Haruki Murakami

INITIAL REACTION :

By chance my mum had a Haruki Murakami book at home - 'Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman' - so, being one of the authors on the list I decided to pick up and read it. I was immediately struck by the strangeness of his writing, how the narration of his stories sounds like a stream of someone's consciousness, the constancy and vividness of descriptive detail : sounds, smells, surroundings... I like the ambiguous and confusing nature of his writings, as well as the subtlety of his references, repetition of certain lines, words and motifs.

FURTHER RESEARCH :

-- Huraki Murakami is Japanese 

-- wrote his first book in 1979 : Norwegian wood

-- he writes a combination of short stories and novels : "if writing novels is like planting a forest then writing short stories is more like planting a garden"