The hunt for the sheep

Haruki Murakami

(* 12/1/1949) is considered one of the most important contemporary Japanese writers. In 1973, he graduated from Waseda University in Tokyo and, instead of seeking permanent employment with a large corporation, he took a truly revolutionary step and opened a jazz bar in a Tokyo suburb. When, on a sudden impulse, he decided to start writing his first novel, hardly anyone could have guessed what a significant author he would soon become. By the time he published his third work, A Wild Sheep Chase (Czech ed. 2016), for which he received the Noma Literary Prize for New Writers in 1982, people were already talking about the “Murakami phenomenon.” Three years later, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Czech ed. 2008) was published, for which the author received the prestigious Tanizaki Prize. In 1987, the novel Norwegian Wood (Czech ed. 2002) was released—it didn't win any literary awards, but it broke all records, with more than four million copies sold in Japan alone. His subsequent works enjoyed similar success: South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992, Czech ed. 2004) and Sputnik Sweetheart (1999, Czech ed. 2009). In 2003, he published the novel Kafka on the Shore (Czech ed. 2006) and a year later, the prose work After Dark (Czech ed. 2007). The author's “memoir” What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, the short story collections After the Quake (2010) and Men Without Women (2015), and the novels 1Q84 (2012, 2013), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (2014), and colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2015) have also been translated into Czech. Illustrated versions of three of the author's short stories have also been published: Sleep (2013), The Strange Library (2014), and The Second Bakery Attack (2016). In October 2006, the author was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in Prague. In 2009, he received the Jerusalem Prize. Murakami's works have been translated into fifty languages.