Murakami, Haruki 1949-

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MURAKAMI, Haruki 1949-

(Murakami Haruki)

PERSONAL: Born January 12, 1949, in Ashiya City, Japan; son of high-school literature teachers; married Yoko Takahashi, 1971. Education: Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, B.A., 1975. Hobbies and other interests: Running, Jazz music.

ADDRESSES: Home—Oiso, Japan. Office—Minami Aoyama 4-17-35-6E, Minato-ku, Tokyo, 107-0062 Japan. Agent—c/o International Creative Management, Inc., 40 West 57th St., New York, NY 10019.

CAREER: Writer, novelist, short-story writer, educator, and business owner. Co-owner and manager, with wife Yoko Takahashi, of jazz bar Peter Cat, Tokyo, Japan, 1974–81. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, visiting fellow in East Asian studies, 1991, associate researcher, 1991–93; writer-in-residence, Tufts University, 1993–95; former teacher, William Howard Taft University.

AWARDS, HONORS: Gunzo New Writer Award for first novel, 1979, for Hear the Wind Sing; Noma Literary Award for New Writers, 1982, for A Wild Sheep Chase; Junichiro Tanizaki Prize, 1985, for Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World; Yomiuri Literary Award, 1996, for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; Kuwabara Takeo Award, 1999, for Yakusoku Sareta Basho de.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Kaze no uta o kike, Kodansha (Tokyo, Japan), 1979, translation by Alfred Birnbaum published as Hear the Wind Sing, Kodansha International (Tokyo, Japan), 1987.

1973-nen no pinboru, Kodansha International (Tokyo, Japan), 1980, translation by Alfred Birnbaum published as Pinball, 1973, Kodansha International (Tokyo, Japan), 1985.

Hitsuji o megaru boken, Kodansha International (Tokyo, Japan), 1982, translation by Alfred Birnbaum published as A Wild Sheep Chase, Kodansha International (New York, NY), 1989.

Sekai no owari to hado-boirudo wandarando, Shinchosha (Tokyo, Japan), 1985, translation by Alfred Birnbaum published as Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Kodansha International (New York, NY), 1993.

Noruwei no mori, Kodansha International (Tokyo, Japan), 1987, translation by Alfred Birnbaum published as Norwegian Wood, Kodansha (Tokyo, Japan), 1989, translated by Jay Rubin, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 2000.

Dansu dansu dansu, Kodansha International (Tokyo, Japan), 1988, two volumes, translation by Alfred Birnbaum published as Dance Dance Dance: A Novel, Kodansha International (New York, NY), 1994.

Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru, Shinchosha (Tokyo, Japan), 1994, translation by Jay Rubin published as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel, Knopf (New York, NY), 1997.

South of the Border, West of the Sun, translation by Philip Gabriel, Knopf (New York, NY), 1999.

Sputnik Sweetheart, translation by Philip Gabriel, Knopf (New York, NY), 2001.

afterdark, Kodansha International (Tokyo, Japan), 2004.

Kafka on the Shore, translation by Philip Gabriel, Knopf (New York, NY), 2005.

OTHER

Murakami Haruki zensakuhin, 1979–1989, eight volumes, Kodansha International (Tokyo, Japan), 1990–91.

The Elephant Vanishes: Stories, translation by Jay Rubin and Alfred Birnbaum, Knopf (New York, NY), 1993.

Andaguraundo, Kodansha International (nonfiction), 1997, published as Yakusoku Sareta Basho de, Bungeishunju, 1998, translated as Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, Harvill (London, England), 2000, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 2001.

After the Quake: Stories, translated by Jay Rubin, Knopf (New York, NY), 2002.

(Selector and author of introduction) Birthday Stories (anthology), Harvill (London, England), 2004.

Vintage Murakami, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 2004.

Zou no shoumetsu, Shinchosha (Tokyo, Japan), 2005.

Tokyo Kitan-Shu, translation by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, Shinchosha (Tokyo, Japan) 2005.

Has translated works by Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Irving, Grace Paley, Paul Theroux, Truman Capote, Mark Strand, Tim O'Brien, and Tobias Wolff into Japanese. Contributor to books, including "On Meeting My 100-Percent Woman One Fine April Morning," translation by K. Flanagan and T. Omi published in New Japanese Voices: The Best Contemporary Fiction from Japan, Atlantic Monthly Press (New York, NY), 1991; "TV People," translation by Birnbaum published in Monkey Brain Sushi: New Taste in Japanese Fiction, 1991; and "Sleep," published in The Literary Insomniac: Stories and Essays for Sleepless Nights, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1996. Contributor of short stories to periodicals. Author's works have been translated into sixteen languages.

