Showing results by author "Haruki Murakami" in All Categories

Toru Okada's cat has disappeared, and this has unsettled his wife, who is herself growing more distant every day. Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has started receiving. As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out, and he embarks on a bizarre journey, guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell.

Haruki Murakami’s highly anticipated first novel in six years follows the narrator as his enduring memory of his formative teenage relationship leads him to the mysterious City, and a disruption to the barriers between the real and shadow worlds.

A 30-something painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist. When he discovers a strange painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the valley, a precocious 13-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt during World War II in Vienna, a pit in the woods behind the artist’s home and an underworld haunted by Double Metaphors.

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....

Kafka Tamura runs away from home at 15, under the shadow of his father's dark prophesy. The ageing Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simplified life suddenly turned upside down. As their parallel odysseys unravel, cats converse with people, fish tumble from the sky, a ghost-like pimp deploys a Hegel-spouting girl of the night, a forest harbours soldiers apparently un-aged since World War II.

A 20-something advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend and casually appropriates the image for an insurance company's advertisement. What he doesn't realise 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.

Combine an offbeat cast of characters with Murakami's idiosyncratic prose, and the result is the remarkable story Dance Dance Dance: high-class call girls billed to MasterCard, a psychic 13-year-old dropout has a passion for talking heads, and meet a hunky matinee idol doomed to play dentists and teachers. Don’t forget the one-armed beach-combing poet, an uptight hotel clerk and one very bemused narrator caught in the web of advanced capitalist mayhem.

In 1982 Murakami began running to keep fit. Here he reflects on his running experiences. Equal parts travelogue, training log, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers his preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon. By turns funny and sobering, playful and philosophical, this is a must-listen for fans of this masterful author and for the increasing number of people who find a similar satisfaction in running.

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost 20 years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

Information is everything in Hard-Boiled Wonderland. A specialist encrypter is attacked by thugs with orders from an unknown source, is chased by invisible predators, and dates an insatiably hungry librarian who never puts on weight. In the End of the World a new arrival is learning his role as dream-reader. But there is something eerily disquieting about the changeless nature of the town and its fable-like inhabitants.

Growing up in the suburbs in postwar 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 30s. After a decade of drifting he has found happiness with his loving wife and two daughters and success running a jazz bar. Then Shimamoto reappears.

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 collection Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic.

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 his time drinking beer and smoking in J's Bar with the Rat, listening to the radio, thinking about writing and the women he has slept with. Three years later, in Pinball, 1973, he has moved to Tokyo to work as a translator and live with indistinguishable twin girls.

In each story in this collection, Haruki Murakami sidesteps the real and sprints for the surreal. Everyday events are transcended, leaving the reader dazzled by this master of his craft. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is Murakami's most eclectic collection of stories to date, spanning five years of his writing.

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.

Eine geheimnisvolle Bibliothek in einer ummauerten Stadt am Ende der Welt, die nur betreten kann, wer seinen eigenen Schatten zurücklässt: Hier lebt das wahre Ich des Mädchens, in das sich der namenlose Erzähler mit siebzehn Jahren unsterblich verliebt. Er macht sich auf die Suche, gelangt in die Stadt, doch das Mädchen erkennt ihn nicht mehr.

Aomame ist knapp 30, Geschäftsfrau und auf dem Weg zu einem wichtigen Termin. Zu Beginn von Haruki Murakamis Roman 1Q84 sitzt sie in einem Taxi auf der Tokioter Stadtautobahn im Stau. Im Radio läuft eine Sinfonie, die ihr merkwürdiger Weise bekannt vorkommt, und merkwürdig ist auch der Rat, den der nicht minder merkwürdige Taxifahrer ihr mit auf den Weg gibt: Um nicht zu spät zu kommen, solle sie doch einfach aussteigen und verbotenerweise über eine Wendeltreppe die Hochstraße verlassen. Aomame folgt dem Rat - und findet sich plötzlich in einem Paralleluniversum wieder, in dem sie brutale Männer mordet und in dem zwei Monde am Himmel stehen. Aus 1984 ist das Jahr 1Q84 geworden.

Satsuki has spent 30 years hating one man: did her desire for revenge cause the earthquake? Miyake left his family in Kobe to make midnight bonfires on a beach hundreds of miles away. Fourteen-year-old Sala has nightmares that the Earthquake Man is trying to stuff her inside a little box. Katagiri returns home to find a giant frog in his apartment on a mission to save Tokyo from a massive burrowing worm.

Cuando nos rodean los muros, la aventura de toda una vida quizá consista en franquearlos. El regreso de Murakami a la novela después de La muerte del comendador. Poco se imagina el joven protagonista de esta novela que la chica de la que se ha enamorado está a punto de desaparecer de su vida. Se han conocido durante un concurso entre estudiantes de diferentes institutos, y no pueden verse muy a menudo.

23 stories, all unabridged, from a diverse group of star writers and readers. A truly memorable collection with a wide appeal. Includes "The Years Midnight" by Helen Simpson, read by Harriet Walter; "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful Morning" by Haruki Marukami, read by Walter Lewis; "Bablady" by A. S. Byatt, read by Roslaind Eyres; "Hotel des Vaoyaguerus" by William Boyd, read by Martin Jarvis; and "Who?" by Fay Weldon, read by Julie Christie.