'His fantasies, with their easy reference to western pulp fiction and music, retain a beauty of the mind' Guardian
In 1978, Haruki Murakami was 29 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, which turned Murakami from a writer into a
phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many
languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to
Murakami's unique and addictive fictional universe.
Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a
day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance
running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and
races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records
and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I
Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and
they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing
quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of
imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,
1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious
and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant
readers, ensuring Murakami's place as one of the world's most
acclaimed and well-loved writers.
His fantasies, with their easy reference to western pulp fiction
and music, retain a beauty of the mind
*Guardian*
A remarkable writer...he captures the common ache of contemporary
heart and head
*Jay McInerney*
Combines a witty sci-fi pastiche and a dream-like Utopian fantasy
in two separate narratives which alternate in an interweave of
precognition and deja vu
*Independent*
Here is abundant imagination at play
*Sunday Times*
Murakami's bold willingness to go straight-over-the-top has always
been a signal indication of his genius...a powerful melange of
disillusioned radicalism, keen intelligence, wicked sarcasm and a
general allegiance to the surreal. If Murakami is the "voice of a
generation," as he is often proclaimed in Japan, then it is the
generation of Thomas Pynchon and Don De Lillo
*Washington Post*
The last surviving victim of an experiment that implanted the subjects' heads with electrodes that decipher coded messages is the unnamed narrator of this excellent book by Murakami, one of Japan's best-selling novelists and winner of the prestigious Tanizaki prize. Half the chapters are set in Tokyo, where the narrator negotiates underground worlds populated by INKlings, dodges opponents of both sides of a raging high-tech infowar, and engages in an affair with a beautiful librarian with a gargantuan appetite. In alternating chapters he tries to reunite with his mind and his shadow, from which he has been severed by the grim, dark ``replacement'' consciousness implanted in him by a dotty neurophysiologist. Both worlds share the unearthly theme of unicorn skulls that moan and glow. Murakami's fast-paced style, full of hip internationalism, slangy allegory, and intrigue, has been adroitly translated. Murakami is also author of A Wild Sheep Chase ( LJ 10/15/89); his new work is recommended for academic libraries and public libraries emphasizing serious contemporary fiction.-- D.E. Perushek, Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville
His fantasies, with their easy reference to western pulp fiction
and music, retain a beauty of the mind * Guardian *
A remarkable writer...he captures the common ache of contemporary
heart and head -- Jay McInerney
Combines a witty sci-fi pastiche and a dream-like Utopian fantasy
in two separate narratives which alternate in an interweave of
precognition and deja vu -- Richard Lloyd Parry * Independent *
Here is abundant imagination at play * Sunday Times *
Murakami's bold willingness to go straight-over-the-top has always
been a signal indication of his genius...a powerful melange of
disillusioned radicalism, keen intelligence, wicked sarcasm and a
general allegiance to the surreal. If Murakami is the "voice of a
generation," as he is often proclaimed in Japan, then it is the
generation of Thomas Pynchon and Don De Lillo * Washington Post *
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