January 2019

January’s Author of the Month is...Haruki Murakami!

A mini biography by Hannah Amos

Haruki Murakami (村上 春樹) was born on January 12, 1949, in Kyoto, Japan. He grew up in Kobe and later moved to Tokyo, where he attended Waseda University in Shinjuku. His first novel Hear the Wind Sing won the Gunzou Literature Prize for up-and-coming writers in 1979. Murakami’s works have been translated into more than 50 languages. Some of his most notable novels are: Norwegian Wood (1987), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles (1995), Kafka on the Shore (2002), and 1Q84 (2009). He dabbled in nonfiction as well, most notably writing Underground (2000) entailing interviews of survivors of the Hanshin earthquake and the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack and the religious cult responsible for the latter.

Murakami is overt about his passion for music. He ran a small jazz bar with his wife, Yoko Murakami, for seven years after he graduated from college. He mostly works listening to music through his vinyl collection of over 10,000, the majority of it being jazz. He has also made playlists for a select amount of his works, assigning a song per chapter. Some artists on his playlist include Billy Joel, Prince, The Beatles, Franz Schubert, Radiohead and more.

Murakami notes his influences as Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan.