Haruki Murakami
- Writer
Haruki Murakami graduated from Waseda University, Tokyo, in 1975.
Widely considered one of Japan's most important 20th-century novelists.
His often solitary, withdrawn, and world-weary protagonists are generally stripped of
Japanese tradition. Frequently called postmodern, his fiction, which
often includes elements of surreal fantasy and is sprinkled with
references to American popular culture, is cool and contemporary; his
distinctive style is often characterized as "hard-boiled." His first
novel was Hear the Wind Sing (1979). Since then he has published such
novels as Pinball 1973 (1980), A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), Hard-Boiled
Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), Norwegian Wood (1987),
Dance, Dance, Dance (1988), The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995), The
Sputnik Sweetheart (1999), and Kafka on the Shore (2002). He has also
written short stories, e.g., those collected in The Elephant Vanishes
(1993) and After the Quake (2002), and done translations. His first
nonfiction book, Underground (2001), is an oral history of the 1995 gas
attack by religious extremists in the Tokyo subway and its relation to
the Japanese psyche.