Japan's best-selling living novelist Haruki Murakami at 75

They are quirky characters in quirky stories, depicted with an affectionate detachment. On this occasion, the show's eminence grise, the legendary German critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, argued with his colleague Sigrid Löffler about Haruki Murakami's novel "South of the Border, West of the Sun," causing a media scandal. The point of contention was the book's sex scenes, which Löffler called "speechless, listless stammering," dismissing the novel itself as "literary fast food." A modern image of Japan As the saying goes, there's no such thing as bad publicity, and "South of the Border, West of the Sun" became an overnight bestseller in Germany. That first novel, "Hear the Wind Sing" from 1979, promptly won him the Prize for New Writers from the Japanese literary magazine Gunzo.