HARUKI MURAKAMI is considered one of the world's leading contemporary writers. He was born in Kyoto in 1949 and got married very early, shortly after turning twenty. Together with his wife, they opened a jazz club in Tokyo named Peter Cat. Murakami attributes his decision to write to a paradoxical moment of sudden inspiration during a baseball game. Alongside his night job, he continued to write and translate major American authors, but turned exclusively to writing only after the enormous success of the novel NORWEGIAN WOOD, which has sold more than 10,000,000 copies worldwide and was made into a film. Since then, Murakami has divided his time between Japan and Hawaii, working on his novels with unprecedented consistency. He particularly loves and once completed, on his own, the route of the classic Athens marathon. He has been honored with the Franz Kafka, Jerusalem, and Hans Christian Andersen awards, as well as Japan's most prestigious literary award, the Yomiuri Prize, and is consistently among the candidates for the Nobel Prize.