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, which 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 29 and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. Posh and pop, sublimity and superficiality, history and fantasy, trash and transcendence: they switch positions and then fuse - Boyd Tonkin * Independent * In its bones, this novel is a thriller * Daily Telegraph * It is a work of maddening brilliance and gripping originality, deceptively casual in style, but vibrating with wit, intellect and ambition - Richard Lloyd Parry * The Times * Which other author can remind you simultaneously of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and JK Rowling, not merely within the same chapter but on the same page? Viewed through the "post-modern" lens, his exemplary blend of a light touch and weighty themes, of high literature and popular entertainment, ticks every box.
So like Murakami himself, I'll borrow from Orwell: 1Q84 is quite simply doubleplusgood * Independent on Sunday * 1Q84 reads like a cross between Stieg Larsson and Roberto Bolano. It is his most achieved novel an epic in which form and content are neatly aligned. Murakami's magnum opus * Japan Times * 1Q84 has a range and sophistication that surpasses anything else in his oeuvre.
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