Haruki Murakami

At 75 years old, Haruki Murakami has this physical status:

Haruki Murakami (, Murakami Haruki, born January 12, 1949) is a Japanese writer.

His books and stories have been best-selling in Japan as well as internationally, with his books being translated into 50 languages and selling millions of copies outside of his native country.

His work has received several accolades, including the World Fantasy Award, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize. A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), Norwegian Wood (1987), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95), Kafka on the Shore (2001), and 1Q84 (2009–10) are among Murakami's most notable works.

Raymond Carver and J.D.Salinger have also translated into Japanese works.

His fiction, which was often dismissed by Japan's literary establishment as un-Japanese, was inspired by Western writers from Chandler to Vonnegut, by Brautigan.

It is often surrealistic and melancholic or fatalistic, portrayed in a Kafkaesque interpretation of the "recurrent themes of alienation and loneliness" that he weaves into his stories.

Murakami was praised by Steven Poole of The Guardian as "among the world's best living novelists" for his books and performances.

Personal life

Murakami did not intend to meet other writers after receiving the Gunzo Award in 1979 for his 1979 literary work Hear the Wind Sing. Aside from Sarah Lawrence's Mary Morris, whom he briefly mentions in his book When I Talk About Running With Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison, Murakami was never a member of a writer group, and he was never fond of clubs, schools, and literary circles. Murakami claims that he relies on his wife, who is always his first reader, when working on a book. Although he never met many writers among the contemporary writers, Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy, Lee Child, and Dag Solstad all love his work. Murakami is a fan of Ry Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto's work, although he does not read much contemporary Japanese literature.

Murakami plays baseball and claims to be a fan of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows. Murakami's review of The Moment I Became a Novelist' in 2015 explains how attending a Swallow's game in Jingu Stadium in 1978 inspired a personal epiphany, which led to the writing of his first book.

Haruki Murakami is a huge fan of crime novels. He'd buy paperbacks from secondhand book stores and learned to read English during his high school days in Kbe. The Name is Archer, Ross Macdonald's first book he read in English, was his first book to read in English. Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky were among the other writers he was interested in, including Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Murakami has a passion for classical and jazz. After attending an Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers concert in Kobe, he began to develop an interest in jazz at the age of 15. The Peter Cat, a coffeehouse and jazz bar, was opened later. Murakami has said that writing is similar to writing, and that listening is a mental journey. He aspired to be a composer at one time but, but instead, he became a writer because he couldn't play instruments well.

Murakami said in a telephone interview with The Guardian that his surreal books appeal to people, particularly in times of instability and political instability. "I was so popular in the 1990s in Russia, at the time they were transitioning from the Soviet Union," he said. "People in Germany were in a lot of confusion, and people were in limbo, like my books."

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Writing career

Murakami began writing stories when he was 29. "I didn't write anything before that," he said. I was just one of those ordinary people. I was running a jazz club but I didn't produce anything at all." While watching a baseball game, he was inspired to write Hear the Wind Sing (1979). He referred to the moment he found he could write as a "warm feeling" because he could still feel in his heart. That night, he went home and began writing. Murakami served on Hear the Wind Sing for ten months, mostly at night, after working days at the bar. He wrote the book and submitted it to the only literary competition that would accept a work of that length, winning the first prize.

Murakami's first success with Hear the Wind Sing encouraged him to keep writing. Pinball, 1973, a year later, he released a sequel. He co-wrote a short story collection called Yume de Aimashou with author and future Earthbound/Mother creator Shigesato Itoi in 1981. In 1982, he published A Wild Sheep Chase, a critical success. The Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973, and A Wild Sheep Chase form the Trilogy of the Rat (a sequel, Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance, and Dance; it's not part of the collection) based on the same unidentified narrator and his companion, "the Rat." The first two novels were not widely available in English translation outside of Japan until 2015, but Kodansha had an English version with extensive notes, but it was not widely distributed outside of Japan until 2015. Murakami considers his first two books to be "immature" and "flimsy," and he would not be eager to have them translated into English. "I could feel a sort of sensation, the joy of telling a tale." A Wild Sheep Chase, he says, was "the first book in which I could feel a sense of sensation, as well as the pleasure of sharing a tale." If you're looking for a good story, you'll keep reading. I just keep writing when I write a good story.

