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In 1978, Haruki Murakami was 29 and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers¿ award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami¿s unique and addictive fictional universe.
Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring Murakami¿s place as one of the world¿s most acclaimed and well-loved writers.
In 1978, Haruki Murakami was 29 and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami's unique and addictive fictional universe.
Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring Murakami's place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers.
In 1978, Haruki Murakami was 29 and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers¿ award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami¿s unique and addictive fictional universe.
Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring Murakami¿s place as one of the world¿s most acclaimed and well-loved writers.
In 1978, Haruki Murakami was 29 and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami's unique and addictive fictional universe.
Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring Murakami's place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers.
A mesmerising, epic, utterly involving masterpiece from Haruki Murakami
In 1978, Haruki Murakami was 29 and running a jazz bar in downtown
Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him
suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the
Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following
year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled
Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood,
published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a
phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many
languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to
Murakami's unique and addictive fictional universe.
Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a
day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance
running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and
races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records
and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I
Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and
they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing
quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of
imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,
1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious
and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant
readers, ensuring Murakami's place as one of the world's most
acclaimed and well-loved writers.
Murakami's magnum opus
*Japan Times*
1Q84 has a range and sophistication that surpasses anything else in
his oeuvre. It is his most achieved novel; an epic in which form
and content are neatly aligned... So like Murakami himself, I'll
borrow from Orwell: 1Q84 is quite simply doubleplusgood
*Independent on Sunday*
1Q84 reads like a cross between Stieg Larsson and Roberto Bolano...
In its bones, this novel is a thriller
*Daily Telegraph*
Eerie, suspenseful and packed full of gorgeous ordinary details and
provocative extraordinary events, Murakami takes weighty themes and
delivers a compulsive tale that is funny, fresh and intensely
surreal. Unmissable.
*Marie Claire*
It is a work of maddening brilliance and gripping originality,
deceptively casual in style, but vibrating with wit, intellect and
ambition
*The Times*
Which other author can remind you simultaneously of Fyodor
Dostoyevsky and JK Rowling, not merely within the same chapter but
on the same page? Viewed through the "post-modern" lens, his
exemplary blend of a light touch and weighty themes, of high
literature and popular entertainment, ticks every box. Posh and
pop, sublimity and superficiality, history and fantasy, trash and
transcendence: they switch positions and then fuse
*Independent*
A postmodernist mélange of fantasy worlds, dystopias, alternate
realities and genre pastiches, all overlaid on an unsuspecting
contemporary Japan. They are the sort of fiction that usually
attracts a cult following, but Mr Murakami's cult spreads across
the globe
*Wall Street Journal*
A surreal twist on the formula of David Nicholl's One Day; fate
preventing two soulmates from getting together from getting
together for decades... Stieg Larsson enthusiasts may enjoy the
novel too as Aomame could be Lisbeth Salader's Japanese cousin...
What makes Murakami cool as well as popular is has metaphysical
mischievousness, his playing around with the idea of alternate
realities... Every time you open 1Q84, you get the sensation of
falling down the rabbit hole, into a unique and addictive world
*Sunday Express*
The novel of the year... such are Murakami's gifts, both in terms
of his imagination and his skills as a writer, that the
near-magical world he conjures seems real and tangible
*Word*
His default setting as a writer lies in documenting a muted
alienation - Kafka with an iPod - and solace, in his books, tends
to be found in the sudden human connection of sex and longing, but
mostly his characters, like his readers, are left to figure things
out on their own with shifting and partial information to go on
*Observer*
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