Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949. Following the publication o fhis first novel in Japanese in 1979, he sold the jazz bar he ran with his wife to become a full-time writer.It was with the publication of Norwegian Wood - which has to date sold more than 4 million copies in Japan alone - that he was truly catapulted into the limelight, and he is now Japan's best-known novelist abroad.