Murakami Haruki

Haruki Murakami Haruki Murakami (村上春樹) was born January 12, 1949 in Kyoto, Japan. He is a writer and translator whose works of fiction and non-fiction have garnered him critical acclaim. He received the Franz Kafka Prize for his novel Kafka on the Shore and is considered by critics an important figure in postmodern literature. The Guardian praised him as one of the "world's greatest living novelists."

Murakami's fiction is humorous and surreal, and at the same time digresses on themes of alienation and loneliness. Through his work, he is able to capture the spiritual emptiness of his generation and generations thereafter as well as explore the negative effects of Japan's seemingly work-dominated mentality. His writing criticizes the decline in human values and showcases an extreme loss of connection among people in Japan's society.
Photo © Markus Tedeskino / Ag.Focus

Novels

JAPAN / TRANSLATED       TITLE (IN ENGLISH)
1979 / 1987 Hear the Wind Sing
1980 / 1985 Pinball, 1973
1982 / 1989 A Wild Sheep Chase
1985 / 1991 Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
1987 / 2000 Norwegian Wood
1988 / 1994 Dance Dance Dance
1992 / 2000 South of the Border, West of the Sun
1995 / 1997 The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
1999 / 2001 Sputnik Sweetheart
2002 / 2005 Kafka on the Shore
2004 / 2007 After Dark
2009 / 2011 1Q84
2013 / 2014 Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Other

Collections of Murakami's short stories have been published overseas - two of them entitled After the Quake and The Elephant Vanishes. Haruki Murakami has also written several non-fiction works, such as the book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Japanese translations for literary works by Truman Capote, J.D. Salinger, and F. Scott Fitzgerald (to name a few), and social essays for various publications.