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Quizzes

Quiz: Test your knowledge of Haruki Murakami’s novels

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Reading lists

Where to start reading Haruki Murakami’s books

Guide to magical realism

A guide to magical realism

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The best Japanese fiction in translation

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Features

The thirteen Best Haruki Murakami quotes

Image showing some of the best books of 2024, including Think Again, PATRIOT, The City and its Uncertain Walls and An African History of Africa

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Must-read books of 2024: A look back at the year’s most exciting releases

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Fifteen non-fiction books to inspire you

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Extracts

Haruki Murakami: How I write my novels

Newsletter

9 absorbing novels with an academic setting

A host of short story collections photographed against a red background

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12 short story collections to sink into

A text collage citing quotes about winter

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The best literary quotes about winter

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Perfect books for the music lover in your life

Tokyo has inspired all manner of writers seeking to evoke its unique atmosphere

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Book your holiday: Tokyo

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Life according to Haruki Murakami

Norwegian Wood

the classic Japanese love-story, now in a deluxe gift edition

Discover Haruki Murakami’s most beloved novel

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. 
 
In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Men Without Women, Murakami's distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

The haunting, enigmatic love story that turned Murakami into a literary superstar in Japan, and is his bestselling title throughout the world 
 
Autumn 1969, and soon I would be 20. 
 
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 twenty 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. 
 
‘Such is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami’s writing that everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility’ Guardian 
 
'Poignant, romantic and hopeless, it beautifully encapsulates the heartbreak and loss of faith' Sunday Times 
 
'A masterly novel' New York Times

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

His fantasies, with their easy reference to western pulp fiction and music, retain a beauty of the mind

A remarkable writer...he captures the common ache of contemporary heart and head

Combines a witty sci-fi pastiche and a dream-like Utopian fantasy in two separate narratives which alternate in an interweave of precognition and deja vu

Murakami's bold willingness to go straight-over-the-top has always been a signal indication of his genius...a powerful melange of disillusioned radicalism, keen intelligence, wicked sarcasm and a general allegiance to the surreal. If Murakami is the "voice of a generation," as he is often proclaimed in Japan, then it is the generation of Thomas Pynchon and Don De Lillo

He has become the foremost representative of the new style of Japanese writing: hip, cynical, highly stylized, set at the juncture of cyberpunk, postmodernism and hard-boiled detective fiction... Murakami is adept at outrageous wit, outrageous style.

Haruki Murakami (Author) 
In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. 
 
In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Men Without Women, Murakami's distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers. 
 
Jay Rubin (Translator) 
Jay Rubin is the author of Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State and Making Sense of Japanese, and he edited Modern Japanese Writers for the Scribner Writers Series. He has translated into English two novels by the Japanese writer Soseki Natsume, and also Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and after the quake.

Murakami's surreal, mind-bending masterpiece: a sci-fi pastiche and a Utopian fantasy novel ingeniously woven together. 
 
A narrative particle accelerator that zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan. Unicorn skulls and voracious librarians. John Coltrane and Lord Jim. Science fiction, detective story, post-modern manifesto. All this rolled into one rip-roaring novel, End of the World and Hard-boiled Wonderland is the tour de force that expanded Haruki Murakami’s international following. 
 
Tracking one man's descent into the Kafkaesque underworld of contemporary Tokyo, Murakami unites East and West, tragedy and farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy. 
 
‘A remarkable writer...he captures the common ache of contemporary heart and head’ Jay McInerney 
 
‘His fantasies, with their easy reference to western pulp fiction and music, retain a beauty of the mind’ Guardian 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

A Wild Sheep Chase

the surreal, breakout detective novel, now in a deluxe gift edition

Special 3D Edition

Haruki Murakami's third novel, A Wild Sheep Chase is the mystery hybrid which completes the odyssey begun in Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973. 
 
The man was leading an aimless life, time passing, one big blank. 
 
His girlfriend has perfectly formed ears, ears with the power to bewitch, marvels of creation. The man receives a letter from a friend, enclosing a seemingly innocent photograph of sheep, and a request: place the photograph somewhere it will be seen. Then, one September afternoon, the phone rings, and the adventure begins. Welcome to the wild sheep chase. 
 
‘A science fiction fantasy, a romance, a metaphysical tease, or a dramatisation of philosophical ideas’ Independent 
 
‘A highly accomplished piece of craftsmanship’ New Yorker 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland

A special hardback edition of Murakami's surreal, mind-bending masterpiece, in a new, unabridged translation from Jay Rubin. 
 
