Back in January, surrealist Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami announced his intention to start an advice column on his website that would allow him to correspond directly with readers, and possibly help them solve their life's problems. Since then, your quirky uncle Haruki has done just that, answering more than 5,000 questions about everything from love to food to pop culture.

Haruki Murakami, possibly Japan's most celebrated living writer, is a fairly private person who's confident that most people, if they met him, would not like him very much. But the author of 1Q84 and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle places a high value on his "conceptual" relationship with his fans, and has thus proposed to solve their life's problems, as best he can, on his website.