Haruki Murakami stats:

• Born 12 January 1949 in Kyoto, Japan
• Studied drama at Waseda University, Tokyo
• First job at a record shop inspired the main character of Norwegian Wood
• Ran Peter Cat jazz bar in Tokyo from 1974-1981
• Wrote his first novel in 1979, at 29
• 1982 - first critical success, A Wild Sheep Chase
• 1987 - Norwegian Wood published
• First non-fiction published in 1997, Underground, a series of interviews with victims of a 1995 poison gas attack on Tokyo’s subway
• Kafka on the Shore published in 2002, English version 2005
• 2008 - autobiographical account of his hobby What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
• 2011 - film version of Norwegian Wood released

Murakami on Murakami:

• Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don’t think so… I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games. - Time Magazine, 2002
• For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.
• Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).
• I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. - San Francisco Chronicle, 2008
• My writing style rarely depends on the character of the Japanese language. So, I think what is lost in the process of translation is relatively little - Japan Times, 2008