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is a popular contemporary Japanese writer and translator. His work has been described by the Virginia Quarterly Review as "easily accessible, yet profoundly complex". His works of fiction and non-fiction have garnered him critical acclaim, and he is the sixth recipient of the Franz Kafka Prize for his novel Kafka on the Shore. He is considered by critics as an important figure in postmodern literature and Guardian praised him as "one of the world's greatest living novelists".
kami was born in post-war Japan as part of the baby boomer generation.

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Quotations
As I already explaned, I don't have any form. I'm a conceptual metaphysical object.
Colonel Sanders in Kafka on the Shore
If you're in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark.
Norwegian Wood
Mediocrity is like a spot on your shirt, it never comes off.
Dance, Dance, Dance
Numbers arent the important thing...what matters is deciding in your heart to accept another person completely. When you do that, it is always the first time and the last.
The Kidney-shaped Stone that Moves Every Day (translated by Jay Rubin)
Money had no name of course. And if it did have a name, it would no longer be money. What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability.
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
He inherited from his mother's stories the fundamental style he used, unaltered, in his own stories: namely, the assumption that fact may not be truth, and truth may not be factual.
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

Encyclopedia
is a popular contemporary Japanese writer and translator. His work has been described by the Virginia Quarterly Review as "easily accessible, yet profoundly complex". His works of fiction and non-fiction have garnered him critical acclaim, and he is the sixth recipient of the Franz Kafka Prize for his novel Kafka on the Shore. He is considered by critics as an important figure in postmodern literature and Guardian praised him as "one of the world's greatest living novelists".
Biography
Murakami was born in post-war Japan as part of the baby boomer generation. Although he was born in Kyoto in 1949, he spent most of his youth in Kobe. His father was the son of a Buddhist priest. His mother was the daughter of an Osaka merchant. Both taught Japanese literature.
Since childhood, Murakami has been heavily influenced by Western culture, particularly Western music and literature. He grew up reading a range of works by American writers such as Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and he is often distinguished from other Japanese writers for his Western influences.
Murakami studied behavioral science at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he established himself as a leading researcher. His first job was in a record store (which is where one of his main characters, Toru Watanabe in Norwegian Wood, works). Shortly before finishing his studies, Murakami opened the coffeehouse (jazz bar, in the evening) "Peter Cat" in Kokubunji, Tokyo with his wife, Yoko. They ran the bar from 1974 until 1981.
Many of his novels have musical themes and titles referring to classical music, for example, the three books comprising The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: The Thieving Magpie (after Rossini's orchestral overture), Bird as Prophet (after a piano piece by Robert Schumann), and The Bird-Catcher (a protagonist in Mozart's opera The Magic Flute). Some of his novels take their titles from songs: Dance, Dance, Dance (after The Dells song, although it is widely thought it was titled after the Beach Boys tune), Norwegian Wood (after the Beatles' song) and South of the Border, West of the Sun (the first part being the title of a song by Nat King Cole).
Murakami is a keen marathon runner and triathlete, although he did not start running until the age of 33. On June 23 1996, Murakami completed his first "ultramarathon" a 100 km race around Lake Saroma, Hokkaido, Japan. He discusses his relationship with marathons in his 2008 work, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.
"Trilogy of the Rat"
Murakami wrote his first fiction when he was 29. He said he was suddenly and inexplicably inspired to write his first novel (Hear the Wind Sing, 1979) while watching a baseball game. In 1978, Murakami was in Jingu Stadium watching a game between the Yakult Swallows and the Hiroshima Carp when Dave Hilton, an American, came to bat. According to an oft-repeated story, in the instant that Hilton hit a double, Murakami suddenly realized he could write a novel. He went home and began writing that night. Murakami worked on it for several months in very brief stretches after working days at the bar (resulting in a fragmented, jumpy text in short chapters). After finishing, he sent his novel to the only literary contest that would accept a work of that length, and won first prize. Even in this first work, many of the basic elements of Murakami's mature writing are in place: Westernized style, idiosyncratic humor, and poignant nostalgia.
His initial success with Hear the Wind Sing encouraged him to keep writing. A year later he published Pinball, 1973, a sequel. In 1982 he published A Wild Sheep Chase, a critical success, which makes original use of fantastic elements and has a uniquely disconnected plot. Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, and A Wild Sheep Chase form the "Trilogy of the Rat" (a sequel, Dance, Dance, Dance, was written later but is not considered part of the series), centered on the same unnamed narrator and his friend, "the Rat". However, the first two novels are unpublished in English translation outside Japan, where an English edition with extensive translation notes was published as part of a series intended for English students. According to Murakami (Publishers Weekly, 1991), he considers his first two novels "weak", and was not eager to have them translated into English. A Wild Sheep Chase was "The first book where I could feel a kind of sensation, the joy of telling a story. When you read a good story, you just keep reading. When I write a good story, I just keep writing."
Wider recognition
In 1985 Murakami wrote Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a dreamlike fantasy which takes the magical elements in his work to a new extreme.
