Haruki Murakami

Murakami ran a Tokyo jazz club called Peter Cat with his wife through most of his twenties, an unlikely training ground he has credited for his prose's rhythm. The decision to write came in an instant, he says, at a baseball game in 1978, watching a batter hit a double. He went home and wrote through the night, producing his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, within months.

He sold the bar to write full-time and has since translated Fitzgerald, Carver, and Chandler into Japanese alongside his own fiction. Norwegian Wood's runaway success in Japan made him so recognizable he decamped to Europe and then the United States for years; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, written partly from Princeton, expanded his private mythology of wells and vanished women into an epic reckoning with wartime Manchuria.

An avid marathon runner, he has published a memoir on the sport alongside a body of fiction now translated into some fifty languages.