Author Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami is an internationally recognized writer and also a translator. He was born in Japan in January 12th of 1949. Born in Kyoto but he grew up in Kobe and graduated a college in Tokyo where he met his wife. After graduating a college, he owned a jazz bar called "Peter Cat" for several years where he wrote his first novel. Winning the Gunzou literature prize with his first novel Hear the Wind Sing, he closed his Jazz bar and became a full-time writer and now his novel is translated into about forty lanaguages.

Murakami's writing style is usually humorous and surreal. He is known for presenting serious matters in a light and casual way, and write casual matters in a deep and serious voice with his insightful, imaginative point of view.

He is highly influenced by Western culture which includes various writers such as Raymond Chandler and Kurt Vonnegut and he is a big fan of Jazz music which appears a lot in his stories. It's been said that he could succeed internationally because of the lifestyles of the narrators of his stories involved a lot with western culture.
For instance most of the food that appears in his stories are western food instead of Japanese food (there's even a short story called "The Year of Spaghetti" where the narrator cooked the spaghetti everyday for a whole year.)

In his stories people wear Italian brands and drink German beers and smoke American cigarettes. They travel to Hawaii, Greek and listen to Jazz music by Nat King Cole. The apperance of Japanese culture is almost minimal and that could've appealed to the international readers since they can easily relate to the universal life-style.