Haruki Murakami (村上 春樹, Murakami Haruki) is a renowned Japanese writer, born on January 12, 1949. His novels, essays, and short stories have become international best-sellers, translated into 50 languages and selling millions of copies worldwide. Murakami has won numerous awards for his work, including the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the World Fantasy Award, the Tanizaki Prize, the Yomiuri Prize for Literature, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Noma Literary Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Kiriyama Prize for Fiction, the Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, and the Princess of Asturias Awards. His work often incorporates magical realism, spanning genres such as science fiction, fantasy, and crime fiction.

Growing up in Ashiya, near Kobe, Murakami later moved to Tokyo to attend Waseda University. Before becoming a writer, he owned a small jazz bar for seven years. His first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, was published in 1979. Notable works include Norwegian Wood (1987), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95), Kafka on the Shore (2002), and 1Q84 (2009–10). The latter was ranked as the best work of Japan's Heisei era by the national newspaper Asahi Shimbun's survey of literary experts.

Murakami's fiction has polarized literary critics and the reading public, and he has sometimes been criticized by Japan's literary establishment as "un-Japanese." Despite this, he is recognized as a "truly extraordinary writer" and praised as "among the world's greatest living novelists." His inspirations include Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Brautigan, while he has cited Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy, and Dag Solstad as favorite contemporary writers. In addition to his novels, Murakami has published five short story collections and non-fiction works, including Underground, an oral history of the Tokyo subway sarin attack, and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, a memoir about his experience as a long-distance runner.