Haruki Murakami Books In Order

The Rat Books In Publication Order

  1. Hear the Wind Sing (1979)
  2. Pinball, 1973 (1980)
  3. A Wild Sheep Chase (1982)
  4. Dance, Dance, Dance (1988)

Kishidancho Goroshi Books In Publication Order

  1. Killing Commendatore (2017)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985)
  2. Norwegian Wood (1987)
  3. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997)
  4. South of the Border, West of the Sun (1999)
  5. Sputnik Sweetheart (2001)
  6. Kafka on the Shore (2005)
  7. After Dark (2007)
  8. 1Q84 (2011)
  9. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2014)

Short Stories/Novellas In Publication Order

  1. The Strange Library (2012)
  2. Desire (2017)
  3. Birthday Girl (2019)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. The Elephant Vanishes (1993)
  2. After the Quake (2002)
  3. Vintage Murakami (2004)
  4. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2006)
  5. Men Without Women (2017)
  6. First Person Singular: Stories (With: Philip Gabriel) (2020)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (2000)
  2. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2008)
  3. Murakami Diary 2009 (2008)
  4. Haruki Murakami Goes to Meet Hayao Kawai (2016)
  5. Absolutely on Music (2016)
  6. Murakami 2020 Diary (2019)
  7. Murakami T: The T-Shirts I Love (With: Philip Gabriel) (2020)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. Birthday Stories (2004)
  2. Ten Selected Love Stories (2013)

The Rat Book Covers

Kishidancho Goroshi Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Stories/Novellas Book Covers

Short Story Collections Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Anthologies Book Covers

Haruki Murakami Books Overview

A Wild Sheep Chase

A marvelous hybrid of mythology and mystery, A Wild Sheep Chase is the extraordinary literary thriller that launched Haruki Murakami’s international reputation. It begins simply enough: A twenty something advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend, and casually appropriates the image for an insurance company s advertiseme*nt. What he doesn t realize is that included in the pastoral scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Thus begins a surreal and elaborate quest that takes our hero from the urban haunts of Tokyo to the remote and snowy mountains of northern Japan, where he confronts not only the mythological sheep, but the confines of tradition and the demons deep within himself. Quirky and utterly captivating, A Wild Sheep Chase is Murakami at his astounding best.

Dance, Dance, Dance

This unusual poetry release is read by youtube. com star Urgelt he prefers to use his internet alias who lives a solitary life in Virginia USA reading poetry. His video of The Cremation is intensely moving and passionate. For Naxos AudioBooks, he has selected the best of Robert Service 1874 1958, a Scottish born Canadian whose poetry evokes the pioneering West and the Yukon.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

The fantastical novels of Haruki Murakami have earned him a dedicated international fan base and recurring success in the bestseller charts. In Hard boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Murakamis brilliant imagination seizes on the worlds most ingenious and complex invention: the human mind. Two contrasting worlds are envisaged. In Hard boiled Wonderland a shuffler is at work in Tokyo, where the minds of the people have become servant to the requirements of the governmental system. In the surreal realm of the End of the World a dreamreader, sifts through memories, scattering them to oblivion. Gradually the alternate universes of the shuffler and the dreamreader are interwoven and Murakamis ingenious conception of the mind becomes clear. A feast for the imagination Murakamis novel amazes, amuses and delights.

Norwegian Wood

First American PublicationThis stunning and elegiac novel by the author of the internationally acclaimed Wind Up Bird Chronicle has sold over 4 million copies in Japan and is now available to American audiences for the first time. It is sure to be a literary event. 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 to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable. As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.A poignant story of one college student’s romantic coming of age, Norwegian Wood takes us to that distant place of a young man’s first, hopeless, and heroic love. From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Japan’s 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 wife’s 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. From the Trade Paperback edition.

South of the Border, West of the Sun

Following the massive complexity of The Wind Up Bird Chronicle Haruki Murakami’s best selling, award winning novel comes this deceptively simple love story, a contemporary rendering of the romance in which a boy finds and then loses a girl, only to meet her again years later. Hajime ‘Beginning’ in Japanese was an atypical only child growing up in a conventional middle class suburb. Shimamoto, herself an only child, was cool and self possessed, precocious in the extreme. After school these childhood sweethearts would listen to records, hold hands, and talk about their future. Then, despite themselves, in the way peculiar to adolescents, they grew apart, seemingly for good. Now, facing middle age, finally content after years of aimlessness, Hajime is a successful nightclub owner, a husband and father, when he suddenly is reunited with Shimamoto, propelled into the mysteries of her life, and confronted by dark secrets she is loath to reveal. And so, reckless with enchantment and lust, Hajime prepares to risk everything in order to consummate his first love, and to experience a life he’s dreamed of but never had a chance to realize. Bittersweet, passionate, and ultimately redemptive, South of the Border, West of the Sun is an intricate examination of desire, illuminating the persistent power of childhood and memory in matters of the heart.

