About the Author; Summer Research (25 Pieces of Information)

HARUKI MURAKAMI

5 QUOTES//SELECTED PIECES OF WRITING

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- If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.

- No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories

- But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives

- The body is not the only target of rape. Violence does not always take a visible form, and not all wounds gush blood

- Don't you think it would be wonderful to get rid of everything and everybody and just go some place where you don't know a soul

5 MOTIFS

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- Memories

- Isolation

- Birds

- Melancholic women

- Jazz music

5 CHARACTERS

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- Naoko

- Toru Okada

- Toru Watanabe

- Midori Kobayashi

- Reiko Ishida 

5 LOCATIONS

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- The meadow at the start of Norwegian Wood

- Watanabe's college

- Naoko's apartment

- Midori's bookshop

- Mountain sanatorium near Kyoto

5 PIECES OF INFORMATION ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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- An avid fan of Jazz, his first job was at a record store, he owns more than 6000 music records. When asked where his favourite place in the world to travel to is, he said: "First would be Boston, Massachusetts, because it’s the most convenient and satisfying city for collecting secondhand jazz records." 

- When he's in writing mode for a novel, he gets up at 4am and works for five to six hours. In the afternoon, he will run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then read a bit and listen to some music. He goes to bed at 9pm. "I keep to this routine every day without variation." He says "The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerise myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long — six months to a year — requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity."

- He does four or five drafts of every novel, spending six months writing the first and seven or eight months rewriting

- His first work of non-fiction, Underground (1998), was a compendium of interviews with victims of the 1995 sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway system

- Murakami was born in Kyoto, grew up in Kobe, and attended Waseda University in Tokyo. His parents were teachers who taught Japanese literature and talked about it all the time, so much so that Murakami said he hated the subject and became interested in Western literature