Haruki Murakami Books in Order

About Haruki Murakami

Murakami ran a jazz bar in Tokyo before he was thirty — and describes having the idea for his first novel while watching a baseball game in 1978, in the outfield of Jingu Stadium, as a ball arced into the sky and in that single moment he understood he could write a novel. He went home and began that same night. Hear the Wind Sing (1979) won a literary prize but he considered it juvenilia; it is the first of a loose trilogy with Pinball, 1973 and A Wild Sheep Chase, and was long unavailable in English translation.

What made Murakami a global phenomenon was Norwegian Wood (1987), a realistic novel of grief and young love in 1960s Tokyo that sold three million copies in Japan alone when it was published, generating a level of fame he found suffocating. He left Japan, lived in Greece and Italy and the United States, and wrote The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore while abroad. His novels are recognisable by their loneliness, their jazz and classical music, their cats, their women who leave, their protagonists who cook and run and feel subtly displaced — and by the way they make the surreal feel inevitable. 1Q84 (2009–2010), his longest work, is an alternate-history literary thriller running to nearly 1,000 pages.