Haruki Murakami

About

Japanese novelist and short story writer (born 1949) whose work blends the mundane and the surreal in ways that have won him a vast international readership. His fiction explores loneliness, memory, music, and the search for identity.

Books on TheBookRoads

Norwegian Wood

Toru Watanabe recalls his student years in Tokyo during the late 1960s and his relationships with two very different women against a backdrop of student radicalism and personal loss. Murakami's most realistic and most commercially successful novel.

1987 Japan

Kafka on the Shore

Two narratives unfold in parallel: a fifteen-year-old boy fleeing his father's Oedipal prophecy, and an elderly man who can talk to cats and make fish rain from the sky. A signature blend of the mundane and the metaphysical.

2002 Japan

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Toru Okada searches for his missing cat and wife and descends into a surreal underworld of memory and violence. One of Murakami's most ambitious novels, weaving together Japan's wartime past and a surreal domestic present.

Country

Also from Japan