Ten things you need to know about Haruki Murakami

Murakami’s protagonists are often transformed by exquisitely tender physical meetings with unusual, beautiful and often confused or mysterious women. He describes love with delicate wonder, and his hero is driven by passionate need once the woman of his life is revealed. “I have to talk to you,” Toru Watanabe tells the emotionally troubled Naoko in Norwegian Wood. “I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.”

One of the great blessings I count as essential in my life is encountering Murakami Haruki as a young adult. Just like seeing Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express when I was sixteen, these are life-changing encounters, forever leaving memories etched in a soul during a time that is particularly impressionable. Memories to last a lifetime, and so unmistakeably part of who I am, what I write and where I want to be.