He grew up in Kobe and graduated from Waseda University in Tokyo. His first novel, Hear the Wind Sing (1979), won him the Gunzou Literature Prize for budding writers. This novel, together with Pinball 1973 (1980) and A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), for which he won the Noma Literary Prize for New Writers, form The Trilogy of the Rat. He is also the author of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), Norwegian Wood (1987), Dance Dance Dance (1988), South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992), and The Elephant Vanishes (1993). In 1991, Murakami spent four years in the United States with his wife where he taught at Princeton and wrote The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994). After the Kobe earthquake and the poison gas attack in the Tokyo subway in 1995, Murakami returned to Japan where he interviewed attack victims, and then members of the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo. From these interviews, Murakami published two nonfiction books in Japan, the later of which, The Place That Was Promised (1998), won the Kuwabara Takeo Academic Award.
