Books by Haruki Murakami

Two sisters--Eri, a fashion model sleeping her way to oblivion, and Mari, a young student--form the center of a novel that documents a series of encounters--with a jazz trombonist, the manager of a "love hotel" and her maid staff, and a Chinese prostitute brutalized by a businessman client--in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.

Marukami structures these stories around the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan. In them, ordinary citizens must confront the consequences of the harrowing disruptions of their lives. A New York Times Notable Book for 2002.

The six stories in Haruki Murakami’s mesmerizing collection are set at the time of the catastrophic 1995 Kobe earthquake, when Japan became brutally aware of the fragility of its daily existence. But the upheavals that afflict Murakami’s characters are even deeper and more mysterious, emanating from a place where the human meets the inhuman.

An electronics salesman who has been abruptly deserted by his wife agrees to deliver an enigmatic package—and is rewarded with a glimpse of his true nature. A man who has been raised to view himself as the son of God pursues a stranger who may or may not be his human father. A mild-mannered collection agent receives a visit from a giant talking frog who enlists his help in saving Tokyo from destruction. As haunting as dreams, as potent as oracles, the stories in After the Quake are further proof that Murakami is one of the most visionary writers at work today.

In this collection of 25 short stories, Haruki Murakami draws the reader into his wondrously addictive literary world: a fabulist land filled with illogical acts, inexplicable disappearances, and talking animals. Murakami is a master of magic-realism, but unlike his Latin-American predecessors, his stories are not lush and verdant, but rather are austere, strange, remote, and blissfully exact.

This wildly propulsive novel by the acclaimed author of A Wild Sheep Chase focuses on a man searching for a former lover who vanished mysteriously from a seedy hotel. But each new clue to Kiki's whereabouts leads him deeper into a labryrinth of physical violence and metaphysical dread. "A world-class writer."--Washington Post Book World

Fifteen tales encompass the story of a man obsessed with the disappearance of an elephant from a local zoo and that of a young mother whose sleeplessness provides her with a foretaste of death.

Japan's most widely-read and controversial writer, author of A Wild Sheep Chase, hurtles into the consciousness of the West with this narrative about a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters--not to mention Bob Dylan and Lauren Bacall.

Kafka Tamura lives with his father in Tokyo, but at 15 he takes to the road, hoping to locate his mother and his sister, who left when he was four. Meanwhile, an elderly and possibly retarded man named Nakata, who survived a mysterious (and still unexplained) event many years ago, is able to talk to cats. These two story lines converge in Haruki Murakami's seventh novel, a winsomely odd tale full of eccentric characters, surreal details, and unexpected subplots. Named one of the 10 Best Books of 2005 by the New York Times.

With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come.

This magnificent new novel has a similarly extraordinary scope and the same capacity to amaze, entertain, and bewitch the reader. A tour de force of metaphysical reality, it is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle-yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.

Extravagant in its accomplishment, Kafka on the Shore displays one of the world's truly great storytellers at the height of his powers.

Kafka Tamura lives with his father in Tokyo, but at 15 he takes to the road, hoping to locate his mother and his sister, who left when he was four. Meanwhile, an elderly and possibly retarded man named Nakata, who survived a mysterious (and still unexplained) event many years ago, is able to talk to cats. These two story lines converge in Haruki Murakami's seventh novel, a winsomely odd tale full of eccentric characters, surreal details, and unexpected subplots. Named one of the 10 Best Books of 2005 by the New York Times.

The unlikely alliance between Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old runaway, and the aging Nakata, a man who has never recovered from a wartime affliction, brings dramatic changes to both characters as they embark on a surreal odyssey through a strange, sometimes violent, sometimes fantastical world.

The tragic death of their best friend has a profound influence on the passionate relationship between Toru, a serious young college student in Tokyo, and Naoko, an introspective, beauty, as Toru finds himself drawn to an independent, sexually liberated young woman.

Written by Ryunosuke Akutagawa - one of Japan's foremost stylists and a modernist master whose short stories are marked by imagery, cynicism, beauty, and wild humour. His other works include: "Rashomon"; "In a Bamboo Grove"; "The Nose"; "O-Gin"; "Loyalty"; "Death Register"; "The Life of a Stupid Man"; and "Spinning Gears".

Years after their separation, two Japanese childhood sweethearts are reunited, and happily married Hajime finds himself prepared to risk everything for the chance to be with his now mysterious first love Shinamoto.

An unrequited love for a woman devoted to Kerouac and the writer's life leads a man on a quest to uncover the mysteries of love and human longing after the woman disappears without a trace during her odyssey from parochial Japan through Europe to a Greek island, leaving behind only computer accounts of bizarre events and stories within stories. Reprint.

"An unrequited love for a woman devoted to Kerouac and the writer's life leads a man on a quest to uncover the mysteries of love and human longing after the woman disappears without a trace during her odyssey from parochial Japan through Europe to a Greek island, leaving behind only computer accounts of bizarre events and stories within stories."

Covers the 1995 Tokyo Gas Attack, during which agents of a Japanese cult released a gas deadlier than cyanide into the subway system, as documented in interviews with its survivors, perpetrators, and victim family members.

In a revealing memoir, the award-winning Japanese writer recalls his four-month preparation for the 2005 New York City marathon, interweaving his reflections on the meaning of running in his life, his thoughts on the writing process and career, his greatest triumphs and disappointments, and his experiences as an author and as an athlete. Simultaneous.

Following in the footsteps of other writers who have taken a break from their critically acclaimed novels to write about their personal involvement with a sport (John Updike on golf or Joyce Carol Oates on boxing), Haruki Murakami (THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE) describes his passionate dedication to running: he runs a minimum of six miles a day, and in addition to running 20 marathons, he has run a 62-mile ultramarathon. In WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING, Murakami, in his mellow, ruminative prose, describes the physical aspects of running, the philosophical, and how running, perhaps more than any other sport, mirrors the solitary, grueling work of writing.

Blending elements of myth and mystery, a stunning novel by the author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle features a cast of bizarre characters, including a sheep with a mysterious star on its back, caught up in a Nietzschean quest for power.

Japans most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II. In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wifes missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.