ADAPTATIONS: The Elephant Vanishes was adapted for the stage by Simon McBurney, 2003; the short story "Tony Takitani" was adapted to film, 2003; short stoires "Honey Pie" and "Superfrog Saves Tokyo" were adapted for the stage by Frank Gatati, 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: Haruki Murakami has been known for most of his career as the leading representative of a hip generation of Japanese who grew up in the postwar years, were disenchanted with their traditional culture, and sought freedom by emulating American pop culture. Ostentatiously refusing to participate in political action, Murakami has become known for his cool demeanor, his wearing of sunglasses, and his fashionable casual clothes. He has been called the Japanese Jay McInerney or the Japanese Bret Easton Ellis, not only for his cool, but also for his ability to attract masses of new-generation youth while alienating older readers.

Born in a suburb of Kobe in 1949, the son of a literature teacher, Murakami felt alienated at an early age from the authoritarian strictures and familial closeness of Japanese culture. Like many Japanese of his era, he turned to American culture for inspiration and escape. He told reviewer Jay McInerney in a 1992 interview for the New York Times Book Review that the infatuation for things American was not a love of the United States per se, but that American culture, from a distance, appeared "so shiny and bright that sometimes it seemed like a fantasy world."

As an adolescent, Murakami read Western literature, turning to such authors as Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ray Bradbury. He entered Waseda University in Tokyo in 1968, earning his degree in 1975. It was a time of violent student protest, an activity that disillusioned Murakami despite his sympathy with rebellion and with the goals of the protesters. In 1971, while still a student, he married fellow student Yoko Takahashi, who has remained his closest companion ever since, serving as his first reader and most trusted critic. The couple opened a jazz bar called Peter Cat in 1974; Yoko's role was to meet the public, while Murakami did physical work such as dishwashing and reading novels in his spare time.

It was during his bar-keeping years that Murakami had a sudden inspiration to write; he described this "revelation" to Ian Buruma, in a 1996 New Yorker profile. In April of 1978, Murakami was in the bleachers of Jingu Stadium, watching a baseball game between the Yakult and Hiroshima teams, when an American, Dave Hilton, came to the bat and hit a double. Buruma reported, "in that instant, Murakami realized that he could write a novel. He still doesn't know why; he just knew." He began writing the novel in English, at his kitchen table after bar hours, but later put it into Japanese and submitted it, as Kaze no uta o kike, for a prestigious first-novel prize, the Gunzo Award. (Submitting unpublished manuscripts is common for first novelists in Japan.) The novel won the prize and sold more than 200,000 hardback copies. Murakami pioneered a new Japanese writing style consciously different from the usual style of Japanese high literature. Brand names and references to American pop culture abound in what Ian Buruma described in the New Yorker as "a mixture of science fiction, hard-boiled cool, and metaphysics." A second novel, titled in English Pinball, 1973, has similar traits and a similar atmosphere of alienation.

Murakami turned to full-time writing in 1981 and produced his third novel, A Wild Sheep Chase. This postmodernist work features a nearly anonymous narrator and a cast of characters who are known by nicknames; the short chapters and the narrator's pose as a detached Japanese Everyman mark the novel's trendy attitude; and the plot, which concerns a search for a mysterious supernatural sheep, shows typical influences of the science fiction genre. This novel, the first of Murakami's books to be translated into English, was an alternate selection of the Literary Guild. Reviewing it in Tribune Books, Alan Cheuse thought it was "a greatly entertaining piece of fiction that will remind U.S. readers of the first time they read Tom Robbins or how much they miss Thomas Pynchon." In Booklist, Jill Sidoti called it "a fine book, one to be read through, contemplated, and then reread." Fumiko Kometani in the Los Angeles Times Book Review assured readers that Murakami was "immensely readable, his pages as easily consumable as bar peanuts."

