"A dazzling new collection of short stories--the first major new work of fiction from the beloved, internationally acclaimed, Haruki Murakami since his #1 best-selling Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. 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...

In 1995, the Japanese city of Kobe suffered a massive earthquake. Nearly 6,000 people died. after the quake was the imaginative response from Japan’s leading novelist, Haruki Murakami: six stories, each dealing not directly with the catastrophe but the wider seismic effect it had on the emotional lives of people many miles away.

It became a catalyst for individuals to reassess their lives with unexpected consequences for themselves and their

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"An insightful look into the mind of a master storyteller—and a unique look at the craft of writing from the beloved and best-selling author of 1Q84, Norwegian Wood, and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. "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 MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: Esquire, Vulture, LitHub, New York Observer...

A boy visits a library on his way home from school. An old man takes the boy hostage and forces him to memorize a large number of books. The boy eventually realizes that the man plans to absorb the information he's memorized by eating his brain. With the help of a strange girl and a man dressed as a sheep, the captive devises an escape plan.

A tour de force of metaphysical reality, it 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. Their odyssey, as mysterious...

Follows an alienated young man whose suspicions begin to grow when a free-spirited woman he loves suddenly disappears after her boyfriend confesses his secret penchant for burning down greenhouses.

Two years after his wife's unexpected death, Yusuke Kafuku arrives in Hiroshima to direct a production of Uncle Vanya for a theater festival and, through relationships with an actor with whom he shares a tangled history and a chauffeur with whom he develops a surprising rapport, finds himself confronting emotional scars. This quietly mesmerizing tale of love, art, grief, and healing is ultimately a cathartic exploration of what it means to go on living...