PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
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.
Every creative person should read this short book. No rules are laid down, but for those with an open mind there are hints galore and the occasional precept. * Literary Review * A fascinating glimpse of the peculiar writerly life * Sunday Times *Books of the Year* * One of the most read authors around the world... You end this collection of beautiful essays vowing to never let life, or writing, get so complicated again. * Guardian, *Book of the Day* * A quirky, chatty collection of essays by the award-winning Japanese novelist... this charming collection opens up much of the Japanese master's thinking on a life of luck, hard work, and joy in his long vocation as a novelist. * Irish Independent * Intriguing glimpses inside the singular mind of Murakami -- Sean O'Hagan * Observer * Some of [Murakami's] best books are non-fiction: Underground, about the Tokyo sarin gas attack, and this year's Novelist as a Vocation, a book of essays about his life, writing method and the wellsprings of his extravagant imagination. -- Richard Lloyd Parry, Books of the Year * New Statesman * At any moment on our planet there are at most a few dozen novelists working with great power, for a broad audience, with the material of consciousness, which is what the novel is so uniquely good at handling, how it feels to be inside us, what it means, the devastations and beauties it brings. Murakami is one of them. * New York Times Book Review * It's safe to say there is no one like Murakami * Literary Review * A true original * The Times * A master storyteller * Sunday Times *
