Japablum Recommends: Author Haruki Murakami, Who Finally Kind of Talks to the Press

Japablum is a big fan of the Haruki Murakami. He's a truly unique voice on the contemporary literary scene and, best of all, he never has a cartoon image of some skinny bitch shopping and chatting on a cell phone on the cover of his books. Well, the famously shy Murakami has finally submitted to a friendly press grilling in GQ Korea, and Japablum thought both of our readers would want to know.

Japablum first discovered Murakami when we were trolling through a Tokyo bookstore looking for something Japanese to read in English. We found Underground, Murakami's only nonfiction title, a series of interviews he conducted with surviving victims of theTokyo sarin gas attack in 1995. Murakami also talked to ex-members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, the group that organized and executed the bizarre attack. Was the book a total bummer? Absolutely! But very interesting, especially for anyone interested in the Japanese way of looking at/dealing with tragedy.

From that, Japablum moved on to Murakami's fiction. Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle are our favorites. Norwegian Wood, the standard Murakami text in Japan that most of the Japanese public is readily familiar with, is our least favorite, but what do we know? We're just a blog.