Murakami, Haruki

Nineteen-year-old college student Mari Asai has a series of unusual encounters over the course of a long Tokyo night, while her sister Eri, a fashion model, sleeps.

A Tokyo of the future where information confers power and right, but the inhabitants have no human essence.

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.