Creator / Haruki Murakami

Most authors don't write simultaneous futuristic thrillers and pastoral fantasies about people with slashed eyes. Most authors don't write about chains of events set off by a missing cat. Most authors don't write about 15 year-old Oedipuses.

Most authors are not Haruki Murakami (born January 12, 1949).

Murakami's works include twelve novels, dozens of short stories, an autobiography, and a non-fiction book of essays and interviews exploring a terrorist attack on Tokyo's subways that occurred in 1995. He achieved literary super-stardom in Japan with the publication of Norwegian Wood, but opinion is very much divided among the Japanese literary community whether he is a genius or a purveyor of somewhat odd popular fiction. His fans say, why not both?

Fiction:

Novels:

• The “Trilogy of the Rat”
  • Hear the Wind Sing
  • Pinball, 1973
  • A Wild Sheep Chase
• Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
• Norwegian Wood
• Dance Dance Dance
• South of the Border, West of the Sun
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
• Sputnik Sweetheart
• Kafka on the Shore
• After Dark
• 1Q84
• Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
• Killing Commendatore

Short story collections:

• The Elephant Vanishes, which includes Barn Burning, the basis for movie Burning (2018).
• after the quake
• Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, which, along with Super-Frog Saves Tokyo from After the Quake, adapted into a French animated film of the same name.
• Let’s Meet in a Dream (in collaboration with Shigesato Itoi)
• Men Without Women, which includes Drive My Car - the basis for the 2021 movie of the same name.

Non-Fiction:

• Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
• On Music

Murakami's fiction often concerns dreams, sex, violence, the inexplicable, loneliness, parallel worlds, jazz and cats.

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Murakami and his works provide examples of the following:

• Amnesiac Lover: The narrator imagines that he and his dream girl are actually both examples of this in "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning."
• Author Appeal:
  • Murakami seems bizarrely fixated on ears, for some reason.
  • He’s also a huge jazz fan. In a 2007 essay for the New York Times Book Review, he discussed his his prior career as a jazz club proprietor in Tokyo, named Peter Cat, and the influence and inspiration that his writing has drawn from jazz music.
  • He also loves reading—basically, all of his protagonists are avid readers.
  • Wells and cats also appear in much of his work.
  • Adolescent or pubescent girls, often troubled and/or with difficult lives, tend to appear in his books. They usually strike a bond with the protagonist, who becomes a sort of protector.
  • He also loves whisky—a collection of whiskies reduced to pieces and spilled liquid is his idea of nightmare fuel. And an antagonist is named after a well-known Scottish brand.
  • Many characters in his series are concepts given physical form. Such as Johnny Walker and Colonel Sanders.
  • Suicide shows up a lot in his works, particularly in Norwegian Wood and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
• Bad Ass Bookworm: Murakami himself, who is a triathlete and marathon runner (which is the main subject of his memoir).
• Cats Are Magic: Pops up frequently, especially in Kafka on the Shore.
• Creator's Oddball: In contrast to his other, more experimental and postmodern novels, Norwegian Wood is a fairly straightforward coming-of-age/love story.

• First Installment Wins: Discussed in What I write when talking about writing, in which he considers Ernest Hemingway first two books,The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms alongside Nick Adams stories to be the best stories of the man. He remarks these tales have an energy to them that takes his breath away, but later stories lack the impact of the first.
• Fix Fic: Samsa in Love is a more optimistic take on Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis in which Gregor Samsa doesn't commit suicide and instead transforms back into a human with no memory of his experiences as a giant bug. Afterwards, he bonds with a hunchback woman while readjusting to the human world.
• Food Porn: His books often have detailed descriptions of what the protagonist is cooking or eating.

• Literary Allusion Title: Pinball, 1973's title is an allusion to Kenzaburo Oe's The Silent Cry (Japanese title Football, Man'en 1^note 1860, according to the Gregorian calendar).

• Mind Screw: In almost every single book. The notable exception to this is Norwegian Wood, which was his attempt to write a book very much unlike his usual work.
• Nameless Narrative: The Trilogy of the Rat, and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.
• No Ending: Some of his stories. Most infamously, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.
• No Export for You: Up until 2015, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 had never been published outside of Japan (with the odd exception of Thailand), as Murakami was not anxious for a wider audience to find his earliest work. Translations into English have been published for students of English in Japan, and can be found here and there on the internet. Both works finally got a wider English release in 2015, combined into one volume as Wind/Pinball: Two Novels.

• Trilogy Creep: Dance Dance Dance to the "Trilogy of the Rat".

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