Japanese · b. 1952
Murakami barricaded his high school roof in Sasebo in 1969, was suspended, moved to Tokyo, and won the Akutagawa Prize at twenty-four for Almost Transparent Blue, a novella about drugs and sex among Japanese kids around an American airbase that sold over a million copies and outraged the literary establishment. He has been the violent Murakami ever since: Coin Locker Babies, In the Miso Soup, Audition, Piercing. He also directs films, hosted a television business programme for twenty years, publishes an email newsletter on the Japanese economy, and wrote a bestselling guide to occupations for schoolchildren. The consistent subject across the pulp and the economics is the same: a rich, orderly country that produces people with nowhere to put their energy. Takashi Miike's film of Audition made him a name in horror circles that he did not ask for.