Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

Haruki Murakami; Jay Rubin

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. Read more…

By Haruki Murakami; Translated By Alfred Birnbaum

In this propulsive novel by the author of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and The Elephant Vanishes, one of the most idiosyncratically brilliant writers at work in any language fuses science fiction, the hard-boiled thriller, and white-hot satire into a new element of the literary periodic table. As he searches for a mysteriously vanished girlfriend, Haruki Murakami\'s protagonist plunges into a wind tunnel of sexual violence and metaphysical dread in which he collides with call girls; plays chaperone to a lovely teenaged psychic; and receives cryptic instructions from a shabby but oracular Sheep Man. Dance Dance Dance is a tense, poignant, and often hilarious ride through the cultural Cuisinart that is contemporary Japan, a place where everything that is not up for sale is up for grabs. Read more…

Haruki Murakami

lgrsnf/D:\!genesis\library.nu\c1\_269765.c1d7cb14ba46415e9b152785f7239b90.epub Read more…

Murakami, Haruki

The plot centers on the narrator's brief but intense obsession with pinball, his life as a freelance translator, and his later efforts to reunite with the old pinball machine that he used to play. He describes living with a pair of identical unnamed female twins, who mysteriously appear in his apartment one morning, and disappear at the end of the book. Interspersed with the narrative are his memories of the Japanese student movement, and of his old girlfriend Naoko, who hanged herself, like the character of the same name in Murakami's later novel Norwegian Wood. The plot alternates between describing the life of narrator and that of his friend, The Rat. -- Description from http://www.goodreads.com (May 27, 2015) Read more…

By Haruki Murakami; Translated From The Japanese By Jay Rubin

Two sisters--Eri, a fashion model sleeping her way to oblivion, and Mari, a young student--form the center of a novel that documents a series of encounters--with a jazz trombonist, the manager of a "love hotel" and her maid staff, and a Chinese prostitute brutalized by a businessman client--in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn Read more…

Haruki Murakami; Philip Gabriel; Jay Rubin

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. RunTime: 13 hrs 30 min, 2 CDs. \* Mp3 CD Format \*. Following the best-selling triumph of "Kafka on the Shore," 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." Read more…

Haruki Murakami

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. ** Murakami’s new novel is coming ** COLORLESS TSUKURU TAZAKI AND HIS YEARS OF PILGRIMAGE 'The reason why death had such a hold on Tsukuru Tazaki was clear. One day his four closest friends, the friends he’d known for a long time, announced that they did not want to see him, or talk with him, ever again' Read more…

Haruki 1949- Murakami; J Philip Gabriel

Amazon.com ReviewThe opening pages of a Haruki Murakami novel can be like the view out an airplane window onto tarmac. But at some point between page three and fifteen--it's page thirteen in Kafka On The Shore--the deceptively placid narrative lifts off, and you find yourself breaking through clouds at a tilt, no longer certain where the plane is headed or if the laws of flight even apply. Joining the rich literature of runaways, Kafka On The Shore follows the solitary, self-disciplined schoolboy Kafka Tamura as he hops a bus from Tokyo to the randomly chosen town of Takamatsu, reminding himself at each step that he has to be "the world1s toughest fifteen-year-old." He finds a secluded private library in which to spend his days--continuing his impressive self-education--and is befriended by a clerk and the mysteriously remote head librarian, Miss Saeki, whom he fantasizes may be his long-lost mother. Meanwhile, in a second, wilder narrative spiral, an elderly Tokyo man named Nakata veers from his calm routine by murdering a stranger. An unforgettable character, beautifully delineated by Murakami, Nakata can speak with cats but cannot read or write, nor explain the forces drawing him toward Takamatsu and the other characters.To say that the fantastic elements of Kafka On The Shore are complicated and never fully resolved is not to suggest that the novel fails. Although it may not live up to Murakami's masterful \_\_, Nakata and Kafka's fates keep the reader enthralled to... Read more…

村上春樹, Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami Is An International Phenomenon. When Books One And Two Of His Latest Masterpiece, 1q84, Were Published In Japan, A Million Copies Were Sold In One Month, And The Critical Acclaim That Ensued Was Reported All Over The Globe. Readers Were Transfixed By The Mesmerising Story Of Aomame And Tengo And The Strange Parallel Universe They Inhabit. Then, One Year Later, To The Surprise And Delight Of His Readers, Murakami Published An Unexpected Book Three, Bringing The Story To A Close. In Order To Reflect The Experience Of 1q84's First Readers, Harvill Secker Is Publishing Books One And Two In One Beautifully Designed Volume And Book Three In A Separate Edition. A Long-awaited Treat For His Fans, 1q84 Is Also A Thrilling Introduction To The Unique World Of Murakami's Imagination. This Hypnotically Addictive Novel Is A Work Of Startling Originality And, As The Title Suggests, A Mind-bending Ode To George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four. (the Number 9 In Japanese Is Pronounced Like The Letter 'q'). 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... Read more…

