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. 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. 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 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. 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, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. It makes sense that Murakami’s work might prove popular in times of political anxiety: it exerts an entrancing, sometimes almost sedative effect on the reader, the strangeness of the plot. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. This is the first Murakami I’ve read after hearing about his brilliance for years (and years).

One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo.

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