About the Author: Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami  村上 春樹
Was born on Wednesday the 12th of January 1949 in Fushimi-Ku, Kyoto.

Murakami was a student during the 1960s cultural revolution, this obviously went some way to make him a subversive counter-cultural rebel.

His father was a teacher of Japanese literature, leading Murakami to renounce Japanese literature and obsess over western examples of fiction, philosophy and other novella.
Apparently, Murakami was a particularly lazy student, leaving university he got married and opened a Jazz Bar called 'Peter Cat'.

'In 1968 or 69 anything could happen. It was so exciting but at the same time, it was risky. The bets were so big. If you can win, you could get big bets, but if you lost, you are lost!'

'Sometimes I wonder why I'm a novelist now. There is no definite career reasson why I became a writer. Something happened and I became a writer.'

Rather than regurgitating the influx of popular American literature, Murakami created something new and unique.

At 13:30 on the 1st of April 1978, Murakami received an epiphany during a baseball game. He sat amongst the crowd, a cool beer clasped under a warm afternoon. The batsman connected with a pitch perfectly, the sound of the collision echoed as Murakami suddenly decided he was going to write.

His second book 'Pinball' proved successful enough that he didn't have to run the bar anymore.

Murakami engages in a sort of ironman routine, waking up at 4am, writing until the afternoon and spends many hours training for marathons and browsing the occasional record store.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

.Modern Japanese literature began in the Meigi Restoration of 1868 due to a national urge for modernisation

.This lead to a long period of literature assimilation, mostly European and Russian

.By the 1980s American literature became a lot more influential due to it being fashionable and 'post-modern'

.Murakami became associated with this exchange due to his extensive translation work; for example 'The Catcher in the Rye' and 'The Great Gatsby' (being one of his favourite books)

QUOTES

.'I don't think myself as an artist, I'm just a guy who can write'

.'If you don't know what you love, you are lost'

.'Do you know the knack of slicing onions without tears?
Finish cutting them before  tears start dropping.;

.'Every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razorblades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four O'clock in the morning'

.'Most near-future fictions are boring. It's always dark and raining, and the people are so unhappy.'
(I guess he doesn't like Phillip K. Dick)

.'Only the dead stay seventeen forever'

.'What we seek is some kind of compensation for what we put up with'

.'I'm kind of a big kettle. It takes time to get boiled, but then I'm always hot'

.'If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets'

.'I'm not mysterious!'

.'If the very important secret is not solved, then readers will be frustrated. That is not what I want. But if a certain kind of secret stays secret, it's a very sound curiosity. I think readers need it'

.'In my younger days I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories'

BONUS LINKS

On the Globalization of Literature: Haruki Murakami, Tim O’Brien, and Raymond Carver 

by

 

Reiichi Miura:

http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/internetnation/bungaku

Short stories and biographical information:
http://www.murakami.ch/hm/shortstories/main.html

Recent Guardian Interview about Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/13/haruki-murakami-interview-colorless-tsukur-tazaki-and-his-years-of-pilgrimage