Profile
村上春樹（1949年-）は京都生まれの小説家。ジャズ喫茶を経営する傍ら29歳で執筆を始め、『ノルウェイの森』『海辺のカフカ』『1Q84』など50言語以上に翻訳された作品を発表。エルサレム賞（2009年）など国際的評価も高い。
Haruki Murakami was born on January 12, 1949, in the Fushimi district of Kyoto, Japan, and grew up in Nishinomiya and Ashiya in Hyogo Prefecture. He studied theater arts at Waseda University’s School of Literature in Tokyo, where he immersed himself in American fiction, jazz, and cinema. In 1974, he and his wife Yoko opened a small jazz bar, Peter Cat, in Kokubunji, Tokyo. On April 1, 1978, while watching a baseball game at Jingu Stadium, he experienced a sudden, inexplicable certainty: he could write a novel. He was 29. That evening, he sat at the kitchen table after closing the bar and began to write.
His debut novel, Hear the Wind Sing (1979), won the Gunzo Prize for New Writers. His breakthrough came with Norwegian Wood (1987), which sold over four million copies in Japan alone and triggered a cultural phenomenon dubbed the “Murakami Boom.” Subsequent works — The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95), Kafka on the Shore (2002), 1Q84 (2009–10), and Killing Commendatore (2017) — have been translated into more than fifty languages, placing him among the world’s most widely read living novelists. He is also a celebrated translator into Japanese of American writers, including Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and J. D. Salinger. His non-fiction memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007, Bungeishunju) explores the shared discipline of long-distance running and the novelist’s craft.
In 2009, Murakami accepted the Jerusalem Prize at the Jerusalem International Book Fair, making the controversial decision to attend despite international calls to boycott in response to the Gaza conflict. His acceptance speech — in which he used the metaphor of a wall and an egg to declare his unconditional commitment to the individual over any system or institution — was widely published and quoted worldwide. He has also received the Franz Kafka Prize (2006) and the Catalonia International Prize (2011). He remains a perennial contender for the world’s major literary awards and continues to write prolifically, maintaining for over three decades a daily routine of early rising and a ten-kilometre run that he considers as inseparable from the act of writing itself.