These viewpoint characters are usually men, because for Murakami, and for the audience he imagines-that is, for the audience that most male writers imagine-male characters are the most transparent. Like Emerson’s transparent eyeball, they serve as a lens for the peculiarities that surround them: They’re impressionable and neutral at the same time. The nameless narrator of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World cooly scrutinizes a bizarre world inside his own mind. Think of Aomame from 1Q84, who floats through a slightly shifted alternate world, observing but largely apart from it. They are transparent nonentities, serving to focus and magnify. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring Murakami's place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers.It’s rare, though not impossible, to connect emotionally with one of Haruki Murakami’s characters.

His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami's unique and addictive fictional universe. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. In 1978, Haruki Murakami was 29 and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo.

Men and women murakami