Jay Rubin explains how Murakami developed a distinctive new style in Japanese writing. In tracing the reclusive writer's career, he draws on his own interviews with him, and observations gathered from ten years of collaborating with Murakami on translations of his works.

Jay Rubin is a professor of Japanese Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State and Making Sense of Japanese, and he edited Modern Japanese Writers for the Scribner Writers Series. He has translated into English two novels by the Japanese writer Soseki Natsume, and also Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and after the quake.