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. Combined, the three novels form a trilogy that capture the outlook of 1970s youth with chic, droll panache. Hard-Boiled Wonderland introduced a science fiction ambience to Murakami's work and bagged the Tanizaki Jun'ichiro Prize in 1985. He has translated American writers such as Raymond Carver whose sparseness he mirrors. Murakami sells more novels in translation than any other Japanese author. Work: Pinball, 1973 (1985); Hear The Wind Sing (1987); Norwegian Wood (1989); A Wild Sheep Chase (1989); Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End Of The World (1993); The Elephant Vanishes: Short Stories (1993); Dance Dance Dance (1994); Coin Locker Babies (1995); The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1997); Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack And The Japanese Psyche (2000); Sputnik Sweetheart (2002); After The Quake: Stories (2002). Subplot: Dried-up wells, only children, the unbearable beauty of the female ear lobe - Murakami is a sucker for weird, desolate detail. Read Underground - his analysis of the Aum Shirikyo subway attack whose nightmare novelty inspired him to find out exactly what happened in the Tokyo subway that clear spring day in 1995. Murakami interviewed survivors, many of whom had diligently continued their commutes, hacking and coughing into the city. One passenger, on a weekly errand to purchase milk, pressed on to the market even as he started to black out. 'Thinking back on it now,' Murakami quotes him as saying, 'it's a mystery to me why I'd buy milk . . . when I was in such agony.' Underground describes a society so aligned to routine that only a catastrophe could derail it. Murakami later strikingly said the event marked the beginning of Japan's economic decline. 'People believed that the harder we work, the richer we become,' he said. 'All of a sudden people realised that wasn't happening. People became pessimistic.'