Haruki Murakami is probably the most internationally acclaimed and influential contemporary Japanese author alive today. Over a career spanning 30 years, he has illustrated the apathy and ennui enveloping postwar Japan through sometimes wildly fantastic storytelling with surreal twists and turns, sprinkled with elements of Western philosophy and psychology.
Murakami is also known as a translator of modern American fiction, including novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, Truman Capote and J.D. Salinger.
He has ventured into nonfiction, releasing "Underground" in 1997 — a collection of interviews with the victims of the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attacks by the Aum Shinrikyo cult.