Haruki Murakami’s life has been shaped by the kinds of sudden inexplicable encounters that fill his writing with a characteristic buoyancy and unpredictability. In 1978, then a young proprietor of a jazz bar in Tokyo, Murakami attended a baseball game. While sipping a beer, Murakami watched a player walk up to the diamond, swing, and score a double – which is when Murakami suddenly thought: “I could write a novel… I went to a stationery store and bought a fountain pen and paper” (qtd. in Rubin 30). In this way, at the age of twenty-nine, Murakami was inspired to write his first work, Hear the Wind Sing (1979).
Hear the Wind Sing – with minimalist prose, an experimental point of view, and a disjointed structure – won Gunzo Magazine’s new writer award in 1980....
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Citation: Chozick, Matthew. "Haruki Murakami". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 May 2008; last revised 25 August 2025. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5415, accessed 18 December 2025.]
