MURAKAMI HARUKI

(P/B) MEN WITHOUT WOMEN
"I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden." Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all. Marked by the same wry humor that has defined his entire body of work, in this col...
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(P/B) UNDERGROUND
The true story behind an act of terrorism that turned an average Monday morning into a national disaster. In spite of the perpetrators' intentions, the Tokyo gas attack left only twelve people dead, but thousands were injured and many suffered serious after-effects. The novelist Haruki Murakami interviews the victims to try and establish precisely what happened on the subway that day. He also interviews members and ex-members of the doomsday cult responsible, in the hope that they might be able to explain the reason for the attack and how ...
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(P/B) SOUTH OF THE BORDER, WEST OF THE SUN
Growing up in the suburbs in post-war Japan, it seemed to Hajime that everyone but him had brothers and sisters. His sole companion was Shimamoto, also an only child. Together they spent long afternoons listening to her father's record collection. But when his family moved away, the two lost touch. Now Hajime is in his thirties. After a decade of drifting he has found happiness with his loving wife and two daughters, and success running, intense, enveloped in mystery. Hajime is catapulted into the past, putting at risk all he has in the pr...
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(P/B) KAFKA ON THE SHORE
Kafka on the Shore follows the fortunes of two remarkable characters. Kafka Tamura runs away from home at fifteen, under the shadow of his father's dark prophecy. The ageing Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his simple life suddenly turned upside down. Their parallel odysseys are enriched throughput by vivid accomplices and mesmerising dramas. Cats converse with people; fish tumble from the sky; a forest harbours soldiers apparently un-aged since WWII. There is a savage killing, bu...
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(P/B) WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING
A compelling mediation on the power of running and a fascinating insight into the life of this internationally bestselling writer. In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, 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, he reflects upon the influence the sport has had on his life and on his writing. Equal parts travelogue, training log and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers his four-month preparation for the 2005 New...
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(P/B) 1Q84
The year is 1984. Aomame sits in a taxi on the expressway in Tokyo. Her work is not the kind which can be discussed in public but she is in a hurry to carry out an assignment and, with the traffic at a stand-still, the driver proposes a solution. She agrees, but as a result of her actions starts to feel increasingly detached from the real world. She has been on a top-secret mission, and her next job will lead her to encounter the apparently superhuman founder of a religious cult. Meanwhile, Tengo is leading a nondescript life but wishes to...
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ΤΙΣ ΜΙΚΡΕΣ ΩΡΕΣ
Άνθρωποι της νύχτας, του περιθωρίου. Ένας τρομπονίστας τζαζ, η ιδιοκτήτρια ενός "ερωτικού" ξενοδοχείου, μια Κινέζα πόρνη που την έχει σπάσει στο ξύλο κάποιο στέλεχος εταιρείας. Δυο αδελφές, η Έρι, ένα μοντέλο που ο λήθαργός του ταυτίζεται με λήθη, και η Μάρι, μια φοιτήτρια που θα συναντήσει τον στοιχειωμένο θίασο τις μικρές ώρες. Οι δυο αδελφές και οι πλανόδιοι του μεσονυκτίου, παρά την άβυσσο που τους χωρίζει, συνδέονται με μυστικά και ανάγκες που θα αποδειχτούν ισχυρότερα από καθετί. Σύντομα καταλαβαίνουμε ότι η Έρι, βυθισμένη σε έναν αφ...
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(P/B) DESIRE
‘I could always sense a boundary around me and I did my best not to step over the line’ You've just passed someone on the street who could be the love of your life, the person you're destined for - what do you do? In Murakami's world, you tell them a story. The five weird and wonderful tales collected here each unlock the many-tongued language of desire, whether it takes the form of hunger, lust, sudden infatuation or the secret longings of the heart. Selected from Haruki's Murakami's short story collections The Elephant Vanishes, Blind W...
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(P/B) THE ELEPHANT VANISHES
When a man's favourite elephant vanishes, the balance of his whole life is subtly upset; a couple's midnight hunger pangs drive them to hold up a McDonald's. A woman finds she is irresistible to a small green monster that burrows through her front garden. An insomniac wife wakes up to a twilight world of semi-consciousness in which anything seems possible - even death. In every one of these stories Murakami makes a determined assault on the normal. (From the publisher) «Enchanting... inriguing... All of these tales have a wonderfully surr...
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(P/B) DANCE, DANCE, DANCE
High-class call girls billed to Mastercard. A psychic 13-year-old dropout with a passion for Talking Heads. A hunky matinee idol doomed to play dentists and teachers. A one-armed beach-combing poet, an uptight hotel clerk and one very bemused narrator caught in the web of advanced capitalist mayhem. Combine this offbeat cast of characters with Murakami's idiosyncratic prose and out comes Dance Dance Dance. It is an assault on the sense, part murder mystery, part metaphysical speculation; a fable for our times as catchy as a rock song blast...
