In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in
downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to
him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear
the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the
following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was
Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a
writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were
translated into many languages, including English, and the door was
thrown wide open to Murakami's unique and addictive fictional
universe.
Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a
day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance
running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and
races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records
and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I
Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and
they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing
quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of
imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,
1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious
and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant
readers, ensuring Murakami's place as one of the world's most
acclaimed and well-loved writers.
Murakami writes of contemporary Japan, urban alienation and
journeys of self-discovery, and in this book he combines
recollections of the war with metaphysics, dreams and
hallucinations into a powerful and impressionistic work
*Independent*
Deeply philosophical and teasingly perplexing, it is impossible to
put down
*Daily Telegraph*
Murakami weaves these textured layers of reality into a shot-silk
garment of deceptive beauty
*Independent on Sunday*
Critics have variously likened him to Raymond Carver, Raymond
Chandler, Arthur C. Clarke, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Bret
Easton Ellis and Thomas Pynchon - a roster so ill assorted as to
suggest Murakami is in fact an original
*New York Times*
Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work of a true
original
*The Times*
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