Haruki Murakami; Translated By Alfred Birnbaum

BRAND NEW FIRST EDITION 1987 English softcover, with the original obi, clean text NO remainders NOT ex-library slight shelfwear; WE SHIP FAST. 201503824 Carefully packed and quickly sent in rugged shipping box (or Priority Envelope). Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and the most recent of his many international honors is the Jerusalem Prize, whose previous recipients include J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, and V. S. Naipaul. We recommend selecting Priority Mail wherever available; $3.99 Standard /Media Mail can take up to 3 weeks.\*\* Read more…

Haruki Murakami

A New York Times bestselling author—and “a mythmaker for the millennium, a wiseacre wiseman” ( New York Times Book Review )—delivers a surreal and elaborate quest that takes readers from Tokyo to the remote mountains of northern Japan, where the unnamed protagonist has a surprising confrontation with his demons. 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 the 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 who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Read more…

Murakami, Haruki

Haruki Murakami, the internationally bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, plunges us into an urbane Japan of jazz bars, coffee shops, Jack Kerouac, and the Beatles to tell this story of a tangled triangle of uniquely unrequited loves.A college student, identified only as “K,” falls in love with his classmate, Sumire. But devotion to an untidy writerly life precludes her from any personal commitments-until she meets Miu, an older and much more sophisticated businesswoman. When Sumire disappears from an island off the coast of Greece, “K” is solicited to join the search party and finds himself drawn back into her world and beset by ominous, haunting visions. A love story combined with a detective story, Sputnik Sweetheart ultimately lingers in the mind as a profound meditation on human longing. Read more…

Murakami, Haruki

From Publishers Weekly The virtuoso Japanese novelist presents 17 playful and darkly comic existentialist conundrums. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal This collection of 15 stories from a popular Japanese writer, perhaps best known in this country for A Wild Sheep Chase ( LJ 11/15/89), gives a nice idea of his breadth of style. The work maintains the matter-of-fact tone reminiscent of American detective fiction, balancing itself somewhere between the spare realism of Raymond Carver and the surrealism of Kobo Abe. These are not the sort of stories that one thinks of as "Japanese"; the intentionally Westernized style and well-placed reference to pop culture gives them a contemporary and universal feel. Engaging, thought-provoking, humorous, and slyly profound, these skillful stories will easily appeal to American readers but must present something of a challenge to the Japanese cultural establishment. At their best, however, they serve to dispel cultural stereotypes and reveal a common humanity. Recommended for libraries with an interest in contemporary fiction. - Mark Woodhouse, Elmira Coll. Lib., N.Y. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more…

Murakami, Haruki

Set at the time of the catastrophic 1995 Kobe earthquake, the mesmerizing stories in After the Quake are as haunting as dreams and as potent as oracles. An electronics salesman who has been deserted by his wife agrees to deliver an enigmatic package— and is rewarded with a glimpse of his true nature. A man who views himself as the son of God pursues a stranger who may be his human father. A mild-mannered collection agent receives a visit from a giant talking frog who enlists his help in saving Tokyo from destruction. The six stories in this collection come from the deep and mysterious place where the human meets the inhuman—and are further proof that Murakami is one of the most visionary writers at work today. Read more…

Haruki Murakami; Philip Gabriel

__Kafka on the Shore__ 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. As their paths converge, and the reasons for that convergence become clear, Haruki Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder. __Kafka on the Shore__ displays one of the world’s great storytellers at the peak of his powers. Read more…

Murakami, Haruki; Strecher, Matthew

In an “other world” composed of language—it could be a fathomless Martian well, a labyrinthine hotel or forest—a narrative unfolds, and with it the experiences, memories, and dreams that constitute reality for Haruki Murakami’s characters and readers alike. Memories and dreams in turn conjure their magical counterparts—people without names or pasts, fantastic animals, half-animals, and talking machines that traverse the dark psychic underworld of this writer’s extraordinary fiction. Fervently acclaimed worldwide, Murakami’s wildly imaginative work in many ways remains a mystery, its worlds within worlds uncharted territory. Finally in this book readers will find a map to the strange realm that grounds virtually every aspect of Murakami’s writing. A journey through the enigmatic and baffling innermost mind, a metaphysical dimension where Murakami’s most bizarre scenes and characters lurk, __The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami__ exposes the psychological and mythological underpinnings of this other world. Matthew Carl Strecher shows how these considerations color Murakami’s depictions of the individual and collective soul, which constantly shift between the tangible and intangible but in this literary landscape are undeniably real. Through these otherworldly depths __The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami__ also charts the writer’s vivid “inner world,” whether unconscious or underworld (what some Japanese critics call __achiragawa__, or “over there”), and its... Read more…

[By] Haruki Murakami; Translated From The Japanese By Jay Rubin

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.__ Read more…