Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949, the son of two Japanese literature teachers. He studied drama at Waseda University, where he met his wife Yoko, and promptly did the most un-literary thing imaginable: he opened a jazz club called Peter Cat in Tokyo, spending his twenties pouring drinks and spinning records.

The origin story is now legend: At age 29, watching a baseball game at Jingu Stadium, he was struck by a sudden, inexplicable certainty that he could write a novel. He went home that night and started. “Hear the Wind Sing” won the Gunzo Prize for new writers. So Murakami, uncomfortable with sudden fame, did what his protagonists would later do: he disappeared. He moved to Greece and Italy in 1986, then America in 1991, running marathons and writing in isolation.

What emerged was a body of work that the Japanese literary establishment dismissed as "un-Japanese” - too Western, too influenced by Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Chandler and American Jazz. Murakami didn't care. He translated “The Great Gatsby” and “Catcher in the Rye” into Japanese. He wrote about loneliness, cats, wells, parallel dimensions, and men cooking spaghetti at 3am while the world quietly unraveled around them.

He's now among the most-read authors on the planet, ever. He’s perpetually shortlisted for the Nobel Prize. He’s still running marathons into his seventies, still chasing whatever it was that hit him in that baseball stadium, still descending into wells to see what's at the bottom.