Written by Jon Williams
For the past
few weeks you’ve been seeing Haruki Murakami’s name at or near the top of the
bestseller lists. His recent novel
Colorless
Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, released on August 12, went
straight to the top of the
New York Times
list, where it remains in the top ten. It follows the main character as he
attempts to get his life in order by reuniting and making amends with friends
from his youth. Murakami’s own story, though, is just as interesting.
Born in
Kyoto 1949, Murakami went on to study drama in college in Tokyo. Instead of
pursuing that as a career, however, he and his wife opened a jazz club.
According to Murakami himself, he didn’t write at all until he was 29 years
old. Then, while attending a baseball game, he was struck with the notion that
he could write a novel. He had to stop on his way home from the ballpark to buy
a pen and paper, but he began work that very night on the manuscript that would
become Hear the Wind Sing, his first
novel. Although that book is not widely available in English, a new translation
is in the works, scheduled for a 2015 release. It will be paired with a new
translation of his second novel, Pinball,
1973, which is also rare in its current English version.
While
Pinball, 1973 was his first novel
translated into English, Murakami did not gain international acclaim until his
third and fourth novels,
A Wild Sheep
Chase (written 1982, translated 1989; currently unavailable) and
Hard-Boiled
Wonderland and the End of the World (written 1985, translated 1991),
which worked in elements of fantasy and magical realism. Then came
Norwegian Wood (currently unavailable as
an audiobook, although the
movie
adaptation is available), a realistic coming-of-age novel, and perhaps his
most famous to date. That made its way to the U.S. in 2000. Since then he has
published such novels as
The
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,
Kafka
on the Shore, and
1Q84
(his most recent work prior to
Colorless
Tsukuru), all of which came available to English readers in much shorter
order than his previous works.
Murakami’s
novels are his most popular works, but they are by no means his only literary
occupation. He is a noted translator, adapting into Japanese so much of the
American literature that has had such an influence on him, such as
Breakfast
at Tiffany’s,
The
Long Goodbye, and
The
Great Gatsby, among many others. In between novels he writes short stories,
a form in which he claims to find more joy. You can find examples of his short
fiction in the collection
After
the Quake, a collection dealing with the aftermath of the 1995
earthquake in Kobe, Japan. He also ventures into non-fiction with
What
I Talk About When I Talk About Running, a memoir of his dedication to
fitness. Like his writing life, Murakami came relatively late to running—beginning
at age 33, he has run one marathon each year since, as well as one 110km
ultra-marathon.
Needless to
say, you haven’t heard the last of this driven literary dynamo. A new story,
Strange
Library, arrives in December. With the print version coming it at a scant
96 pages, its length is quite a contrast to most of his work. What comes after
that is anyone’s guess. As Murakami prefers to challenge himself as he writes,
it’s certain to be compelling.