Sputnik Sweetheart

Combining the early, straightforward seductions of Norwegian Wood and the complex mysteries of The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, this new novel his seventh translated into English is Haruki Murakami at his most satisfying and representative best. The scenario is as simple as it is uncomfortable: a college student falls in love once and for all, despite everything that transpires afterward with a classmate whose devotion to Kerouac and an untidy writerly life precludes any personal commitments until she meets a considerably older and far more sophisticated businesswoman. It is through this wormhole that she enters Murakami’s surreal yet humane universe, to which she serves as guide both for us and for her frustrated suitor, now a teacher. In the course of her travels from parochial Japan through Europe and ultimately to an island off the coast of Greece, she disappears without a trace, leaving only lineaments of her fate: computer accounts of bizarre events and stories within stories. The teacher, summoned to assist in the search for her, experiences his own ominous, haunting visions, which lead him nowhere but home to Japan and there, under the expanse of deep space and the still orbiting Sputnik, he finally achieves a true understanding of his beloved.A love story, a missing person story, a detective story all enveloped in a philosophical mystery and, finally, a profound meditation on human longing.

Kafka on the Shore

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.

After Dark

A short, sleek novel of encounters set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn, and every bit as gripping as Haruki Murakami’s masterworks The Wind Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. At its center are two sisters Eri, a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion, and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny s toward people whose lives are radically alien to her own: a jazz trombonist who claims they ve met before, a burly female love hotel manager and her maid staff, and a Chinese prostitute savagely brutalized by a businessman. These night people are haunted by secrets and needs that draw them together more powerfully than the differing circumstances that might keep them apart, and it soon becomes clear that Eri s slumber mysteriously tied to the businessman plagued by the mark of his crime will either restore or annihilate her. After Dark moves from mesmerizing drama to metaphysical speculation, interweaving time and space as well as memory and perspective into a seamless exploration of human agency the interplay between self expression and empathy, between the power of observation and the scope of compassion and love. Murakami s trademark humor, psychological insight, and grasp of spirit and morality are here distilled with an extraordinary, harmonious mastery.

1Q84

‘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 make us feel that we are dreaming it ourselves.’ ‘The New York Times Book Review” ‘ The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo. A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 ‘Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.’ Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled. As Aomame’s and Tengo’s narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television fee collector. A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell’s ‘1Q84’ is Haruki Murakami’s most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.

The Elephant Vanishes

With the same deadpan mania and genius for dislocation that he brought to his internationally acclaimed novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami makes this collection of stories a determined assault on the normal. A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald’s in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard. By turns haunting and hilarious, The Elephant Vanishes is further proof of Murakami’s ability to cross the border between separate realities and to come back bearing treasure. From the Trade Paperback edition.

After the Quake

In 1995, the physical and social landscape of Japan was transformed by two events: the Kobe earthquake, in January, which destroyed thousands of lives, and the poison gas attacks in the Tokyo subways in March, during the morning rush hour. Following these twin disasters, Haruki Murakami abandoned his life abroad and returned home to confront his country’s grief. The subway attack led to his recent Underground. And out of the quake come these six stories, set in the months between natural catastrophe and man made terrorism. His characters find their resolutely normal everyday lives undone by events even more surreal yet somehow believable than we have come to expect in his fiction. An electronics salesman, abruptly deserted by his wife, is entrusted to deliver a mysterious package but gets more than he bargained for at the receiving end; a Thai chauffeur takes his troubled charge to a seer, who penetrates her deepest sorrow; and, in the unforgettable title story, a boy acknowledges a shattering secret about his past that will change his life forever. But the most compelling character of all is the earthquake itself slipping into and out of view almost imperceptibly, but nonetheless reaching deep into the lives of these forlorn citizens of the apocalypse. The terrible damage visible all around is, in fact, less extreme than the inconsolable howl of a nation indelibly scarred an experience in which Murakami discovers many truths about compassion, courage, and the nature of human suffering.

