Timeline Wednesday 12 January 1949

Events on Wednesday 12 January 1949 2

• 1949 – present Haruki Murakami Japanese novelist Japanese novelist, short-story writer, essayist and translator whose deeply imaginative novels blend surrealism, loneliness and modern life with jazz, cats and parallel worlds. Born in Kyoto and raised in Kobe, he ran a jazz bar with his wife before an epiphany at a baseball game led him to write his first novel. Norwegian Wood (1987) made him one of the best-selling authors in Japanese history. His works have been translated into over 50 languages, selling millions of copies worldwide. A perennial Nobel Prize candidate, he has received the Franz Kafka Prize, the Jerusalem Prize, the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, and the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.
• 1949 Haruki Murakami born in Kyoto Born Haruki Murakami in Fushimi-ku, Kyoto. His parents both taught Japanese literature, but Murakami gravitated toward Western fiction — Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Kurt Vonnegut — and jazz.