In Haruki Murakami‘s afterword to his Japanese translation of The Great Gatsby, he writes of the three novels that impacted him most:
When someone asks, ‘Which three books have meant the most to you?’ I can answer without having to think: The Great Gatsby, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. All three have been indispensable to me (both as a reader and as a writer); yet if I were forced to select only one, I would unhesitatingly choose Gatsby. Had it not been for Fitzgerald’s novel, I would not be writing the kind of literature I am today (indeed, it is possible that I would not be writing at all, although that is neither here nor there).
Find links to Murakami’s most influential reads below, and complement with the bookshelves of Neil Gaiman and Salman Rushdie.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (also rec’d by David Bowie)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (also rec’d by Bruce Springsteen & Ernest Hemingway)
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
(via Facebook)
In his introduction to The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, he also mentions Franny & Zooey by Salinger (which he hopes to translate into Kansai) and The Collected Stories by Paley (Which he was translating).