13 Great Haruki Murakami Books + That Brand-New Novel

Books
Written By Chris Well

Photo: © Elena Seibert

“The more I try to write about reality in a realistic way,” the author says, “the more the unreal world invariably emerges.”

With his new book on the way, we take a look at Haruki Murakami’s books—his best books, most important books, and best-selling books…

With his first novel in six years, best-selling and award-winning magical realism author Haruki Murakami seems as popular as ever with fans in Japan. They lined up outside bookstores to get a copy of his new novel, The City And Its Uncertain Walls—a 661-page book(!) written during the pandemic lockdown(!).

The City And Its Uncertain Walls follows a character within a walled city and shows how they experience this location throughout the various stages of their life.

“I started writing this novel in early March 2020, when the coronavirus started raging in Japan,” Murakami says. “It took me almost three years to finish.”

Watch for an English translation of The City And Its Uncertain Walls later in the year.

While we’re waiting, I thought I’d spotlight several of Murakami’s previous books. Below are 13 titles (in chronological order) worth checking out…

About the author

Haruki Murakami has published more than a dozen novels, plus several short-story collections and nonfiction stuff. His writings are really popular all over, translated from their original Japanese into 50 languages and having sold millions of copies around the world.

Murakami has received numerous awards as an author, including the World Fantasy Award, the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize.

As a magical realism author, his fiction tends to stretch across more than one genre at a time, including the supernatural, fantasy, science fiction, and crime fiction. Murakami names authors like Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Chandler, and Richard Brautigan as inspirations, and says his current favorite authors include Cormac McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Dag Solstad.

Readers of his work tend to fall on one side or the other, as fans or critics. As mentioned by the New Yorker, his “mysterious and haunting” tales ask such unique questions…

  • What if a monkey stole your name?

  • What if a beetle woke up as Gregor Samsa?

  • What if you had to deliver an empty box and it changed your life?

“When I’m writing novels, reality and unreality just naturally get mixed together,” Murakami told them. “It’s not as if that was my plan and I’m following it as I write, but the more I try to write about reality in a realistic way, the more the unreal world invariably emerges.”

Interestingly, while the famous Japanese author has his books translated by others into English, we’ve heard that he himself translates others’ English books into Japanese.

While we’re waiting for more info about his new book, I thought I’d spotlight several of Murakami’s previous books. For this list, I’ve limited it to include fiction—so, novels and short story collections. (He has also written several nonfiction books.) Below are 13 of his most important works. Scroll further down for more info about each book…

Related links:

Monster Complex uses Amazon affiliate links.

13 Important Haruki Murakami Books + That Brand-New Novel

Scroll down for more info about each title…

13 Important Haruki Murakami Books

Hear the Wind Sing (1979) / Pinball, 1973 (1980) - one volume edition

This two-in-one volume includes Murakami’s first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, and his second novel, Pinball, 1973.

In the spring of 1978, a young Haruki Murakami sat down at his kitchen table and began to write. The result: two remarkable short novels—Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973—that launched the career of one of the most acclaimed authors of our time.

These powerful, at times surreal, works about two young men coming of age—the unnamed narrator and his friend the Rat—are stories of loneliness, obsession, and eroticism. They bear all the hallmarks of Murakami’s later books, and form the first two-thirds, with A Wild Sheep Chase, of the trilogy of the Rat. 

Featuring an introduction by Murakami himself, Wind/Pinball offers a fascinating insight into a great writer’s beginnings.

Find Wind/Pinball on Amazon

A Wild Sheep Chase (1982)

A marvelous hybrid of mythology and mystery, A Wild Sheep Chase is the extraordinary literary thriller that launched Haruki Murakami’s international reputation…

A surreal and elaborate quest that takes readers from Tokyo to the remote mountains of northern Japan, where the unnamed protagonist has a surprising confrontation with his demons.

It begins simply enough: A twenty-something advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend, and casually appropriates the image for an insurance company’s advertisement.

What he doesn’t realize is that included in the pastoral scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences.

Thus begins a surreal and elaborate quest that takes our hero from the urban haunts of Tokyo to the remote and snowy mountains of northern Japan, where he confronts not only the mythological sheep, but the confines of tradition and the demons deep within himself.

Find A Wild Sheep Chase on Amazon

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985)

“Once, when I was younger, I thought I could be someone else…. But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return.”

In this hyperkinetic and relentlessly inventive novel, Japan’s most popular (and controversial) fiction writer hurtles into the consciousness of the West.

Across two parallel narratives, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World draws readers into a mind-bending universe in which Lauren Bacall, Bob Dylan, a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters collide to dazzling effect. What emerges is a novel that is at once hilariously funny and a deeply serious meditation on the nature and uses of the mind.

Review

“Murakami’s bold willingness to go straight over the top [is] a signal indication of his genius…a world-class writer who has both eyes open and takes big risks.” (Washington Post Book World)

Find Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World on Amazon

Norwegian Wood (1987)

A magnificent coming-of-age story steeped in nostalgia, blending the music, the mood, and the ethos that were the 1960s with a young man’s hopeless and heroic first love…

Toru, a serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. As Naoko retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.

Stunning and elegiac, Norwegian Wood first propelled Haruki Murakami into the forefront of the literary scene.

Find Norwegian Wood on Amazon

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994)

“I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.”

An astonishingly imaginative detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets from Japan’s forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II.

In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists.

Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.

