Haruki Murakami is a Japanese author and translator who is known for his works of fiction and non-fiction worldwide. He never imagined he would become a writer. In 1970, he ran a jazz bar with his wife and at the age of 29, he began writing. He is a highly-skilled runner and loves detective stories. Every year he won a Japanese literary award. His fifth book, Norwegian Wood, was the first book published in Japan in 1987. He was praised as one of the world’s greatest living novelists by The Guardian. He received many awards including the Franz Kafka Prize, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and the Jerusalem Prize. He also wrote personal essays on running, entitled What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Jerusalem Prize, which has previously been awarded to J.M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, and V.S. Naipaul, is the most recent of his many international literary accolades.
Murakami’s novels are outstanding, realistic fiction aimed at exploring, and understanding the core of human identity.
5 Best Murakami Novels
Who is Haruki Murakami ?
- A. Runner
- B. Writer
- C. Ironer
- D. Singer
Best Murakami novels collection to amaze you
Norwegian Wood
The life of Toru Watanabe, a quiet and unusually serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and self-examining woman. But their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Toru begins to adjust to campus life, the loneliness, and isolation he faces there, Naoko feels pressure and the responsibilities of life as unbearable. Norwegian Wood is a story of one college student’s romantic coming-of-age that would remind one of their hopeless yet heroic love.
The Strange Library
The story is about a lonely, unnamed boy who ends up imprisoned in a labrinth beneath a library. The boy’s guard is an old librarian who wants to eat his brain but only after he memorizes the content of three obscure and weighty tomes on Ottoman tax collection.
A Wild Sheep Chase
This novel is full of wit, abnormality and fascination that would take the reader from Tokyo to the wildlife of Hokkaido. It is one of the most entertaining and exciting books of Murakami, a must read.
Kafka on the Shore
It’s an amazing story with a metaphysical reality tour by two remarkable characters, a teenage boy who runs out of home to avoid a gruesome oedipal prophecy and an elderly dullard.
This is Murakami’s most popular book.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
It is a fictional detective story about a disintegrating marriage and also the excavation of buried secrets of Japan’s forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II.
Toru Okada, a young man from a Tokyo suburb, searches for his wife’s missing cat. Later he also searches for his wife. This is the most beloved novel, exciting, inspiring, and involved with comedy and risk.
There are more of Haruki Murakami’s best books like Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, 1Q84, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Pinball-1973, Hear the Wind Sing and Dance Dance Dance.
Haruki Murakami has won the prestigious Yomiuri Prize in 1995 for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. The winner gets 2 million yen ($ 18000) and an inkstone for grinding one’s own ink.