Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949. Following the publication of his first novel in Japanese in 1979, he sold the jazz bar he ran with his wife and became a full-time writer. It was with the publication of Norwegian Wood - which has to date sold more than 4 million copies in Japan alone - that the author was truly catapulted into the limelight.

Known for his surrealistic world of mysterious (and often disappearing) women, cats, earlobes, wells, Western culture, music and quirky first-person narratives, he is now Japan's best-known novelist abroad.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is one of his acclaimed collections of short stories. In 'Crabs', 'The Year of Spaghetti' and 'The Mirror', Murakami confronts fundamental emotions: loss, identity, friendship, love; and questions our ability to connect with humanity, and the pain of those connections or the lack of them.

Read by Hugh Ross

Producer: David Roper
A Heavy Entertainment production for BBC Radio 4. Show less