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Portrait of Haruki Murakami

Literature · Novelists

Haruki Murakami

born 1949 · Japanese

Contemporary Japanese fiction

Haruki Murakami is the most widely translated Japanese novelist alive, known for deadpan narrators who slip from ordinary Tokyo life into a parallel world of talking cats, vanishing wives and wells. He ran a jazz bar before deciding at a baseball game that he would write a novel, and his books are saturated with Western music, cooking and long-distance running. He has been the perennial bookmakers' favourite for the Nobel Prize for two decades without winning it.

How to spot them

  • ▸First-person narrator, cooking spaghetti, listening to jazz or classical records, looking for a cat
  • ▸Wells, parallel Tokyos, sheep, moons and mysterious women who disappear
  • ▸He ran a Tokyo jazz bar called Peter Cat before becoming a writer
  • ▸A marathon runner; his memoir is about running
  • ▸A translator into Japanese of Fitzgerald, Carver, Chandler and Salinger

Key works

A Wild Sheep Chase (1982)

The third book of the Rat trilogy: an advertising man is sent to Hokkaido to find a sheep with a star on its back

Norwegian Wood (Noruwei no Mori) (1987)

Noruwei no Mori — the realist campus love story, opening with a Beatles song heard on a landing plane, that made him a celebrity in Japan

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985)

Alternating chapters between a cyberpunk Tokyo of data-shuffling Calcutecs and a walled town with unicorn skulls

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994)

Toru Okada loses a cat, then a wife, and sits at the bottom of a dry well; it also recounts the Nomonhan incident in Manchuria

Kafka on the Shore (2002)

A runaway fifteen-year-old and the old man Nakata, who can talk to cats, in alternating chapters heavy with Oedipus

Underground (1997)

Non-fiction: interviews with victims of the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, and later with Aum members

1Q84 (2009)

Aomame and Tengo in a 1984 with two moons; the title puns on the Japanese for nine, kyu

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007)

Memoir of marathons and writing discipline, its title after a Raymond Carver collection

Key ideas

  • The doubled world: an ordinary Tokyo with a second, rule-bound reality beneath it
  • Detachment as style — cooking, records and routine as the anchor while the uncanny takes over
  • A turn after 1995 towards Japanese collective trauma, in the earthquake and the sarin attack

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born on 12 January 1949 in Kyoto and raised near Kobe; he studied drama at Waseda University
  • •He ran a jazz bar in Tokyo called Peter Cat before publishing his first novel
  • •He has said the idea of writing came to him in 1978 watching Dave Hilton hit a double at a Yakult Swallows game
  • •Hear the Wind Sing (1979) won the Gunzo Prize for new writers
  • •He has translated Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler and J. D. Salinger into Japanese
  • •Norwegian Wood sold in the millions in Japan and prompted him to leave the country for several years
  • •His 2009 Jerusalem Prize speech used the image of the egg and the wall, siding with the egg
  • •He has taught in the United States at Princeton and at Tufts
  • •His 2026 novel The Tale of KAHO was his first in three years and his first with a female protagonist

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources