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The Japan Librarian Association has accused The Kobe Shimbun newspaper of violating privacy rules by exposing the teenage reading habits of author Haruki Murakami.

“Disclosing the records of what books were read by a user, without the individual’s consent, violates the person’s privacy,” the group said in a statement. Here is more from The Guardian:

The Kobe Shimbun revealed Murakami’s reading habits of half a century ago after obtaining the cards from the school’s library that carried borrower entries under the author’s name, Japanese media reported.

Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has won the 2015 Hans Christian Andersen Prize, Denmark’s leading literary honor.

Murakami will receive the award and its $71,400 purse at a ceremony in Odense, Denmark (Andersen’s hometown) in October 2016. The Economic Times has the scoop: “The jury honoured Murakami’s ‘bold mix of classic narrative, pop culture, Japanese tradition, dreamlike realism and philosophical debate.'”

Previous winners include: Paolo Coehlo, J.K. Rowling, Isabel Allende and Salman Rushdie.

Murakami's first two novels never saw wide English-language distribution and have long been out of print. Now packaged together as Wind/Pinball, the books are finally available again and include a new introduction by the author. These remarkable stories serve as a coming of age, not just for their characters but for Murakami as well. Books [...]

The New Yorker has released an English version of Haruki Murakami’s short story, “Kino.” It can be found in Murakami’s collection, Men Without Women.

According to Open Culture, the author’s Japanese publisher released the book last year. Philip Gabriel served as the translator for the piece. Click here to read the English edition of another Murakami short fiction piece, “Yesterday.”

Here’s an excerpt from the short story: “When Kino quit his job, it wasn’t because he was dissatisfied with his work but because he discovered that his wife was having an affair with his best friend at the company. Kino spent more time out on the road than at home in Tokyo. He’d stuff a large gym bag full of shoe samples and make the rounds of sporting-goods stores all over Japan, also visiting local colleges and companies that sponsored track teams.” (via BookRiot)

Following the coming-of-age of Hajime, a lonely only child, into his young adulthood, marriage, and adult life, South of the Border, West of the Sun is a melancholy tale of a life of longing. Exploring love, attraction, sexuality, and happiness, Murakami's brilliant novel visits a marriage on the knife-edge of disaster. The tension, the indecision, [...]

Somewhere between the edge of sleep and wakefulness, After Dark resides. Told in one evening, with chapters indicated by time-stamps, Murakami's tale of both somnambulists and insomniacs is still, stark, and seductive. With a bonus delicious, "thriller-ish" story thread, After Dark is a little slice of Murakami heaven. Books mentioned in this post

Which authors do you admire most? The team at blinkbox books has created an infographic that examines the careers of several famous authors including J.K. Rowling, Stephenie Meyer, Meg Cabot, Stephen King, and Haruki Murakami. For each author that is listed on this image, their “breakthrough” novel is highlighted.

Both Douglas Adams and J.R.R. Tolkien hit it big with their debut novels, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Hobbit: There and Back Again. F. Scott Fitzgerald became well-known at age 30 for his third book, The Great Gatsby, while Leo Tolstoy achieved great success at age 42 with his sixth title, War & Peace. We’ve embedded the full infographic below for you to explore further—what do you think?

What books did you enjoy reading this year? The BookBub team has created a new infographic with “the ultimate list” of “The Best Books of 2014” which features many popular titles including Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, and Little Failure: A Memoir by Gary Shteyngart.

According to the BookBub blog, the data used for this project from “23 different Best of 2014 lists — from The Washington Post to Library Journal to Buzzfeed and more.” We’ve embedded the entire graphic below for you to explore further.
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We’ve collected the books debuting on Indiebound’s Indie Bestseller List for the week ending December 07, 2014–a sneak peek at the books everybody will be talking about next month.

(Debuted at #7 in Paperback Fiction) The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami: “A lonely boy, a mysterious girl, and a tormented sheep man plot their escape from the nightmarish library of internationally acclaimed, best-selling Haruki Murakami’s wild imagination.” (December 2014)

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Every week, we gather together a small pile of newly released titles that we agree should be on everyone's radar. We deem these titles our New Favorites (check out our recent picks here). Now that the year is winding down, we thought we'd take a look back at some of the standouts, in case you [...]

About as introspective as a novel can be, Murakami's latest spends its entirety inside the somewhat sad mind of its protagonist. Damaged by a betrayal he cannot comprehend, Tsukuru is a man wholly undone by his closest friends. After years of loneliness, and only after stumbling into a new relationship with a woman who insists on [...]