Murakami's 1984 book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a dream-like fantasy that brought the magical elements of his work to a new extreme. Murakami's publication of Norwegian Wood, a nostalgic tale of loss and sexuality, earned a major breakthrough and national recognition in 1987. Among young Japanese people, it has sold millions of copies.

The little-known Murakami was thrust into the spotlight by Norwegian Wood. He was beaten at airports and other public places, resulting in his removal from Japan in 1986. Murakami travelled through Europe, lived in the United States, and now lives in Oiso, Kanagawa, with an office in Tokyo.

Murakami, a writing fellow at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During this period, he wrote South of the Border, West of the Sun, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995) mixes the realistic and fantastic with elements of physical violence. It is also more socially aware than his previous work, which is embedded in Manchukuo (Northeast China), a notorious area of war crimes. The book was awarded the Yomiuri Prize by one of Murakami's harshest former scholars, Kenzabure, who himself received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994.

The process of collective trauma emerged in Murakami's writing, which had previously been more personal in character. Murakami was recalled to Japan in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyo gas attack. With his first work of non-fiction, Underground, and the short story collection After the Quake, he came to terms with these events. The underground portion of the Tokyo subway system consists largely of interviews of victims of the gas attacks.

Since remaining in the United States in 1991, Murakami himself cites that he converted his position from one of "detachment" to one of "commitment." "His early books, he said, originated in an individual darkness, while his later works tap into the deepest hours of society and history," Wendy Edelstein wrote in an article for UC Berkeley News.

In The Elephant Vanishes, an English translation of several of his short stories published between 1983 and 1990 have been collected. Murakami has also translated several works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, Truman Capote, John Irving, and Paul Theroux, among others, into Japanese.

Murakami was instrumental in the translation of his work into English, encouraging "adaptations" of his texts rather than direct translation to American reality rather than direct translation. Any of his German works that appeared in German turned out to be translations from English rather than Japanese (South of the Border, West of the Sun, 2000s), encouraged by Murakami himself. Both were later retranslated from Japan.

Sputnik Sweetheart was first published in 1999, followed by Kafka on the Shore in 2002, with the English translation following in 2005. In 2006, Kafka on the Shore received the World Fantasy Award for Novels. In May 2007, the English translation of his book After Dark was published. It was selected by The New York Times as a "notable book of the year" in a "notable book of the year." Murakami's late 2005 published a collection of short stories titled Tky Kitansh, or, which roughly translated as "Mysteries of Tokyo." In August 2006, a collection of the English translations of twenty-four short stories titled Blind Willow, Sleeping Women was published in England. This collection features both older works from the 1980s and some of Murakami's more recent short stories, with all five of them appearing in Tky Kitansh.

Murakami's anthology Birthday Stories, which collects short stories about birthdays, was published in 2002. Russell Banks, Ethan Canin, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, Denis Johnson, Denis Johnson, Denis Johnson, Shannon Keegan, Claire Keegan, Daniel Lyons, Lynda Sexson, Paul Theroux, and William Trevor are among the collection's artists. What I Talk About Running, a collection of stories about him as a marathon runner and a triathlete, was published in Japan in 2007, with English translations released in the United Kingdom and the United States in 2008. The title is based on Raymond Carver's short story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

Murakami's novel 1Q84 was published in Japan by Shinchosha Publishing on May 29, 2009. OneQ84 is pronounced "ichi kyo hachi yon" in Japanese, as the 9th letter in 1984 is also called "ky" in Japanese. In 2011, the book was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Murakami's books were also out of circulation in China after the 2012 anti-Japanese protests, but not so many other Japanese writers. Murakami referred to the China-Japan political conflict as "cheap alcohol" which politicians were offering to the public. He published his book Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage in April 2013. It became a worldwide bestseller, but it received mixed feedback.

Murakami's most recent work as of 2018. The novel, published in Japan on February 24, 2017 and in the United States in October 2018, is a historical fiction that has sparked controversy in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, the novel was classified under "Class II – Indecent." Mass censorship has resulted from this classification. The book cannot be sold to people under the age of 18, and it must have a warning label on the front.

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