Wed Sep 13 2000 at 21:02:27
Murakami Haruki was born in Kyoto in 1949, but spent his childhood in the city of Kobe. After graduating from Kobe High School, he attended university at Waseda, in Tokyo, and majored in Classical Drama. He reportedly decided to begin writing one day in 1974, while watching a baseball game. It was also in this year that he began running a coffee shop specializing in jazz, which he ran until 1981.
Murakami labored in relative obscurity until the publication of
Norwegian Wood in 1987. This novel became quite big in Japan, and Murakami found himself famous. Already a seasoned traveler -- he lived in Greece and Italy while writing Norwegian Wood -- Murakami fled his fame and lived for a long while in the United States, including stints at Princeton and in Cambridge, MA.