RP334 Japan's Literary Superstar

 RP334 Japan's Literary Superstar

Haruki Murakami's aptitude for blurring the line between the real and imagined has earned him fame on both sides of the Pacific. What makes this Japanese writer so popular not only in his home country but also overseas?
For starters, Murakami has quite a romantic background. Born in 1949 to parents who were Japanese literature teachers, he studied drama at a university in Tokyo. After graduating, he worked at a record shop for a while before deciding to open up a jazz bar with his wife in the mid-1970s.
The inspiration to write a novel came to him while watching a baseball game in 1978. After he got home that night, he grabbed a pen and started writing. Months later he sent his work off to a literary contest and they agreed to publish it. This was Hear the Wind Sing, his first novel. Murakami kept on writing but remained relatively unknown in Japan until the publication of Norwegian Wood in 1987. A decade later, international audiences fell in love with him upon the release of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. When his 2013 novel Colorless Tzukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage was released in Japan, it sold 350,000 copies in the first three days.
Murakami's books have now been translated into over 50 languages worldwide and many people openly speculate that he will one day win the Nobel Prize in Literature. That was quite an inspirational game of baseball!
Readers the world over also love Murakami's unique style. It's as if he can see through our world and into the next. This lets him write novels that provide readers with the purest form of escape, letting them take a vacation from reality.
His prose flows from a mix of Eastern and Western culture. He had a Japanese upbringing, yet many of his cultural influences came from the West. He grew up reading Western authors such as Kurt Vonnegut and F. Scott Fitzgerald and listened to music by Thelonious Monk, Nat King Cole, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan.
The end result was an author who was raised on rebels yet lived in a society where everyone conformed. This contradiction did not manifest itself in his novels as a political point of view, but rather as a blurred line between reality and fantasy.