Murakami's next novel, titled in English Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, extends the science-fiction trappings. It tells two separate, alternating tales in the manner of William Faulkner's Wild Palms, with the difference that in Murakami's novel, the two tales gradually converge and unite. Hard-Boiled Wonderland takes place in a secret part of the Japanese subway system where the narrator, a survivor of a top-secret neurosurgical experiment, waits for death. The End of the World takes place behind high walls which no one can see over, in a dying land where unicorns roam and where the narrator works in a library as a reader of dreams (which are stored in animal skulls). A Los Angeles Times Books Review contributor felt the science-fictional expositions were "the least successful parts of the book" and that Murakami's plotting was not his strength: "He is better at asides and excursions." A Kirkus Reviews commentator called the novel "a stunning combination of the contemporary and brash with elegaic allegory, all topped off by a strong measure of cyberpunk." The book was a major success in Japan, winning the much-sought-after Tanizaki Prize.

Murakami's fifth and most realistic novel, Norwegian Wood (titled after the Beatles song), sold over two million hardcover copies in Japan. The protagonist, Toru, a college student, has a passive disposition that Brooke Horvath, in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, traced back to the hero of the classic Tale of Genji. The student loses a friend to suicide, gains the friend's girlfriend, then loses her to a rehabilitation center before her own suicide; a second girlfriend consoles him and urges him to get on with life. Horvath found this novel "less startling" than Murakami's earlier work, "a quieter novel, but no less rewarding." Yoshio Iwamoto wrote in World Literature Today that Murakami "captures with an unerring ear the ambience of the sixties for a sizable segment of the population in a lyrically simple and clean prose, in turns appealingly sad and humorous." Murakami's Japanese publishers deliberately delayed the appearance of this novel's English translation because they wanted to present him as a cutting-edge talent rather than as a traditional realist. Norwegian Wood was finally published in English in the United States in 2000; an earlier translation had been published in his native country for Japanese studying English. "Though it may feel uncharacteristically straightforward to his American following, Norwegian Wood bears the unmistakable marks of Murakami's hand," reported Janice P. Nimura in the New York Times Book Review. As in his other works, his Japanese characters and setting are "strikingly Westernized," and his narrator is "low-key," she explained. Also, "Although what Toru narrates never ventures into the surreal, his story proves that 'ordinary' love is no less rich and strange," she related, adding that "in some ways, the landscape of Norwegian Wood is as disconcerting as that of Murakami's weirdest work. There are no real homes here, only more or less humane institutions: schools, universities, hospitals. Safe havens don't exist, and love is never truly unconditional." Threepenny Review contributor Francie Lin compared Norwegian Wood to Murakami's other work by calling it "a more interior, less antic type of narrative that deals with the same notion of alternative realities without recourse to overt fantasy…. The gap between one world and another is a matter of time rather than place. The central tragedies of Norwegian Wood are caused by a kind of failure of the imagination: the people who die are the ones who cannot envision themselves in the future, as if the future were not something organic and inevitable but a construct of the mind."

Murakami's 1988 novel, Dance Dance Dance (also inspired by a Western pop song), sold over a half million hardcover copies in Japan in its first six months in the bookstores. A sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, it presents the narrator of that novel as a public relations writer living in Tokyo. The plot, again a murder mystery with science-fiction leanings, involves several murders, most centrally that of a likable young prostitute named Mei. New York Times Book Review critic Donna Rifkind felt "the book never quite decides what it wants to be," although she expressed admiration for both comic and poetic passages in the text. Times Literary Supplement contributor Alexander Harrison remarked, "as well as acute intelligence, the novel has a relentless pace and verve which would run the world's best blockbuster out of breath." Harrison noted that while much influenced by such Western writers as Raymond Chandler, Murakami paid them homage "before blowing them away…. Although the text has its share of postmodern devices, the final effect is neither tricksy nor impenetrable. Philip Kerr, Paul Auster and Nicholson Baker could all take tuition from Haruki Murakami, and so indeed could Jackie Collins."

For a decade, while writing his works of Japanese-style alienation, Murakami lived abroad, first in Greece and Italy, then for several years in the United States, where for a time he taught at Princeton University and at Tufts University. The experience of living in the West seemed to draw him closer, spiritually, to Japan. As he told New Yorker writer Ian Buruma, "In Japan, I wanted personal independence…. I wanted to be free. In America, I felt free. But Americans take individual independence and freedom for granted. So the question for me was where to go from there. I felt confused."

