Birth of Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami was born on 12 January 1949 in Fushimi-ku. A Japanese novelist and translator, Murakami writes in a dreamlike style that blends everyday life with the surreal, and is influenced by Western jazz, literature and pop culture. He ran a jazz bar in Tokyo before writing his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, and gained wide international readership with Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84. He has translated American authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver and J. D. Salinger, into Japanese. A keen marathon runner, he wrote about it in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and he is often named as a Nobel Prize candidate.

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