Recently, I’ve had an urge to read Murakami again so I decided to start with After Dark, which is probably the shortest of all of his novels. I ended up buying 5 of them but I only read Norwegian Wood, leaving the other 4 to collect dust on my shelf. Strange nocturnal happenings, or a trick of the night? MY THOUGHTSĪbout 6-7 years ago, I started collecting Murakami’s books, fully intending to read them. But tonight as the digital clock displays 00:00, a hint of life flickers across the TV screen, though the television’s plug has been pulled out. Meanwhile Mari’s beautiful sister Eri sleeps a deep, heavy sleep that is ‘too perfect, too pure’ to be normal she has lain asleep for two months. Later, Mari is interrupted again by a girl from the Alphaville Hotel a Chinese prostitute has been hurt by a client, and she needs Mari’s help.
Mari sips her coffee and glances up from a book as a young man, a musician, intrudes on her solitude. 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.The midnight hour approaches in an almost empty all-night diner. 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. 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 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. 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.
That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo.
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