Murakami achieved a major breakthrough and national recognition in 1987 with the publication of Norwegian Wood, a nostalgic story of loss and sexuality. It sold millions of copies among Japanese youth, making Murakami something of a superstar in his native country. The book was printed in two separate volumes, sold together, so that the number of books sold was actually doubled, creating the million-copy bestseller hype. One book had a green cover, the other a red one.
In 1986, Murakami left Japan, traveled throughout Europe, and settled in the United States.
Murakami was a writing fellow at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, and at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. During this time he wrote South of the Border, West of the Sun and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
An established novelist
In 1994/1995 he published The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. This novel fuses his realistic and fantastic tendencies, and contains elements of physical violence. It is also more socially conscious than his previous work, dealing in part with the difficult topic of war crimes in Manchuria (Manchukuo). The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is frequently cited by critics as Murakami's best work. It won him the Yomiuri Prize, awarded to him by one of his harshest former critics, Kenzaburo Oe, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994.
The processing of collective trauma soon took a central position in Murakami's writing, which had until then been more personal in nature. While he was finishing The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Japan was shaken by the Kobe earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyo gas attack, in the aftermath of which he returned to Japan. He came to terms with these events with his first work of non-fiction, Underground, and the short story collection After the quake. Underground consists largely of interviews of victims of the sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway system.
English translations of many of his short stories written between 1983 and 1990 have been collected in The Elephant Vanishes. He has also translated many of the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, Truman Capote, John Irving, and Paul Theroux, among others, into Japanese.
In 2006, Murakami became the sixth recipient of the Franz Kafka Prize from the Czech Republic for his novel Umibe no Kafka (Kafka on the Shore). Murakami told reporters, "In a way, reading Franz Kafka's works served as a starting point for me as a novelist."
In September 2007, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Ličge, as well as one from Princeton University in June 2008.
In January 2009 he received the Jerusalem Prize, a biennial literary award given to writers whose work has dealt with themes of human freedom, society, politics, and government. There was protest in Japan and elsewhere against his attending the February award ceremony in Israel (including threats to boycott his work) as a response against Israel's recent massive retaliatory bombings of Hamas, which killed many innocent citizens in Gaza. In his own kind of protest, after apologetically stating that it was generally his nature to do the opposite of what he was told, Murakami chose to attend the ceremony but gave an eloquent pro-peace speech to the gathered Israeli dignitaries.
Recent work
The succinct Sputnik Sweetheart was first published in 1999. Kafka on the Shore was published in 2002, with the English translation following in 2005. The English version of his latest novel, After Dark, was released in May 2007. It was chosen by the New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year. In late 2005, Murakami published a collection of short stories titled Tokyo Kitanshu (?????, translates loosely as "Mysteries of Tokyo"). A collection of the English versions of 24 short stories, titled Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, was published in August 2006. This collection includes both older works from the 1980s as well as some of Murakami's most recent short stories (including all five that appear in Tokyo Kitanshu).
Murakami has recently published an anthology called Birthday Stories, which collects short stories on the theme of birthdays by Russell Banks, Ethan Canin, Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, Claire Keegan, Andrea Lee, Daniel Lyons, Lynda Sexson, Paul Theroux, and William Trevor, as well as a specially written story by Murakami himself.
A new book of essays titled What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, featuring tales about his experience as a full marathon runner and a triathlete, has been published in Japan, with English translations released in the U.K. and the U.S. This title is a play on that of Raymond Carver's collection of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
Criticism and influence
Murakami's fiction, often criticized by Japan's literary establishment, is humorous and surreal, and at the same time digresses on themes of alienation and loneliness. Through his work, he was able to capture the spiritual emptiness of his generation and explore the negative effects of Japan's work-dominated mentality. His writing criticizes the decrease in human values and a loss of connection between people in Japan's society.
Murakami was awarded the 2007 Kiriyama Prize for Fiction for his collection of short stories Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman but, according to the Kiriyama Official Website, Murakami "declined to accept the award for reasons of personal principle".
Murakami was mistakenly congratulated for receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature 2006 on the homepage of a city library in his native Ashiya, but this was the library's error.
Films and other adaptations
Murakami's first novel Hear the Wind Sing (Kaze no uta o kike) was adapted by Japanese director Kazuki Omori. The film was released in 1981 and distributed by Art Theatre Guild.
Naoto Yamakawa directed two short films Attack on the Bakery (released in 1982) and A Girl, She is 100 Percent (released in 1983) , based on Murakami's short stories Attack on the Bakery and On Seeing the 100% Perfect Woman One Beautiful April Morning respectively.
Japanese director Jun Ichikawa has adapted Murakami's short story Tony Takitani into a 75 minute feature. The film has played at various film festivals and was released in New York and Los Angeles on July 29 2005. The original short story (as translated by Jay Rubin) is available in the April 15 2002, issue of The New Yorker, as a stand-alone book published by Cloverfield Press, and part of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Knopf.
