Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

About Haruki Murakami

Philip Gabriel is the author of Mad Wives and Island Dreams: Shimao Toshio and the Margins of Japanese Literature and Spirit Matters: The Transcendent in Modern Japanese Literature and has translated many novels and short stories by the writer Haruki Murakami and other modern writers. He is recipient of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature (2001) for his translation of Senji Kurois Life in the Cul-de-Sac and the 2006 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for his translation of Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. In 1978 Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel Hear the Wind Sing won a new writers' award and was published the following year. 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. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle 1Q84 What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Men Without Women Murakami's distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday of melancholy and humour continues to enchant readers ensuring his place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers.