Haruki Murakami (Author) 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. Philip Gabriel (Translator) 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 Kuroi's 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 .