Haruki Murakami (村上春樹, born January 12, 1949) is a popular Japanese writer and translator. His first novel Hear the Wind Sing won a literary prize in 1979. Murakami has since published several best-selling novels and short story collections. In 1986, Murakami left Japan to live in Europe and North America, but returned to Japan in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyo gas attack, both of which he wrote about later.
Murakami's fiction, which is often criticised for being "pop" literature by Japan's literary establishment, is humorous and surreal, and at the same time reflects an essential loneliness and longing for love in a way that has touched readers in the West as well as in East Asia.
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