Murakami is the foremost contemporary Japanese novelist who weaves fantastical and surrealist tales set in present day Japan. His work is strongly influenced by western culture and writers such as Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigen. Themes of western music and literature are throughout his novels and short stories. One of his best-known books written in a four year span in the U.S. teaching at Princeton, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle: The Thieving Magpie, refers to Rossini’s orchestral overture. Also, Norwegian Wood, after a Beatles song, and South of the Border, West of the Sun, from Nat King Cole. Murakami gained wide acclaim in the U.S. for Kafka on the Shore, (2002) a novel that follows Kafka, the protagonist’s Oedipal journey.
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