A narrative particle accelerator that zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan, unicorn skulls and voracious librarians, John Coltrane and Lord Jim. Science fiction, detective story and post-modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, End of the World and Hard-boiled Wonderland is the tour de force that expanded Haruki Murakami's international following. 
 
Tracking one man's descent into the Kafkaesque underworld of contemporary Tokyo, Murakami unites East and West, tragedy and farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy. 
 
This edition is a newly unabridged translation from long-time Murakami collaborator, Jay Rubin. 
 
'A remarkable writer...he captures the common ache of contemporary heart and head' Jay McInerney

The City and Its Uncertain Walls

A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a parable for these strange times. 
 
STEP INTO THE CITY. . . 
 
When a young man’s girlfriend mysteriously vanishes, he sets his heart on finding the imaginary city where her true self lives. His search will lead him to take a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own. 
 
When he finally makes it to the walled city, a shadowless place of horned beasts and willow trees, he finds his beloved working in a different library – a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together in the other world and, as the lines between reality and fantasy start to blur, he must decide what he’s willing to lose. 
 
A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a parable for these strange times. 
 
'A love letter to books, libraries and librarians' Financial Times, Books of the Year 
 
 
PRAISE FOR HARUKI MURAKAMI 
 
'The world's most popular cult novelist' Guardian 
 
'Wild and thrilling. . . Murakami is a master storyteller and he knows how to keep us hooked' Sunday Times 
 
'Totally gripping' Daily Express 
 
'It’s safe to say that there’s no one like Murakami' Literary Review 
 
'No other author mixes domestic, fantastic and esoteric elements into such weirdly bewitching shades' Financial Times

A 'cosy' masterpiece with agony between its lines… [The City and Its Uncertain Walls is] quietly miraculous… The greatest books…are those which enable us to enter their worlds, just as Murakami’s narrator enters his mysterious libraries

No other author mixes domestic, fantastic and esoteric elements into such weirdly bewitching shades.

Regular readers will delight in the Easter eggs nested in an unsettling quest spun from Murakami’s long-patented dream logic

An enveloping magical realist story

A mysterious, magical book that reveals itself like a secret being said. Murakami offers a beguiling look at self and the lengths we go to for love

[Murakami’s] imagination is one of a kind, and his blend of pop culture, postmodernism and Japanese mythology is a wholly unique contribution to literature

Murakami blends the whimsical and the threatening with the skill of that other pre-eminent Japanese visionary, Hayao Miyazaki

A sublime meditation on time, age and love

One of his best. It feels at once sweeping and intimate, grand and tender, quiet and charged with feeling

Murakami’s favourite motifs proliferate as the boundaries between the real and unreal, conscious and unconscious, blur

Inventive and magical…full of rich detail

A long, leisurely novel that jumps between here and there, fantasy and reality, and then and now. The result is very Murakamiesque

Beguilingly enigmatic...Murakami blends science fiction, gothic novel, noir mystery, horror, and coming-of-age story... deftly weaves ordinary reality—“something you have to choose by yourself, out of several possible alternatives”—with a shadow world that is at once eerie and beautiful. Astonishing, puzzling, and hallucinatory as only Murakami can be, and one of his most satisfying tales.

Murakami is a master storyteller and he knows how to keep us hooked

It’s safe to say that there’s no one like Murakami.

Murakami…stays true to form with this novel… a speculative fantasy with a faintly creepy undertow

Mysterious, illusive… there is something about the way [Murakami] writes that is so captivating

Ghostbustlingly alive. I was moved by [Murakami’s] portrait of impossible loss, how it can carve within us a Stygian underworld to which we are always being summoned. I even interpreted Murakami’s stinting on fictional norms as an attempt to more directly represent the self-exiling quality of melancholic grief

As we stare down social and ecological disasters, we need new ways to talk about what is real. Murakami writes most transparently about our contemporary moment toward the end of his latest novel in a reflection on the ‘pandemic of the soul.

Haruki Murakami invented 21st-century fiction

More than any author since Kafka, Murakami appreciates the genuine strangeness of our real world

... Mixes love, mystery and magic. This is the kind of book you think about long after you finish reading Irish Independen

Wistful, nostalgic, powerful and poignant

A sublime meditation on what it is to be human, our conscious and subconscious worlds, time, age and love

A sideways, thoughtful and sometimes playful journey into how we understand ourselves and who we want to be

[Murakami’s] principal concern has always been the pain and necessity of learning to be alone… Those concerns are universal. Mr Murakami’s compassionate rendering of them is why millions seek solitude to read his books

Haruki Murakami (Author) 
In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. 
 
In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Men Without Women, Murakami's distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers. 
 
