Shortly before finishing his studies, Murakami opened a coffee house and jazz bar, Peter Cat, in Kokubunji, Tokyo, which he ran with his wife, from 1974 to 1981. Murakami studied drama at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he met Yoko, now his wife. These Western influences distinguish Murakami from the majority of other Japanese writers.

He grew up reading a wide range of works by European and American writers, such as Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, Kurt Vonnegut, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Richard Brautigan and Jack Kerouac. Since childhood, Murakami, like Kōbō Abe, has been heavily influenced by Western culture, particularly Western as well as Russian music and literature. His father was involved in the Second Sino-Japanese War, and was deeply traumatized by it, which would, in turn, affect Murakami. His father was the son of a Buddhist priest, and his mother is the daughter of an Osaka merchant. Murakami was born in Kyoto, Japan, during the post-World War II baby boom and raised in Nishinomiya, Ashiya and Kobe. Meanwhile, Murakami has been described by Gary Fisketjon, the editor of Murakami's collection The Elephant Vanishes (1993), as a 'truly extraordinary writer', while Steven Poole of The Guardian praised Murakami as 'among the world's greatest living novelists' for his oeuvre. He has sometimes been criticised by Japan's literary establishment as un-Japanese, leading to Murakami's recalling that he was a 'black sheep in the Japanese literary world'. His fiction has polarized literary critics and the reading public. Murakami has also published five short story collections, including First Person Singular (2020), and non-fiction works including Underground (1997), inspired by personal interviews Murakami conducted with victims of the Tokyo subway sarin attack, and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007), a series of personal essays about his experience as a marathon runner. His official website lists Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Brautigan as key inspirations to his work, while Murakami himself has cited Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy, and Dag Solstad as his favourite currently active writers. His work spans genres including science fiction, fantasy, and crime fiction, and has become known for its use of magical realist elements. His notable works include the novels Norwegian Wood (1987), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95), Kafka on the Shore (2002), and 1Q84 (2009–10), with 1Q84 ranked as the best work of Japan's Heisei era (1989–2019) by the national newspaper Asahi Shimbun 's survey of literary experts. Growing up in Ashyia near Kobe before moving to Tokyo to attend Waseda University, he published his first novel Hear the Wind Sing (1979) after working as the owner of a small jazz bar for seven years.

He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the World Fantasy Award, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize. His novels, essays, and short stories have been bestsellers in Japan and internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages and having sold millions of copies outside Japan.

Haruki Murakami ( 村上春樹, Murakami Haruki, born Janu) is a Japanese writer.

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