Chase, a critical success, which makes original use of fantastic elements and has a uniquely disconnected plot. Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, and A Wild Sheep Chase form the "Trilogy of the Rat" (a sequel, Dance, Dance, Dance, was written later but is not considered part of the series), centered on the same unnamed narrator and his friend, "the Rat". However, the first two novels are unpublished in English translation outside Japan, where an English edition with extensive translation notes was published as part of a series intended for English students. According to Murakami (Publishers Weekly, 1991), he considers his first two novels "weak", and was not eager to have them translated into English. A Wild Sheep Chase was "The first book where I could feel a kind of sensation, the joy of telling a story. When you read a good story, you just keep reading. When I write a good story, I just keep writing."
In 1985 Murakami wrote Hard-Boiled Wonderland, a dreamlike fantasy which takes the magical elements in his work to a new extreme.
Murakami achieved a major breakthrough and national recognition in 1987 with the publication of Norwegian Wood, a nostalgic story of loss and sexuality. It sold millions of copies among Japanese youth, making Murakami something of a superstar in his native country (to his dismay). The book was printed in two separate volumes, sold together, so that the number of books sold was actually doubled, since the entire book was released in two separate books, creating the million-copy bestseller hype. One book had a green cover, the other a red one. In 1986, Murakami left Japan, traveled throughout Europe, and settled in the United States.
Murakami was a writing fellow at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, and at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. During this time he wrote South of the Border, West of the Sun and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
In 1994/1995 he published The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. This novel fuses his realistic and fantastic tendencies, and contains elements of physical violence. It is also more socially conscious than his previous work, dealing in part with the difficult topic of war crimes in Manchuria. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is frequently cited by critics as Murakami's best work. It won him the Yomiuri Prize, awarded to him by one of his harshest former critics, Kenzaburo Oe, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994.
The processing of collective trauma soon took a central position in Murakami's writing, which had until then been more personal in nature. While he was finishing The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Japan was shaken by the Kobe earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyo gas attack, in the aftermath of which he returned to Japan. He came to terms with these events with his first work of non-fiction, Underground and the short story collection after the quake. Underground consists largely of interviews of victims of the sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway system. While perpetrators and events behind the attack are not the focus of the book, the picture of Japanese society that Murakami paints is shocking.
English translations of many of his short stories written between 1983 and 1990 have been collected in The Elephant Vanishes. He has also translated many of the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, Truman Capote, John Irving, and Paul Theroux, among others, into Japanese.
In 2006, Murakami became the sixth recipient of the Franz Kafka Prize from the Czech Republic for his novel Kafka on the Shore. Murakami told reporters, "In a way, reading Franz Kafka's works served as a starting point for me as a novelist."
In September 2007, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Liège, as well as one from Princeton University in June 2008.
Source: wikipedia
