Murakami was born in Kyto and spent his early years amid the ancient cultural, political, and mercantile traditions of the Kyto-saka- Kbe area. As an only child, he spoke the dialect of the region and heard his schoolteacher parents, Chiaki (son of a Kyto temple family) and Miyuki (daughter of an saka merchant family), discussing eighth-century poetry and medieval war tales at the dinner table. Yet the boy was not interested in the cradle of imperial culture, and in his early teenage years he turned instead to the works of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky and, when he was not editing the Kbe High School newspaper, to those of Americans such as Ed McBain, Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Kurt Vonnegut. As an international trading capital, Kbe had many bookstores dealing in the used paperbacks of foreign residents, and in these stores he could find works in the original languages available at less than half the price of their Japanese translations. Young Murakami was hooked. "What first attracted me to American paperback books was the discovery that I could read books written in a foreign language," he has said. "It was such a tremendously new experience for me to be able to understand and be moved by literature written in a language acquired after childhood."
That language could hardly have been anything but English.
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