His confusion resolved itself startlingly during a 1995 trip to China, where he visited Nomonham, a World War II battle site in the Mongolian desert. Here, after the Japanese initiated a senseless aggression against the Chinese, the Chinese in turn massacred them. Carrying his own food in bags because of an aversion to Chinese food, Murakami explored the site; then, in his hotel room, he experienced a revelation equivalent to his 1978 sensation at the baseball park. This time, he felt that the hotel room was undergoing an earthquake. His next novel, published in English in 1997 as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, features, among other things, a searingly graphic account of the war as remembered by its participants. It was a turnaround for the writer toward political statement. "The most important thing," Murakami told Buruma, "is to face our history, and that means the history of the war." The novel was also an occasion for Murakami to examine his Japaneseness and to explore the meaning of that concept: "I used to hate it, but now I want to find out what is important to me about Japan," he confided to Buruma.

In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the narrator, Toru Okada, is a directionless young man who has a series of strange, dreamlike experiences while searching for his missing cat and for his wife, who leaves him soon after the cat vanishes. He visits psychics, befriends a melancholy teenage girl, and hears rumors of evil deeds done by his brother-in-law, an ambitious politician. At one point, sitting in a dry well, he finds the entrance to a hotel room, which is visited by characters that include a seductress who endows him with miraculous powers and soldiers who recall horrific events of the war, such as seeing friends skinned alive. "These Bocaccio-like interpolations contain some of the best writing in the book," commented Jamie James in the New York Times Book Review. James thought The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle "marks a significant advance in Murakami's art. He has stripped away much of the pop ornamentation that in his earlier novels veered perilously near to product placement." New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani noted that this book differs from Murakami's earlier work because it "not only limns its hero's efforts to achieve self-understanding, but also aspires to examine Japan's burden of historical guilt and place in a post-World War II world. The mechanical cry of the wind-up bird that the book's hero sporadically hears is the sound of history winding its spring, the setting into motion of events that will reverberate through public and private lives."

Murakami added editor to his literary resume with Birthday Stories, a collection of stories about birthdays "compiled by a writer who believes that birthdays—the days that mark the process of ageing and learning and absorbing experience—don't essentially matter," commented James Sullivan in the Financial Times. Among the stories chosen by Murakami are "Dundun," by Dennis Johnson, in which the protagonist marks his birthday by shooting his best friend while in a drug-induced haze. "A Game of Dice" by Paul Theroux details a middle-aged man's annual birthday gift of a virile lover to his pale, mousy wife. "Timothy's Birthday" by William Trevor finds the young main character unable to go home or celebrate his birthday after a bitter argument with his parents. A pair of old lovers reunite years later in Russell Banks's "The Moor," and in "Angel of Mercy, Angel of Wrath," a cranky old woman calls the SPCA for help in clearing her home of a flock of crows on her eighty-first birthday. To Murakami, birthdays represent "not so much the process of evolution and development within an individual, but the playing-out of what must inevitably happen," an inexorable progress toward one's ultimate fate, Sullivan noted.

South of the Border, West of the Sun, deals with the marks left by an adolescent romance on its participants, who are reunited after many years of separation. The man, Hajime, finds that all the women he meets as an adult lack "something that was waiting just for me." When he encounters Shimamoto, his childhood sweetheart, he becomes obsessed with her. "Murakami contemplates the way in which memory not only lingers but gives rise to overwhelming longing for the unreclaimable past," related Mary Hawthorne in the New York Times Book Review. Ultimately, the couple "are incapable of resurrecting the lost perfection of their youth," Hawthorne reported, adding, "This wise and beautiful book is full of hidden truths, but perhaps this is its most essential one, unbearable though it may be to contemplate." Threepenny Review contributor Lin thought South of the Border, West of the Sun something of a companion piece to Norwegian Wood, "as the latter is about youth looking forward and the former about age looking back." Time International reviewer Hilary Roxe observed that the characters "never know what they're looking for and certainly never find it, but … are interesting enough to make their search seem worthwhile," and Lin noted that Murakami's narration has "a kind of restrained candor that gives the novel a quality of private testimony." Richard Bernstein, writing in the New York Times, called the book "a delicate and affecting fable" and "a probing meditation on human fragility, the grip of obsession and the impenetrable, erotically charged enigma that is the other."

