Out of thousands of contemporary writers, one of the most musical ones is Japanese author Haruki Murakami. His works, besides being exceptionally interesting by their plots, are also imbued with music of completely different genres- jazz, rock, classical,but jazz dominates in all of them. If you get acquainted with the biography of the writer, you will find out that before the beginning of his active writing career he successfully ran the jazz bar called” Peter Cat”. Murakami’s love for music is also reflected in the great amount of original vinyl records he ownes- his personal collection contains of more than 40,000 copies. Murakami himself believes that jazz is very similar to writing – both forms of art need a recognizable rhythm, improvisational freedom and relaxed flow of thoughts at the same time.Among many books written by him, there are two, named”Jazz portraits 1and 2″ The inspiration for writing them, Haruki found after visiting an exhibition that displayed famous jazz men portraits, and where he decided to add a short description to each of them.This book is consisted of short essays, portraits by Makoto Vada and short biographical references. In addition, Murakami suggests certain musical album for each artist. Reading and listening to the music simultaneously, help ourselves to feel and understand author’s ideas and feelings better, being carried away into the atmosphere of the story (for that reason the films are always accompanied by music),and even background melodies can greatly contribute into this ” magic”…From Murakami’s novels, music permeates almost everything – the “Norwegian forest”, “Sheep hunting”, “South of the border on west of the sun”, “1q84” and read “what I mean when I talk about running”. Although I don’t enjoy running, his ideas, reasoning and observations are close to mine. How about you? have you ever tried to read a book with a music on a background? Which Murakami’s book is your favorite?