magnificent murakami

Happy birthday to Haruki Murakami (b. January 12, 1949), one of Japan's premier authors and known, read, and loved by many others outside of his native country. Per Wikipedia, Murakami has also done Japanese translations of American writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and J.D. Salinger, and it's always a fine combination of talents when a translator has an intuitive sense of fiction the way Murakami does.  The titles of Murakami's own works tend to be evocatively quirky and memorable, as is the book cover art that graces his novels and memoirs.

He inherited from his mother's stories the fundamental style he used, unaltered, in his own stories: namely, the assumption that fact may not be truth, and truth may not be factual. **  The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle