Murakami, Haruki

The author reflects on how running has influenced his life and writing, discussing the places he has trained, the people he has met, and the races he has run.

Sumire, a twenty-two-year-old Japanese college girl who is a Jack Kerouac devotee and rebellious writer falls in love with a worldly married woman seventeen years her senior, follows her through Europe, and disappears, at which time the narrator, a young man in love with Sumire, is asked to help find her.

Contains seventeen short fiction stories by Haruki Murakami about people whose lives veer off the path of normalcy.

Superimposes the collapse of a marriage over the investigation into recovered war memories and a man's search for his own identity.

A collection of six short stories by Haruki Murakami which are based on the Kobe earthquake of 1995.

An ode to George Orwell's "1984" told in alternating male and female voices relates the stories of Aomame, an assassin for a secret organization who discovers that she has been transported to an alternate reality, and Tengo, a mathematics lecturer and novice writer.

Fifteen-year-old Kafka Tamura runs away from home to escape his father and find his long-lost sister and mother, drifting toward the parallel odyssey of an elderly Tokyo man named Nakata.

The author reflects on how running has influenced his life and writing, discussing the places he has trained, the people he has met, and the races he has run.

Explores the fundamental issues which led to a terrorist attack in which the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo released poisonous gas into the Tokyo subway system on March 20, 1995.