Obsession and other-ness are at the core of Sputnik Sweetheart, in which a young woman writer, Sumire, makes herself over, emulating a beautiful, successful businesswoman, Miu, in an effort to win Miu's love. During a trip to a Greek island, Sumire realizes that Miu does not return her passion—and then Sumire disappears. A man known only as "K," who narrates the story and has an unrequited desire for Sumire, soon arrives from Japan to investigate. "Murakami does hint at a solution," remarked Daniel Zalewski in the New York Times Book Review. "And that solution is breathtakingly freaky." Miu, it seems, believes that she has been "split in two"; she once observed a duplicate of herself making love with a man whose advances she had spurned. Perhaps Sumire's knowledge of this phenomenon, Zalewski noted, has enabled her to go to "'the other side' to find 'the lost part of Miu.'"

The concept of "the other side" also informs Murakami's first nonfiction book, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, about the poison gas attack launched on a Tokyo subway by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult in 1995. He interviews both survivors of the attack and members of the cult. One survivor describes the Aum Shinrikyo followers as being "from another dimension." "In many ways, the cult members are sinister doppelgängers to his own characters," Zalewski related. "Like Sumire, they've decided to 'live in a fiction.'" He concluded, "One can imagine the shudder that went through Japan's best novelist when an Aum member made this sad confession to him: 'My consciousness had gone over to the other side and I couldn't get back.'"

In his short story collection, After the Quake: Stories, Murakami centers his attention on tales inspired by the disastrous Kobe earthquake of 1995 and the human impact of the catastrophe. In the "six amazing stories in this collection, Murakami takes out his flashlight and shines it on the human heart, illuminating various aspects and darker recesses of the human psyche," commented Helen Mitsios in World and I. "And when things get too bleak, he pulls back and comforts his readers with tenderness and wisdom, offering them hope again." In "UFO in Kushiro," Komura, an average fellow who works as an electron-ics salesman, watches his wife obsesses on television coverage of the earthquake. After five days, she abruptly leaves him, realizing in the aftermath of the deadly disaster that he has nothing to offer her, that living with him "is like living with a chunk of air." In "Super Frog Saves Tokyo," which Mitsios called "a gem of magical realism," superhero Frog has to battle Worm to prevent the earthquake from occurring. Frog appears in Mr. Katagiri's apartment, seeking an Everyman to fight at his side. Agreeing to help in any way he can, Katagiri watches as Frog is mortally wounded in the battle. When he awakes from the terrifying dream that has gripped him, however, Katagiri realizes that what can be seen is not necessarily the actual reality, and that sometimes one's fiercest enemy can lurk within a person's own heart. In "Thailand," a frustrated and bitter ex-wife finds herself hoping that her despised ex-husband has suffered terrible harm in the earthquake. "The Ice Man," in which a woman tells of a husband who loves her but is literally made of ice, is a meditation on loneliness and the temporary nature of love. Junpei, the main character in "Honey Pie," suddenly realizes that he has let his life slip past him, and in the aftermath of the quake it is time to participate rather than observe life and ask the woman he loves to marry him. Marukami's writing, "his subtle yet profound alchemy transforms the minutiae of people's humdrum lives into something bigger than themselves," Mitsios concluded.

Kafka on the Shore is told in alternating chapters focusing on the two main characters. Fifteen-year-old Kafka Tamura leaves home to escape the oppression of his overbearing father, a famous sculptor. His sister and mother had similarly left years before. Kafka is also fleeing an Oedipal prediction by his hated sire who said he would kill his father and sleep with his mother. Shortly after Kafka leaves, his father is discovered dead in a pool of blood. Accompanies by his alter-ego, a voice in his head he calls Crow, Kafka heads toward the Japanese island of Shikoku. There, he spends most of his time at a private library, steeping himself in all the books that surround him—literary and pop culture references abound in the novel. He makes friends with a transsexual librarian and eventually manages to get a job at the library that allows him to sleep there. In time, Kafka meets two older women, one in her fifties, one a few years his senior. He has sex with both, even though the younger of the two is most likely his sister, and the older almost certainly his mother. There is even some doubt that the trysts occurred in the material world; the older woman is ghostlike, mercurial, existing perhaps on a metaphysical plane.

