Haruki Murakami
About him
Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer and one of contemporary literature's true international stars. He was born in Kyoto in 1949 and he began to write when he was 29. His books and stories have been bestsellers in Japan as well as internationally, with his work being translated into 50 languages and selling millions of copies outside his native country. He has also translated works by writers like Raymond Carver and J. D. Salinger into Japanese.
His literary style
His fiction is greatly influenced by Western authors, and he draws inspiration from authors as Franz Kafka and Kurt Vonnegat. Its writing style is frequently surrealistic and melancholic or fatalistic, marked bya Kafkaesque rendition of the recurrent themes of alienation and loneliness. Most of his works use use first-person narrative, coherently to the tradition of the Japanese I Novel genre.
His most famous novels
- Norvegian Wood (1987)
- Dance Dance Dance (1988)
- Kafka on the Shore (2002)
- 1Q84 (2009)
- Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013)