Happy birthday Haruki Murakami !

Along time has passed since I started running on an everyday basis. Specifically, it was the fall of 1982. I was thirty-three then. Not long before that, I was the owner of a small jazz club in Tokyo, near Sendagaya Station. Soon after leaving college—I’d been so busy with side jobs that I was actually a few credits short of graduating and was still officially a student—I had opened a little club near the south entrance of Kokubunji Station. The club had stayed there for about three years; then, when the building it was in closed for renovations, I moved it to a new location, closer to the center of Tokyo. The new venue wasn’t big—we had a grand piano and just barely enough space to squeeze in a quintet. During the day, it was a café; at night, it was a bar. We served decent food, too, and, on weekends, featured live performances. This kind of club was still quite rare in Tokyo back then, so we gained a steady clientele and the place did all right financially. 

By Haruki Murakami / continue

  Some of you may wonder what inspires such devotion among the fans of Haruki Murakami, the world’s most internationally popular novelist. The rest of you — well, you’ll probably already know that today is the man’s birthday. Whichever group you fall into, you might like to use the day as an excuse to either deepen your Murakami fandom.

Haruki Murakami: In Search of this Elusive Writer, the BBC documentary  provides a fine introduction to Murakami.