Concurrent with Kafka's story is that of Satoru Nakata, an intellectually stunted old man who can cannot read or write but who has the ability to make it rain fish, leeches, and assorted vermin. He can talk to cats because of what might have been a UFO experience in his youth, and he supplements his meager income by working as a master cat-finder. Nakata becomes profoundly disturbed by a cat-finding case gone wrong, in which he encounters a cat killer in the form of Johnnie Walker, straight from the label of the scotch whisky of the same name. Walker beheads the felines, feasts on their entrails, and uses their souls to make flutes. Walker vows to kill five cats unless Nakata kills, which the distraught old man is willing to do. Afterward, accompanied by newfound friend and trucker Hoshino, he feels himself compelled to travel to Shikoku, where Kafka's life continues to take bizarre turns. Though Kafka and Nakata never meet in the novel, their lives converge ever closer when Kafka wanders deeply into a thick, oppressive forest to face his final fate. "As Kafka waits in a cabin in the woods, we finally see that the motivating force behind Murakami's vagueness is a benign, even friendly, fascination with death," observed Vince Passaro in Artforum International. "Murakami depicts death as a calm and beautiful vastness, a state contiguous with life and therefore not to be feared," Passaro concluded. "Such a vision, slipped so quietly before us, is a profound spiritual gift."

"This tale of two people's struggles to escape/fulfill an unknowingly shared fate is at once absurdly fun and highly sentimental," stated Atlantic Monthly reviewer Joe Zobenica. The story "works a powerful spell, its extremes of violence and sexual encounter drifting across its surface like a painless dream," observed Philip Hensher in the Spectator. John Updike, writing in the New Yorker, called the book an "insistently metaphysical mind-bender," and noting that "The double plot unfolds in cunningly but tenuously linked chapters." A Newsweek reviewer observed that "finishing Kafka on the Shore is like waking from a great dream. Nothing has changed, but everything about the world looks different." Library Journal contributor Shirley N. Quan stated that the "bulk of this narrative is erudite, lyrical, and compelling," while Donald Morrison, writing in Time International, remarked that "like any Murakami novel, Kafka defies both description and the urge to stop reading."

Reflecting on Murakami's body of work, Lin observed, "Despite the discrete concerns of each work, he essentially writes about one thing: there is, in his books, a familiar world full of the living specifics of music, weather, books, food, marriage, and sex; and then there is its shadow, invariably dark and dreamlike, which intrudes upon the original with intent to harm. The intersection of the familiar and the menacing forms the core of Murakami's interest. Coupled with sheer nerve, this obsession spawns a kind of fantasy literature that has no real precedent." And Jamie James pointed out in the New York Times Book Review that "Western critics searching for parallels have variously likened [Murakami] to Raymond Carver, Arthur C. Clarke, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Pynchon—a roster so ill-assorted as to suggest that Murakami may in fact be an original."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Murakami, Haruki, After the Quake: Stories, Knopf (New York, NY), 2002.

Rubin, Jay, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, Harvill Press (London, England), 2002.

Strecher, Matthew, Dances with Sheep: The Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Haruki Murakami, University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies (Ann Arbor, MI), 2002.

PERIODICALS

America's Intelligence Wire, January 27, 2005, Angie Becker, "Murakami's Latest Novel Solid, Likely to Drift away from Novices."

Artforum International, April, 2005, Vince Passaro, review of Kafka on the Shore, p. S47.

Atlantic Monthly, May, 2005, Jon Zobenica, review of Kafka on the Shore, p. 124.

Booklist, September 15, 1989, Jill Sidoti, review of A Wild Sheep Chase, p. 114; November 15, 2004, Allison Block, review of Kafka on the Shore, p.532.

Daily Variety, July 2, 2004, Marilyn Stasio, theater review of The Elephant Vanishes, p. 12.

Dallas Morning News, February 16, 2005, Jerome Weeks, "Haruki Murakami Leads Us on Quests Where Dreams and Reality Blend."

Entertainment Weekly, January 21, 2005, Jennifer Reese, review of Kafka on the Shore, p. 90.

Financial Times, January 24, 2004, James Sullivan, review of Birthday Stories, p. 31; January 15, 2005, Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, review of Kafka on the Shore, p. 32.

Guardian (London, England), May 26, 2001, Matt Thompson, profile of Haruki Murakami.

Japan Times, December 1, 2002, Roland Kelts, profile of Haruki Murakami.

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 1991, review of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, p. 816; December 1, 2004, review of Kafka on the Shore, p.1110.

Library Journal, January 1, 2005, Shirley N. Quan, review of Kafka on the Shore, p. 99.

Locus, August, 1993, Gary K. Wolfe, review of The Elephant Vanishes, pp. 25, 50.

