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The overarching narrative concerns Toru Okadas strange quest to recover his missing cat and missing wife.
Norwegian Wood(1989)This is the book that transformed Murakami from Japanese success to international phenomenon.
Read it if youve ever been in love, are in love, or want to be in love.
John Updike called it an insistently metaphysical mind-bender; its also one of the deepest works in modern fiction.
The Elephant Vanishes(1993)A chained-up retired circus elephant disappears from a small town without a trace.
A woman stays up all night, every night, readingAnna Karenina.
A couple wakes up hungry in the middle of the night and robs a McDonalds for 30 burgers.
Writing is, after all, a makeshift thing.
This quiet, erotic bildungsroman is the perfect example.
Hajime and Shimamoto are childhood best friends, separated by a move and reunited in adulthood.
They fall in love and jet off to Greece for a work holiday, from which Sumire disappears.
The narrator, a friend of Sumires, joins the search party and picks up clues in Sumires writing.
I wont ruin the ending, but thisis one of Murakamis most plaintive works about loneliness and longing.
The prose isnt masterly, but this is a book about the daily grind.
Murakami beautifully captures the evanescence of inspiration in a well-paced and fascinating addition to his oeuvre.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman(2006)To put it colloquially, Murakami is random.
This massive collection of 24 stories makes no attempt at coherence.
Ultimately, the collection hangs together as a representative sampling.
Men Without Women(2017)There was something almost insulting about Murakamis self-own in this collection.
Readers hoping for some introspection about his use of women as maze bait wont find answers here.
Instead, just more wandering men avoiding confrontation and asking why theyre so alone.
Dollops of Americana in a Japanese novel that felt fresh at the time now read as a little forced.
Eventually, the two stories converge.
Nor do accompanying Pop Artesque illustrations add much verve.
There are sparks of the Murakami to come, but absolutely nothing to fire you up.
