Haruki Murakami’s life has been shaped by the kinds of sudden inexplicable encounters that fill his writing with a characteristic buoyancy and unpredictability. In 1978, for instance, Murakami, then a young proprietor of a jazz bar in Tokyo, attended a baseball game. While sipping a beer, Murakami watched a player walk up to the diamond, swing, and score a double – which is when Murakami suddenly thought: “I could write a novel… I went to a stationery store and bought a fountain pen and paper.” In this way, at the age of twenty-nine, Murakami was inspired to write his first work, Hear the Wind Sing (1979).
Hear the Wind Sing – with minimalist prose, an experimental point of view,…
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