Vintage Murakami

Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the greatest modern writers presented in attractive, accessible paperback editions. Murakami’s bold willingness to go straight over the top is a signal indication of his genius…
. A world class writer who has both eyes open and takes big risks. The Washington Post Book WorldNot since Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata has a Japanese writer won the international acclaim enjoyed by Haruki Murakami. His genre busting novels, short stories and reportage, which have been translated into 35 languages, meld the surreal and the hard boiled, deadpan comedy and delicate introspection. Vintage Murakami includes the opening chapter of the international bestseller Norwegian Wood; Lieutenant Mamiya s Long Story: Parts I and II from his monumental novel The Wind Up Bird Chronicle; Shizuko Akashi from Underground, his non fiction book on the Toyko subway attack of 1995; and the short stories Barn Burning, Honeypie. Also inclucded, for the first time in book form, the short story, Ice Man.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Following the best selling triumph of Kafka on the Shore ‘daringly original,’ wrote Steven Moore in The Washington Post Book World, ‘and compulsively readable’ comes a collection that generously expresses Murakami’s mastery. From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit his ability to transform the full range of human experience in ways that are instructive, surprising, and relentlessly entertaining. As Richard Eder has written in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, ‘He addresses the fantastic and the natural, each with the same mix of gravity and lightness.’ Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, and an iceman, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things we might wish for. Whether during a chance reunion in Italy, a romantic exile in Greece, a holiday in Hawaii, or in the grip of everyday life, Murakami’s characters confront grievous loss, or sexuality, or the glow of a firefly, or the impossible distances between those who ought to be the closest of all. ‘While anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream,’ Laura Miller wrote in The New York Times Book Review, ‘it’s the rare artist, like this one, who can make us feel that we are dreaming it ourselves’ a feat performed anew twenty four times in this career spanning book.

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

From Haruki Murakami, internationally acclaimed author of The Wind Up Bird Chronicle and Norwegian Wood, a work of literary journalism that is as fascinating as it is necessary, as provocative as it is profound. In March of 1995, agents of a Japanese religious cult attacked the Tokyo subway system with sarin, a gas twenty six times as deadly as cyanide. Attempting to discover why, Murakami conducted hundreds of interviews with the people involved, from the survivors to the perpetrators to the relatives of those who died, and Underground is their story in their own voices. Concerned with the fundamental issues that led to the attack as well as these personal accounts, Underground is a document of what happened in Tokyo as well as a warning of what could happen anywhere. This is an enthralling and unique work of nonfiction that is timely and vital and as wonderfully executed as Murakami’s brilliant novels.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

From the best selling author of The Wind Up Bird Chronicle and After Dark, a rich and revelatory memoir about writing and running, and the integral impact both have made on his life. In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, Haruki Murakami began running to keep fit. A year later, he d completed a solo course from Athens to Marathon, and now, after dozens of such races, not to mention triathlons and a slew of critically acclaimed books, he reflects upon the influence the sport has had on his life and even more important on his writing. Equal parts training log, travelogue, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers his four month preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon and includes settings ranging from Tokyo’s Jingu Gaien gardens, where he once shared the course with an Olympian, to the Charles River in Boston among young women who outpace him. Through this marvellous lens of sport emerges a cornucopia of memories and insights: the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer, his greatest triumphs and disappointments, his passion for vintage LPs, and the experience, after the age of fifty, of seeing his race times improve and then fall back. By turns funny and sobering, playful and philosophical, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is both for fans of this masterful yet guardedly private writer and for the exploding population of athletes who find similar satisfaction in distance running. From the Hardcover edition.

Murakami Diary 2009

Cats slink across the pages; the seasons are marked by cherry blossom and Japanese maple; spaghetti strands or telephone cords separate the days; and a generous selection of quotations, extracts, and facts from Murakami’s novels and stories appear on almost every page to inspire, amuse, or entertain. This is a diary like no other, faithful to all that is witty, surreal, sexy, and beautiful in Murakami’s work. A must have for fans of Murakami and fans of unique design, this diary is the perfect quirky companion for 2009.

Birthday Stories

This is a collection of 12 Birthday Stories from some of the most distinguished authors of recent years. The stories have been selected and introduced by Haruki Murakami.

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