Vintage Murakami

haruki murakami

Not since Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata has a Japanese writer won the international acclaim enjoyed hy Haruki Murakami. His genre- busting novels, short stones, and repodage, which have been translated into thirty-four languages, meld the surreal and the hard-boiled, deadpan comedy and delicate introspection.

Vintage Murakami includes the opening cnapter of the international bestseller Norwegian Wood; •'Lieueenant Mamiya's Long Story: Parts I and II" from his monumental novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; "Shizuko Akashi" from: Underground, his nonfiction book on the Toyko subway attack 1995; and the short stories "Barn Burning," and "honey pie."

Also included, for the first time in book form, the short story "Ice Man."
--back cover

Table of Contents
"Barn burning" from The Elephant vanished --
"Shizuko Akashi" from Underground --
"Honeypie" from After the Quake --
"Lieutenant Mamiya's long stories: Part I" from the Wind-up bird chronicle --
"Lieutenant Mamiya's long stories: Part II" from the Wind-up bird chronicle --
"Ice man."

Genres fictionshort storiesjapanliteraturejapanese literaturefantasycontemporaryanthologiesmagical realismasian literature

182 pages, Paperback

First published January 6,2004

This edition

Format: 182 pages, Paperback
Published: January 1, 2004 by Vintage Books
ISBN: 9781400033966
ASIN: 1400033969
Language: English

About the author

haruki murakami

Haruki Murakami ( 村上春樹) is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and short stories have been best-sellers in Japan and internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages and having sold millions of copies outside Japan. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the World Fantasy Award, the Tanizaki Prize, Yomiuri Prize for Literature, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Noma Literary Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Kiriyama Prize for Fiction, the Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, and the Princess of Asturias Awards.
Growing up in Ashiya, near Kobe before moving to Tokyo to attend Waseda University, he published his first novel Hear the Wind Sing (1979) after working as the owner of a small jazz bar for seven years. His notable works include the novels Norwegian Wood (1987), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95), Kafka on the Shore (2002) and 1Q84 (2009–10); the last was ranked as the best work of Japan's Heisei era (1989–2019) by the national newspaper Asahi Shimbun's survey of literary experts. His work spans genres including science fiction, fantasy, and crime fiction, and has become known for his use of magical realist elements. His official website cites Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan as key inspirations to his work, while Murakami himself has named Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy and Dag Solstad as his favourite currently active writers. Murakami has also published five short story collections, including First Person Singular (2020), and non-fiction works including Underground (1997), an oral history of the Tokyo subway sarin attack, and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007), a memoir about his experience as a long distance runner.
His fiction has polarized literary critics and the reading public. He has sometimes been criticised by Japan's literary establishment as un-Japanese, leading to Murakami's recalling that he was a "black sheep in the Japanese literary world". Meanwhile, Murakami has been described by Gary Fisketjon, the editor of Murakami's collection The Elephant Vanishes (1993), as a "truly extraordinary writer", while Steven Poole of The Guardian praised Murakami as "among the world's greatest living novelists" for his oeuvre.