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(P/B) BIRTHDAY STORIES
What will you get for your birthday this year? A chance to see into the future? Or a reminder of the imperfect past? In this enviable gathering, Haruki Murakami has chosen for his party some of the very best short story writers of recent years, each with their own birthday experiences, each story a snapshot of life on a single day. Including stories by Russell Banks, Ethan Canin, Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, Claire Keegan, Andrea Lee, Daniel Lyons, Lewis Robinson, Lynda Sexson, Paul Theroux, William Trevor and Haruk...
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(P/B) A WILD SHEEP CHASE
His life was like his recurring nightmare: a train to nowhere. But an ordinary life has a way of taking an extraordinary turn. Add a girl whose ears are so exquisite that, when uncovered, they improve sex a thousand-fold, a runaway friend, a right-wing politico, an ovine-obsesses professor and a manic-depressive in a sheep outfit, implicate them in a hunt for a sheep, that may or may not be running the world, and the upshot is another singular masterpiece from Japan's finest novelist. (ΑΠΟ ΤΗΝ ΠΑΡΟΥΣΙΑΣΗ ΣΤΟ ΟΠΙΣΘΟΦΥΛΛΟ ΤΟΥ ΒΙΒΛΙΟΥ)...
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(P/B) BLIND WILLOW, SLEEPING WOMAN
Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, an ice man, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things we might wish for. Whether in 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 loss, or sexuality, or the glow of a firefly, or the impossible distance between those who ought to be closest of all. Following the success of Kafka on the Shore comes a collection that gives full rein to Murakami's inventive mastery. From the surreal to the mundane, ...
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(P/B) FIRST PERSON SINGULAR
The eight masterly stories in this new collection are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator. From nostalgic memories of youth, meditations on music and an ardent love of baseball to dreamlike scenarios, an encounter with a talking monkey and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world. Occasionally, a narrator who may or may not be Murakami himself is present. Is it memoir or fiction? The reader decides. Philosophical and mysterious, the stories in Fir...
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(P/B) COLORLESS TSUKURU TAZAKI AND HIS YEARS OF PILGRIMAGE
Tsukuru Tazaki had four best friends at school. By chance all of their names contained a colour. The two boys were called Akamatsu, meaning 'red pine', and Oumi, 'blue sea', while the girls' names were Shirane, 'white root', and Kurono, 'black field'. Tazaki was the only last name with no colour in it. One day Tsukuru Tazaki's friends announced that they didn't want to see him, or talk to him, ever again. Since that day Tsukuru has been floating through life, unable to form intimate connections with anyone. But then he meets Sara, who tell...
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(P/B) WIND / PINBALL
Haruki Murakami's first two novels, available for the first time in English outside Japan. With a new introduction by the author. 'If you're the sort of guy who raids the refrigerators of silent kitchens at three o'clock in the morning, you can only write accordingly. That's who I am.' Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 are Haruki Murakami's earliest novels. They follow the fortunes of the narrator and his friend, known only by his nickname, the Rat. In Hear the Wind Sing the narrator is home from college on his summer break. He spends h...
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(P/B) SPUTNIK SWEETHEART
Twenty two year old, Sumire is in love for the first time with a woman seventeen years her senior. But, whereas Miu is a glamorous and successful older woman with a taste for classical music and fine wine, Sumire is an aspiring writer who dresses in an oversized second hand coat and heavy boots like a character in a Jack Kerouac novel. Surprised that she might, after all, be a lesbian, Sumire spends hours on the phone talking to her best friend, K about the big questions in life: what is sexual desire and should she ever tell Miu how she f...
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(P/B) AFTER THE QUAKE
The economy was booming. People had more money than they knew what to do with. And then the earthquake struck. For the characters in after the quake, the Kobe earthquake is an echo from a past they buried long ago. Satsuki has spent thirty years hating one man: a lover who destroyed her chances of having children. Did her desire for revenge cause the earthquake? Junpei's estranged parents live in Kobe. Should he contact them? Miyake left his family in Kobe to make midnight bonfires on a beach hundreds of miles away. Four-year-old Sala has ...
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(P/B) 1Q84
Book Two of 1Q84 ended with Aomame standing on the Metropolitan Expressway with a gun between her lips. She knows she is being hunted, and that she has put herself in terrible danger in order to save the man she loves. But things are moving forward, and Aomame does not yet know that she and Tengo are more closely bound than ever. Tengo is searching for Aomame, and he must find her before this world's rules loosen up too much. He must find her before someone else does. (From the publisher)...
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(H/B) FIRST PERSON SINGULAR
The eight masterly stories in this new collection are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator. From nostalgic memories of youth, meditations on music and an ardent love of baseball to dreamlike scenarios, an encounter with a talking monkey and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world. Occasionally, a narrator who may or may not be Murakami himself is present. Is it memoir or fiction? The reader decides. Philosophical and mysterious, the stories in Fir...
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