Find The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle on Amazon

Sputnik Sweetheart (1999)

Part romance, part detective story, Sputnik Sweetheart tells the story of a tangled triangle of uniquely unrequited love.

K is madly in love with his best friend, Sumire, but her devotion to a writerly life precludes her from any personal commitments. At least, that is, until she meets an older woman to whom she finds herself irresistibly drawn.

When Sumire disappears from an island off the coast of Greece, K is solicited to join the search party—and finds himself drawn back into her world and beset by ominous visions.

Subtle and haunting, Sputnik Sweetheart is a profound meditation on human longing.

Find Sputnik Sweetheart on Amazon

Kafka On the Shore (2002)

Kafka on the Shore displays one of the world’s great storytellers at the peak of his powers…

Kafka on the Shore 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.

As their paths converge, and the reasons for that convergence become clear, Haruki Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder…

Find Kafka On the Shore on Amazon

After Dark (2004)

A gripping novel of late night encounters that’s “hypnotically eerie, sometimes even funny, but most of all … keeps ratcheting up the suspense” (Washington Post Book World).

Nineteen-year-old Mari is waiting out the night in an anonymous Denny’s when she meets a young man who insists he knows her older sister, thus setting her on an odyssey through the sleeping city.

In the space of a single night, the lives of a diverse cast of Tokyo residents—models, prostitutes, mobsters, and musicians—collide in a world suspended between fantasy and reality.

Utterly enchanting and infused with surrealism, After Dark is a thrilling account of the magical hours separating midnight from dawn.

Find After Dark on Amazon

1Q84 (2011)

A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell’s—1Q84 is Haruki Murakami’s most ambitious undertaking yet…

The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo. A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her.

She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.” Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.

As Aomame’s and Tengo’s narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.

Find 1Q84 on Amazon

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013)

One of the most revered voices in literature today gives us a story of love, friend­ship, and heartbreak for the ages.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is the remarkable story of a young man haunted by a great loss; of dreams and nightmares that have unintended consequences for the world around us; and of a journey into the past that is necessary to mend the present.

A New York Times and Washington Post notable book, and one of the Financial Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Slate, Mother Jones, The Daily Beast, and BookPage’s best books of the year.

Find Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage on Amazon

Killing Commendatore (2017)

A tour de force of love and loneliness, war and art, Killing Commendatore is a stunning work of imagination from one of our greatest writers.

When a thirty-something portrait painter is abandoned by his wife, he secludes himself in the mountain home of a world famous artist. One day, the young painter hears a noise from the attic, and upon investigation, he discovers a previously unseen painting.

By unearthing this hidden work of art, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances; and to close it, he must undertake a perilous journey into a netherworld that only Haruki Murakami could conjure.

Find Killing Commendatore on Amazon

Men Without Women: Stories (2017)

Including the story “Drive My Car”—now an Academy Award–nominated film.

This collection from the internationally acclaimed author “examines what happens to characters without important women in their lives; it’ll move you and confuse you and sometimes leave you with more questions than answers” (Barack Obama).

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 lovesick doctors, students, ex-boyfriends, actors, bartenders, and even Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, brought together to tell stories that speak to us all.

In Men Without Women Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic, marked by the same wry humor and pathos that have defined his entire body of work.

Find Men Without Women: Stories on Amazon

First Person Singular: Stories (2021)

A mind-bending collection of short stories from the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author.

The eight stories in this new book are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator. From memories of youth, meditations on music, and an ardent love of baseball, to dreamlike scenarios and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world.

Occasionally, a narrator may or may not be Murakami himself. Is it memoir or fiction? The reader decides.

Philosophical and mysterious, the stories in First Person Singular all touch beautifully on love and solitude, childhood and memory—all with a signature Murakami twist.

“Some novelists hold a mirror up to the world and some, like Haruki Murakami, use the mirror as a portal to a universe hidden beyond it.” —The Wall Street Journal

Find First Person Singular: Stories on Amazon

Coming next!

The City and Its Uncertain Walls (2023)

The Japanese edition of The City and Its Uncertain Walls was released April 13, 2023. The release date for an English translation hasn’t yet been announced.

The novel shares its title with an earlier short story of the same name, which was published in the September 1980 issue of Bungakukai. This short story was eventually rewritten as the novel’s opening chapter.

Ahead of the book release in Tokyo, Murakami talked to reporters:

“Because of the coronavirus … I hardly went out and stayed home most of the time, and I tended to look at my inner self. Then I thought, perhaps it’s time to write that story.”

He started writing the novel January 2020 and finished December 2022. During that period, Murakami noted, lots of major events happened in the world—including Russia’s war on Ukraine, shaken globalism, and the Pandora’s box of social media.

“In an age when society is going through rattling changes, whether to stay holed up inside the wall or to go to the other side of the wall has become a greater proposition than ever.”

You can check for the book on Murakami’s author page on Amazon

Chris Well

Chris Well been a writer pretty much his entire life. (Well, since his childhood.) Over the years, he has worked in newspapers, magazines, radio, and books. He now is the chief of the website Monster Complex, celebrating monster stories in lit and pop culture. He also writes horror comedy fiction that embraces Universal Monsters, 1960s sitcoms, 1980s action movies, and the X-Files.

https://chriswell.substack.com/
Previous

Nomination for horror comic ‘Kraken Inferno’
Next

Director Pierre Földes on adapting Haruki Murakami to the screen: “The supernatural and the commonplace rub together.”