Haruki Murakami holds the titles of both the most popular novelist in Japan and the most popular Japanese novelist in the wider world. After publishing Norwegian Wood in 1987, a book often called “the Japanese Catcher in the Rye,” Murakami’s notoriety exploded to such an extent that he felt forced out of his homeland, a country whose traditional ways and — to his mind — conformist mindset never sat right with him in the first place. Though he returned to Japan in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo underground gas attacks, he remained an author shaped by his favorite foreign cultures — especially America’s. This, combined with his yearning to break from established Japanese literary norms, has generated enough international demand for his work to sell briskly in almost every language in which people read novels.
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st0nedeyesays...Definitely one of my favorite writers.
sfcablecarsays...Reading Murakami has made me look at the world differently. Wonderful. Please pick up one of his books.
siftbotsays...Moving this video to kulpims's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.
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