Never one to be pigeonholed, Murakami is that rarest of literary figures, a writer who revels in telling a good and exciting story without sacrificing his severe vision of what literature is and should be. His flirtation with Magical Realism, surrealism, and the fantastic is evidence of his fearlessness as a writer. He was the first to incorporate Western influences in such an immediate way and he introduced a broad, spare, and raw style that Japanese readers had never before seen. Murakami changed the face of Japanese fiction. He has been deeply influenced by Western culture, and his themes, in some ways, are distilled from his favorite writers and musicians. Like a jazz musician building on the same note, Murakami has-from the start-been obsessed with issues of sexual identity and love, loss and detachment, history and war, and nostalgia and fate. If it is true that writers and artists should spend their entire lives and careers investigating, examining, and trying to understand the same themes, then Haruki Murakami (born January 12, 1949) is a prime example of how to do this successfully.
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