Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami grew up in Ashiya, near Kobe, moved to Tokyo for Waseda University, and published Hear the Wind Sing in 1979 after spending seven years owning a small jazz bar. Norwegian Wood arrived in 1987, followed by The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in the mid-nineties, Kafka on the Shore in 2002, and 1Q84 in 2009-10 - the last ranked by the Asahi Shimbun as the best work of Japan's Heisei era. His fiction moves through science fiction, fantasy, crime, and magical realism, drawing on inspirations like Raymond Chandler and Kurt Vonnegut, while his non-fiction includes Underground, an oral history of the Tokyo subway sarin attack, and a running memoir. Japan's literary establishment has called him un-Japanese; he's called himself a black sheep. His editor at The Elephant Vanishes called him truly extraordinary, and Steven Poole at The Guardian placed him among the world's greatest living novelists, but the polarization holds.