村上 春樹- Japan's most famous writer, initiator of the "Murakami Boom" in Japan where most everyone started reading his books, to the extent that millions of people ordering his works before they even came out. A great novlelist (小説家) indeed.
Dickens. Hemingway. Twain. Fitzgerald. King. And.....Murakami? I'd never heard of Murakami before college, and unlike the other authors on this list I certainly never read any of his works as a required read in high school. It also probably didn't help that Murakami writes in Japanese, and his works get translated in English. Still, Murakami's works have become a fixture in literary history.
Murakami's big hit is 1Q84, and there is greatness in those pages as well as excellent sales success (his most-read work) and certainly comparable qualities not just in name but in style and utopian societies to its predecessor 1984 by George Orwell, but 1Q84 often gets criticized for being too long and windy. Another work that I highly recommend and currently reading is Norwegian Wood. Try it in Japanese if you like as that's the original printing, but the English translation plays out in vivid detail and isn't inferior to some of the best descriptions/ storytelling that I've read. After law school I pretty much stopped reading for pleasure as law school kind of destroys that concept for its attendees, but I got back into it with Norwegian Wood (and some other Japanese manga that I've been reading on the side.)
Murakami's also got quite a few short stories and ran a blog early in the year where he answered thousands of readers' questions both in English and in Japanese, everything from what his diet is to what he thought of famous sumo wrestlers and their techniques. Quite an interesting character and very relatable to readers, Mr. Murakami, which is part of what makes his works so effective. The dialogue seems genuine but more importantly the characters' reactions to the dialogue as well as their thought processes, how they go through their lives. The stories are never overly complicated or the set-up wildly imaginary, they're ordinary people (well, kind of ordinary, they have their quirks which is what makes them seem like real people I guess) leading ordinary lives.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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