A buzz has been building about Australian author Mark Henshaw’s long awaited second novel after Out of the Line of Fire. The Snow Kimono (Text) is a literary psychological thriller set in Japan and France. Insights into both those countries shape the contours, ridges and atmosphere of the novel. Paris is wet and snowy and […]

Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973, the first two novels written by acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami, are getting being published in English. The two novellas were first published in English by Kodansha International in 1987, but are currently out of print.

Knopf will publish these two novellas in one volume in the fall 2015. The works will feature a new English translation by Ted Goosen.

Knopf recently released Murakami’s latest novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage last month and will publish his upcoming novella The Strange Library in December.

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Japanese author Haruki Murakami has a new novella in the works which will be published by Knopf on December 2nd.

The Strange Library, a 96-page story, is about a young man’s strange trip to the library. Check it out:

On his way home from school, the young narrator of The Strange Library finds himself wondering how taxes were collected in the Ottoman Empire. He pops into the local library to see if it has a book on the subject. Once there, he is led to a special ‘reading room’ by a strange old man. The boy is imprisoned at the library and forced to memorize massive volumes of books. What will the boy do when he realizes that his captor intends to absorb his knowledge by eating his brain? With the help of a mysterious girl and a man dressed as a sheep, he hatches a plan to escape.

Murakami is on a roll. The novelist released a new novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, last month.

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Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki may be a simple story, but it carries an emotional heft that feels like a throwback to one of Murakami's classic early novels, like Norwegian Wood. His ephemeral and effortless prose flows like a perfectly choreographed dream and will leave you as satisfied as a long afternoon nap. Books mentioned in this [...]

Known for his beautiful, haunting, lyrical, and — at times — funny surrealistic stylings, Haruki Murakami is one of the most beloved Japanese authors in the Western world. Although infused with the pop culture of the West, his writing remains at its core firmly rooted in Japan. And as modern as his style is, his [...]

Haruki Murakami‘s new novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage comes out next month.

Slate has an excerpt of the RandomHouse  book, which is currently available for preorder. Check it out:

“I have a kind of weird story related to death. Something my father told me. He said it was an actual experience he had when he was in his early twenties. Just the age I am now. I’ve heard the story so many times I can remember every detail. It’s a really strange story—it’s hard even now for me to believe it actually happened— but my father isn’t the type to lie about something like that. Or the type who would concoct such a story. I’m sure you know this, but when you make up a story the details change each time you retell it. You tend to embellish things, and forget what you said before. … But my father’s story, from start to finish, was always exactly the same, each time he told it.”

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Have you ever wondered how much time Les Miserables author Victor Hugo spent sleeping? Or how many hours 1Q84 author Haruki Murakami devotes to writing?

Podio has created an infographic called, “The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People.” The image (embedded below) shows the day-to-day schedules of 26 famous creative professionals including Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov, Slaughterhouse-Five author Kurt Vonnegut, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings author Maya Angelou.

Here’s more from The Huffington Post: “Whether we’re working on our latest novels, paintings or compositions and stuck in ruts, or we’re novices to the creative workspace entirely, we can all benefit from seeing how Charles Dickens, Pablo Picasso, and Mozart spent their days — even if it is just for fun.”

Want to develop a better work routine? Discover how some of the world’s greatest minds organized their days.
Click image to see the interactive version (via Podio).

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Random House Australia will include a sheet of stickers with the first edition printings of Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and the Year of His Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami.

Here’s more from the publishing house’s blog post: “[The] front cover design is an elegant abstract image representing the five main characters in the book, the close childhood friends Mr. Red, Mr. Blue, Miss White, Miss Black and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki. Tsukuru means ‘to make’ or ‘to build’, and this is the concept behind the stickers, which encourage the reader to decorate the novel themselves.”

We’ve embedded an image featuring the sticker images below. Creative director Suzanne Dean, who designed the book jacket, commissioned five Japanese artists to create each sticker. As is the case with the U.S. and U.K. editions of this book, the publisher plans to release it on August 12, 2014.
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Dr. Ilana Simons has created a short animated film celebrating Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. In a Psychology Today blog post, Simons calls him her "favorite living writer" and credits him for inspiring "grand journeys of imagination without using too many adjectives." We’ve embedded the entire film, About Haruki Murakami, above--what do you think? continued...

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World renowned novelist Haruki Murakami has written a new short story entitled "Yesterday." Japanese literature expert Philip Gabriel served as the translator. The New Yorker has published it in their new Summer Fiction issue; thus far it has attracted 295 "favorites" on Twitter. Here's an excerpt from the piece: "As far as I know, the only person ever to put Japanese lyrics to the Beatles song 'Yesterday' (and to do so in the distinctive Kansai dialect, no less) was a guy named Kitaru. He used to belt out his own version when he was taking a bath." (via NPR)

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