Murakami Haruki
Murakami Haruki (村上春樹, also known as Haruki Murakami; born January 12, 1949) is a popular contemporary Japanese writer and translator.He was born in Kyoto but spent most of his youth in Kobe. His father was a Buddhist priest. His mother was the daughter of a merchant from Osaka. They both taught Japanese literature.
Murakami, however, was always more interested in American literature laying the foundations for his Western style, which later distingiuished him from the Japanese literary mainstream.
He studied drama at Waseda University in Tokyo where he met his wife, Yoko. His first job was in a record store. After finishing his studies he opened the jazz bar "Peter Cat" in Tokyo, which he ran from 1974-1982. Hence many of his novels have musical themes, especially Dance, Dance, Dance and Norwegian Wood, named after the Beatles song of the same name.
His first novel Hear the Wind Sing won a literary prize in 1979. A year later he published Pinball, 1973. These novels, which are now both out of print, form the Trilogy of the Rat, together with A Wild Sheep Chase. In 1985 he published a work of science fiction, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.
He achieved his major breakthrough and national recognition in 1987 through the publication of Norwegian Wood. In 1986, Murakami left Japan traveling through Europe until settling in the American town of Cambridge, MA. During this time he wrote Dance, Dance, Dance and South of the Border, West of the Sun.
In 1994/1995 he published The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which dealt in part with the difficult topic of the Japanese war crimes in Manchuria. For this novel he received he won the Yomuiri Literary Award, which was awarded to him by one of his harshest former critics, Oe Kenzaburo.
This processing of collective trauma took a central position in Murakami's writing which had until then been more light-hearted in nature. While he was finishing 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 his first work of non-fiction, Underground and the short story collection After the Quake.
Short stories are an important part of Murakami's ouvre. Apart from Quake, many of his stories written between 1983 and 1990 have been published in English under the title 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.
His latest novels are the short, but succinct Sputnik Sweetheart, first published in 1999, and Kafka on the Shore, from 2002, the English translation of which is scheduled for 2004.
Murakami's fiction, which is often criticised for being "pop" literature by Japan's literary establishment, is humorous and surreal, and at the same time reflects an essential alienation, loneliness and longing for love in a way that has touched readers in the US and Europe, as well as in East Asia.
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