Word: murakami
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...Books: Haruki Murakami...
...Murakami acknowledges he has an "easygoing," accessible style, yet he's careful to rebut the chief accusation made against his work: that it's frothy entertainment. "Many of my readers read my books three or four times, because my novels are easy to read," Murakami says. "But the stories are not easy to understand." In A Wild Sheep Chase and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, for example, he examines complex issues, such as Japan's brutal colonialism in the first half of the 20th century, while also portraying his characters' struggles to reconcile their hopes and fears with the lives...
...Murakami tells it, his emergence as a novelist was a mystical experience-an artistic epiphany. It came in 1977, he says, as he sat in Tokyo's Jingu Stadium watching his favorite baseball team, the Yakult Swallows. When batter Dave Hilton hit a double, Murakami, then 28, says he heard a voice telling him to begin his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing. "That was one of the happiest experiences of my life," he recalls. "Perhaps the happiest." A decade later came the momentous publication of Norwegian Wood. Until then, the psychomysteries that formed the bulk of Murakami's work...
...Today, Murakami does much of his writing at an apartment in Omotesando, a chic Tokyo neighborhood. His spartan office there is as businesslike as its inhabitant. Unassuming as ever, he still dresses in jeans, casual shirts and sneakers, runs 10 kilometers a day, watches his diet, goes to bed early and rises before dawn to work. "He has been the same right from the beginning," says Mizumaru Anzai, an illustrator and writer who has known Murakami for three decades...
...thing that has changed, though, is his writing. Murakami has an uncanny connection to the sensibilities of his readers, many of whom are educated Japanese urbanites in their 30s and 40s. As their worldviews have shifted, so has the material in Murakami's novels. In the 1980s, when Japan's bubble economy was in full swing, his novels featured protagonists who were "very cool, very detached," says Murakami. "It was all very cool fantasy. I was escaping from the real world. But without realizing it, I got used to fighting-against the world, surroundings and the system. My stories have...