Murakami, Haruki

Haruki Murakami grew up as an only child in a traditional Japanese family. Both parents taught Japanese literature and his paternal grandfather was a Buddhist priest. Murakami was born in Kyoto, but the family soon moved to the suburbs on the outskirts of Kobe and Osaka. He abandoned his literature studies at the Waseda University in Tokyo when he married another student, Yoko Takahashi; they are still together. The couple ran the Peter Cat jazz club in Shinjuku, a Tokyo suburb, for seven years. At the end of the 1980s, Murakami tried to live like a European. He spent a few years in Greece and Italy with his wife, and that was where he wrote Norwegian Wood. He lived in the United States between 1991 and 1995 where he was a guest lecturer at Princeton and writer in residence at Medford University, Massachusetts.