By the Book: A Haruki Murakami Reader

A Wild Sheep Chase, 1982
An amateur detective on a quest for a special breed of sheep encounters a woman with strange ears and the Sheep Man. Part of a three-book series, Sheep Chase has been translated into about 17 different languages

Hard boiled Wonderland and End of the World, 1985
A sci-fi tale set in the Tokyo of the future amid a technology war. In alternating chapters, the unnamed protagonist, the sole survivor of an experiment to implant decoder chips in humans, fights to reunite his mind and shadow. Winner of the Junichiro Tanizaki award, the Japanese Pulitzer

Norwegian Wood, 1987
A runaway hit that sold in the millions globally, this book was especially popular in Asia. Two million copies were sold in Japan and 1 million in China; the book also spent 16 years on the best-seller list of Korea's top bookstores. Few writers have had such a huge pan-Asian following

The Elephant Vanishes, 2001
This collection of short stories, many packing the kookiness of Murakami's novels into less than 20 pages, was written over six years. Several stories in the book made their first appearances in magazines such as The New Yorker and Playboy. The title piece inspired a play that toured New York and London

Wind-up Bird Chronicle, 1994
Critics regard this 600-page tome, penned over four years while Murakami was living in the U.S., as his best novel. It stars Murakami's signature jazz-listening loner, but is interwoven with the horrifying narrative of a soldier in World War II Manchuria — the author's first real foray into the dark realms of Japanese history

Underground, 1997
The 1995 Kobe earthquake and the sarin-gas attacks on Tokyo's subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult turned Murakami's thoughts back to Japan after almost seven years away. This non-fiction book was based on scores of interviews with former cult members and gas-attack survivors

South of the Border, West of the Sun, 1992
Like Bergman and Oe, Murakami never tires of his archetypes — in this case the lovelorn, middle-aged male loner. In this tale of lost innocence, a jazz-club owner approaching his 40s reunites with his elusive childhood sweetheart

Kafka on the Shore, 2002
One of Murakami's most complex novels, Kafka blends Western myth, Japanese magic and religious concerns — rarely touched upon in earlier books

After Dark, 2004
In this novella, Murakami's most recent book, the author drops the cool, first-person narrator of his previous work for a wide-angle look at a single night in Tokyo's neon-lit Shinjuku district