Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami , 1949-, Japanese novelist, b. Kyoto, grad. Waseda Univ., Tokyo, 1975. He lived in Europe and the United States from 1986 to 1995. Widely considered one of Japan's most important contemporary novelists, he is heavily influenced by American culture and has been criticized by some Japanese critics as overly Westernized. His often solitary, withdrawn, and world-weary protagonists are generally stripped of Japanese tradition. Frequently designated as postmodern, his cool, contemporary fiction is often characterized by both realism and surreal fantasy, and is sprinkled with references to American popular culture. His distinctive style has often been called "hard-boiled" and includes elements of great moral seriousness as well as passages of whimsy and slapstick comedy. His central theme has been charactized as the elusiveness of human identity.

Murakami's first novel was Hear the Wind Sing (1979, tr. 1987). Since then he has published A Wild Sheep Chase (1982, tr. 1989), Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985, tr. 1991), Norwegian Wood (1987, tr. 1989), Dance, Dance, Dance (1988, tr. 1993), The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995, tr. 1998), The Sputnik Sweetheart (1999, tr. 2001), Kafka on the Shore (2002, tr. 2005), and After Dark (2004, tr. 2007). He has also written short stories, e.g., those collected in The Elephant Vanishes (tr. 1993) and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (tr. 2006). His first nonfiction book, Underground (2001), is an oral history of the 1995 gas attack by Aum Shinrikyo in the Tokyo subway and its relation to the Japanese psyche. He has also translated various works from English to Japanese, including those of Raymond Carver , whose stark, vernacular style and pop-culture allusions have influenced Murakami's own fiction. Murakami's second book of nonfiction, whose title, What I Talk about When I Talk about Running (2008), riffs on one of Carver's, combines a runner's diary, meditations on writing, and personal memoir.

Bibliography: See study by J. Rubin (2002).