Pinball, 1973

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.Theodore (Ted) Goossen has translated the workof many Japanese writers, most notably NaoyaShiga, Haruki Murakami, and Hiromi Kawakami.He is the editor of The Oxford Book of JapaneseShort Stories (1997) and the co-editor and founder, with Motoyuki Shibata, of the annualliterary journal Monkey Business (now Monkey:new writing from Japan), which, since 2011, hasintroduced a new generation of Japanese writers to English-speaking readers. Essays and stories by, as well as interviews with, Murakami are a staple of every issue.