Philip Gabriel (Translator) 
Philip Gabriel is the author of Mad Wives and Island Dreams: Shimao Toshio and the Margins of Japanese Literature and Spirit Matters: The Transcendent in Modern Japanese Literature and has translated many novels and short stories by the writer Haruki Murakami and other modern writers. He is recipient of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature (2001) for his translation of Senji Kuroi’s Life in the Cul-de-Sac, and the 2006 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for his translation of Murakami's Kafka on the Shore.

An exploration of a writer’s life from the Sunday Times bestselling author

Novelist as a Vocation

Words have power. Yet that power must be rooted in truth and justice. Words must never stand apart from those principles. 
 
'You end this collection…vowing to never let life, or writing, get so complicated again' Guardian 
 
Readers who have long wondered where the mysterious novelist gets his ideas and what inspires his beautifully surreal worlds will be fascinated by this highly personal look at the craft of writing. 
 
In this engaging book, the internationally best-selling author shares with readers what he thinks about being a novelist; his own origins as a writer; and his musings on the sparks of creativity that inspire other writers, artists, and musicians. 
 
'Murakami is like a magician who explains what he's doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers' New York Times Book Review 
 
'A fascinating glimpse of the peculiar writerly life' Sunday Times 
 
** A TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES and NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR**

[The] 11 essays here… deal with all the things that you’d like to ask [Murakami]…in the highly unlikely event that you were able to corner him at a book-signing session… You end this collection of beautiful essays vowing to never let life, or writing, get so complicated again

Haruki Murakami (Author) In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. 
 
In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Men Without Women, Murakami's distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers. Philip Gabriel (Translator) Philip Gabriel is the author of Mad Wives and Island Dreams: Shimao Toshio and the Margins of Japanese Literature and Spirit Matters: The Transcendent in Modern Japanese Literature and has translated many novels and short stories by the writer Haruki Murakami and other modern writers. He is recipient of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature (2001) for his translation of Senji Kuroi’s Life in the Cul-de-Sac, and the 2006 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for his translation of Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. Ted Goossen (Translator) Theodore (Ted) Goossen has translated the work 
of many Japanese writers, most notably Naoya 
Shiga, Haruki Murakami, and Hiromi Kawakami. 
He is the editor of The Oxford Book of Japanese 
Short Stories (1997) and the co-editor and founder, with Motoyuki Shibata, of the annual 
literary journal Monkey Business (now Monkey: 
new writing from Japan), which, since 2011, has 
introduced a new generation of Japanese writers to English-speaking readers. Essays and stories by, as well as interviews with, Murakami are a staple of every issue.

Haruki Murakami

Ted Goossen

Two Novels

Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 are Haruki Murakami’s two first novel - here they are together in one edition. 
 
Now I think it’s time to tell my story. 
 
Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 are Haruki Murakami’s two first novels. Home from college on his summer break, the narrator spends his time drinking beer and smoking with his friend nicknamed the Rat, listening to the radio, thinking about writing and pursuing a relationship with a girl with nine fingers. Three years later he has moved to Tokyo to work as a translator and live with indistinguishable twin girls. But the Rat has remained behind. Haunted by memories of the past, the narrator embarks upon a quest to find the exact model of pinball machine he and the Rat had enjoyed playing years earlier: the three-flipper Spaceship. 
 
‘Quintessential Murakami…an excellent introduction to a writer who has since become one of the most influential novelists of his generation’ Guardian 
 
‘Murakami’s way of making emotionally resonant images and symbols bump around on the page, and in one’s mind, remains fresh’ Evening Standard 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

Wind/ Pinball

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Penguin Shop: 3 Clothbound Classics for £33

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Discover the 1Q84 Trilogy by Haruki Murakami.

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Books by Haruki Murakami

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Murakami Collectible Classics6 Books

Articles featuring Haruki Murakami

Quiz: Test your knowledge of Haruki Murakami’s novels

Where to start reading Haruki Murakami’s books

A guide to magical realism

The best Japanese fiction in translation

The thirteen Best Haruki Murakami quotes

Must-read books of 2024: A look back at the year’s most exciting releases

Fifteen non-fiction books to inspire you

Haruki Murakami: How I write my novels

9 absorbing novels with an academic setting

12 short story collections to sink into

The best literary quotes about winter

Perfect books for the music lover in your life

Book your holiday: Tokyo

Life according to Haruki Murakami

Book bundles

Murakami Collectible Classics: the complete series

Murakami Collectible Classics I

Murakami Collectible Classics II

Murakami Collectible Classics: the complete series

Murakami Collectible Classics I

Murakami Collectible Classics II

Murakami Collectible Classics: the complete series

Murakami Collectible Classics I

Murakami Collectible Classics II

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