The dirty facades, the nameless crowds, the unremitting noise, the packed rush-hour trains, the grey skies, the billboards on every square centimetre of available space, the hopes and resignation, irritation and excitement. And everywhere, infinite options, infinite possibilities. An infinity, and at the same time, zero. We try to scoop it all up in our hands, and what we get is a handful of zero. That's the city. That's when I remember what that Chinese girl said. This was never any place I was meant to be.
From A Slow Boat To China in Haruki Murakami's short story collection The Elephant Vanishes
Life: One of Asia's hippest writers, Haruki Murakami was born in Kobe in 1949. He entered Waseda University, where he studied theatre and married a classmate named Yoko.
For three years the couple lived with and were subsidised by Yoko's parents. In 1974 they opened a jazz coffee shop in Tokyo, which Murakami would later commemorate in a short story with a long-winded title and a dryly melancholic take on the monotony that was soon destined to change.
In 1979, Murakami visited Tokyo's Jingu Stadium to watch a baseball game. In the middle of the game, he suddenly experienced an overwhelming urge to write a novel.
From then on, he devoted his nights to writing in his kitchen after the coffee shop closed. Murakami finished his first novel, Hear The Wind Sing, the same year, winning the Gunzo Prize for New Writers.
Pinball, 1973 followed and A Wild Sheep Chase won the Noma Literary Award for New Writers in 1982.