In 1998 the German film Der Eisbaer (Polar Bear), written and directed by Granz Henman, used elements of Murakami's short story The Second Bakery Attack in its three intersecting story lines.
Murakami's work has also been adapted for the stage, in a 2003 play entitled The Elephant Vanishes, co-produced by Britain's Complicite company and Japan's Setagaya Public Theatre. The production, directed by Simon McBurney, adapted three of Murakami's short stories and received acclaim for its unique blending of multimedia (video, music, and innovative sound design) with actor-driven physical theatre (mime, dance, and even acrobatic wirework). On tour, the play was performed in Japanese, with translating supertitles for European and American audiences.
Two stories from Murakami's book after the quakeHoney Pie and Superfrog Saves Tokyo have been adapted for the stage and directed by Frank Galati. Entitled after the quake, the play was first performed at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in association with La Jolla Playhouse, and opened October 12 2007 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. In 2008 Galati adapted and directed a theatrical version of Kafka on the Shore also first running at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater from September to November.
On Max Richter's 2006 album Songs from Before, Robert Wyatt reads passages from Murakami's novels.
In 2007, Robert Logevall adapted All God's Children Can Dance into a film, with a specially composed soundtrack by American jam band Sound Tribe Sector 9.
In 2008, Tom Flint adapted On Seeing the 100% Perfect Woman One Beautiful April Morning into a short film. The film was screened at the 2008 CON-CAN Movie Festival. The film can be viewed, voted, and commented upon as part of the Audience award for the movie festival.
It was announced in July 2008 that French-Vietnamese film-maker Tran Anh Hung would direct an adaptation of Murakami's novel Norwegian Wood. The film will be released in 2010.
Bibliography
Novels
Short stories
Other Work
Translators of Murakami's works
Murakami's works have been translated into many languages. Below is a list of translators according to language (by alphabetical order):
- Arabic - Saeed Alganmi, Iman Harrz Allah
- Brazilian - Ana Luiza Dantas Borges
- Bulgarian - Ljudmil Ljutskanov
- Catalan - Albert Nolla
- Chinese - ???/Lin Shao-hua (China Mainland), ???/Lai Ming-zhu (Taiwan,China), ??/Ye Hui (Hong Kong,China)
- Croatian - Vojo indolic
- Czech - Tomá Jurkovic
- Danish - Mette Holm
- Dutch - Elbrich Fennema, Jaques Westerhoven, L. van Haute
- English - Alfred Birnbaum, Jay Rubin, Philip Gabriel (USA), Theodore W. Goossen (Canada)
- Estonian - Kati Lindström, Kristina Uluots
- Faroese - Pauli Nielsen
- French - Corinne Atlan, Hélčne Morita, Patrick De Vos
- Galician - Mona Imai, Gabriel Álvarez Martínez
- German - Ursula Gräfe, Nora Bierich, Sabine Mangold, Uwe Hohmann
- Greek - Maria Aggelidou, Thanasis Douvris, Leonidas Karatzas, Juri Kovalenko, Stelios Papazafeiropoulos, Giorgos Voudiklaris
- Hebrew - Einat Cooper, Dr. Michal Daliot-Bul
- Hungarian - Erdos György, Horváth Kriszta, Komáromy Rudolf
- Icelandic - Uggi Jónsson
- Indonesian - Jonjon Johana
- Italian - Giorgio Amitrano, Antonietta Pastore
- Korean - Kim Choon Mie, Kim Nanjoo
- Latvian - Inguna Bekere
- Lithuanian - Milda Dyke, Irena Jomantiene, Jurate Nauronaite, Marius Dakus, Dalia Saukaityte, Ieva Stasiunaite
- Norwegian - Ika Kaminka, Kari and Kjell Risvik
- Persian - Gita Garakani, Mehdi Ghobarayi, Bozorgmehr Sharafoddin
- Polish - Anna Zielinska-Elliott
- Portuguese - Maria Joăo Lourenço, Leiko Gotoda
- Romanian - Angela Hondru, Silvia Cercheaza, Andreea Sion, Iuliana Tomescu
- Russian - Dmitry V. Kovalenin, Ivan Sergeevich Logatchev, Sergey Ivanovich Logatchev, Anatoly Lyan
- Serbian - Nataa Tomic, Divna Tomic
- Slovak - Lucia Krulíková
- Slovenian - Nika Cejan, Aleksander Mermal
- Spanish - Lourdes Porta, Junichi Matsuura, Fernando Rodríguez-Izquierdo y Gavala
- Swedish - Yukiko Duke, Eiko Duke, Vibeke Emond
- Thai - Noppadol Vatsawat, Komsan Nantachit, Tomorn Sukprecha
- Turkish - Pinar Polat, Nihal Önol
- Ukrainian - Ivan Dzjuba, Oleksandr Bibko
- Vietnamese - Trinh Lu, Tran Tien Cao Dang, Duong Tuong, Cao Viet Dung, Pham Xuan Nguyen
External links
Interviews
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