Kafka on the Shore displays one of the world's great storytellers at the peak of his powers.
Here we meet a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who is on the run, and Nakata, an aging simpleton who is drawn to Kafka for reasons that he cannot fathom. As their... More details on Kafka on the Shore
Cash isn't the only thing I take from my father's study when I leave home. I take a small, old gold lighter—I like the design and feel of it—and a folding knife with a really sharp blade. Made to skin...
Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Toru begins to adapt t... More details on Norwegian Wood
I WAS THIRTY-SEVEN THEN, STRAPPED IN MY SEAT AS THE HUGE 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to the Hamburg airport. Cold November rains drenched the earth and lent everything the gloomy...
Hyperkinetic and relentlessly inventive, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is Haruki Murakami's deep dive into the very nature of consciousness.
Across two parallel narratives, Murakami draws readers into a mind-bending universe in whic... More details on Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
THE elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent. Or at least I imagined it was ascent. There was no telling for sure: it was so slow that all sense of direction simply vanished. It could have been g...
"Murakami is like a magician who explains what he's doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers . . . But while anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream, it's the rare artist, like this one, who can mak... More details on 1Q84
The taxi’s radio was tuned to a classical FM broadcast. Janáček’s Sinfonietta—probably not the ideal music to hear in a taxi caught in traffic. The middle-aged driver didn’t seem to be listening very ...
Quirky and utterly captivating, A Wild Sheep Chase is Murakami at his astounding best.
An advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend and casually appropriates the image for an advertisement. What he doesn't realize is that included in th... More details on A Wild Sheep Chase
The day of the funeral, I took a streetcar from Waseda. I got off near the end of the line. The map proved about as helpful as a globe would have been. I ended up buying pack after pack of cigarettes,...
Hear the Wind Sing is the first novel by Haruki Murakami. First published in the June 1979 issue of Gunzo, one of the most influential literary magazines in Japan, it was published one month later as a book.
Hear the Wind Sing is the first book in t... More details on Hear the Wind Sing
A writer I happened to meet when I was in college told me this. It was a long time before I finally understood what those words meant, but just knowing them was a kind of comfort that put me at ease. ...
Reality bends all the more acutely with lack of sleep in this stunning novel from the master of the surreal.
Eyes mark the shape of the city
The midnight hour approaches in an almost-empty diner. Mari sips her coffee and reads a book, but soon her s... More details on After Dark
Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature—or more like a single collective entity created by ma...
A tour de force of love and loneliness, war and art, Killing Commendatore is a stunning work of imagination from one of our greatest writers.
When a thirty-something portrait painter is abandoned by his wife, he secludes himself in the mountain home ... More details on Killing Commendatore
From May until early the following year, I lived on top of a mountain near the entrance to a narrow valley. Deep in the valley it rained constantly in the summer, but outside the valley it was usually...
Part romance, part detective story, Sputnik Sweetheart tells the story of a tangled triangle of uniquely unrequited love.
K is madly in love with his best friend, Sumire, but her devotion to a writerly life precludes her from any personal commitments... More details on Sputnik Sweetheart
IN THE SPRING of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains – flattening everything in its path, tossin...
In the tales that make up The Elephant Vanishes, the imaginative genius that has made Haruki Murakami an international superstar is on full display.
In these stories, a man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers at... More details on The Elephant Vanishes
I’M IN THE KITCHEN cooking spaghetti when the woman calls. Another moment until the spaghetti is done; there I am, whistling the prelude to Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra along with the FM radio. Perfect sp...