Look Japan, April, 2004, Dmitry Kovalenin, "Russian-Boiled Wonderland: Japanese Novelist Haruki Murakami Is Enchanting Russian Readers with His Unique Brand of Fiction," p. 29.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 15, 1989, Foumiko Kometani, review of A Wild Sheep Chase, p. 1; September 15, 1991, review of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, p. 3.

M2 Best Books, April 19, 2004, "Korean Publishers to Reissue Novels by Cult Japanese Authors."

Newsweek, January 24, 2005, Malcolm Jones, "The Call of the Wild: A Great Novel with Talking Cats and Colonel Sanders," p. 67.

Newsweek International, January 24, 2005, Malcolm Jones, review of Kafka on the Shore, p. 57.

New Yorker, December 23, 1996, Ian Buruma, interview with Haruki Murakami, pp. 60-71; January 24, 2005, John Updike, review of Kafka on the Shore.

New York Times, October 31, 1997, Michiko Kakutani, "On a Nightmarish Trek through History's Web," p. E44; February 17, 1999, Richard Bernstein, "An Obsessive Attraction That Cripples Two Lives," p. E8.

New York Times Book Review, January 2, 1994, Donna Rifkind, review of Dance Dance Dance, p. 9; November 2, 1997, Jamie James, "East Meets West," p. 8; February 14, 1999, Mary Hawthorne, "Love Hurts," p. 8; September 24, 2000, Janice P. Nimura, "Rubber Souls"; June 10, 2001, Daniel Zalewski, "Lost in Orbit."

People, January 17, 2005, Kyle Smith, review of Kafka on the Shore, p. 55.

Publishers Weekly, December 6, 2004, review of Kafka on the Shore, p. 42; January 31, 2005, Daisy Maryles, review of Kafka on the Shore, p. 24.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 1993, Brooke Horvath, review of Norwegian Wood, pp. 228-229.

Sarasota Herald Tribune, March 6, 2005, Joe Follick, review of Kafka on the Shore, p. E5.

Spectator, January 1, 2005, Philip Hensher, review of Kafka on the Shore, p. 23.

Sunday Telegraph (London, England), January 16, 2005, Theo Tait, "Dreams of Cats," review of Kafka on the Shore.

Threepenny Review, summer, 2001, Francie Lin, "Break on Through"; spring, 2005, Steven G. Kellman, review of Kafka on the Shore, p. 143.

Time International, March 1, 1999, Hilary Roxe, "An Enchanting Futile Quest," p. 56; February 14, 2005, Donald Morrison, "It's Raining Sardines: Haruki Murakami's Novel Kafka on the Shore Is a Sublimely Weird, Compulsively Readable Blockbuster," p.58.

Times Literary Supplement, March 18, 1994, Alexander Harrison, review of Dance Dance Dance, p. 12.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), November 11, 1989, Alan Cheuse, review of A Wild Sheep Chase, p. 6.

Village Voice, January 18, 2005, Paul Lafarge, review of Kafka on the Shore.

Washington Post, January 30, 2005, Steven Moore, review of Kafka on the Shore, p. BW06.

World and I, November, 2003, Morton A. Kaplan, "Making Life Meaningful," commentary on Haruki Murakami, p. 12; November, 2003, Helen Mitsios, review of After the Quake, p. 210.

World Literature Today, winter, 1992, Yoshio Iwamoto, review of Norwegian Wood, pp. 207-208; January-April, 2005, Patricia Welch, "Haruki Murakami's Storytelling World," p. 55.

Yomiuri Shimbun (Tokyo, Japan), October 9, 2003, "Second Haruki Murakami Story to Be Put on Big Screen"; June 24, 2004, Marigold Huges, theater review of The Elephant Vanishes; November 24, 2004, "China Hit by 'Murakami Fever' Epidemic," commentary on Haruki Murakami; January 30, 2005, Colin Donald, review of Kafka on the Shore.

ONLINE

AllReaders.com Web Site, http://www.allreaders.com/ (September 5, 2005), John Marcel, review of A Wild Sheep Chase; David Loftus, review of A Wild Sheep Chase; John Marcel, review of Dance, Dance, Dance; Egdonna Esman, review of Norwegian Wood; John Marcel, review of Norwegian Wood; Sergio Mendoza, review of Norwegian Wood; John Marcel, review of South of the Border, West of the Sun; Sergio Mendoza, review of South of the Border, West of the Sun; David Loftus, review of South of the Border, West of the Sun; John Marcel, review of Sputnik Sweetheart; David G. Phillips, review of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.