Haruki Murakami

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Most authors don't write simultaneous futuristic thrillers and pastoral fantasies about people with slashed eyes. Most authors don't write about chains of events set off by a missing cat. Most authors don't write about 15 year-old Oedipuses.

Most authors are not Haruki Murakami.

Murakami's works include twelve novels, dozens of short stories, an autobiography, and a non-fiction book of essays and interviews exploring a terrorist attack on Tokyo's subways that occurred in 1995. He achieved literary super-stardom in Japan with the publication of Norwegian Wood, but opinion is very much divided among the Japanese literary community whether he is a genius or a purveyor of somewhat odd popular fiction. His fans say, why not both?

Murakami's fiction often concerns dreams, sex, violence, the inexplicable, loneliness, parallel worlds, and cats.

Works written by Haruki Murakami include:

Fiction:

Novels:

• The "Trilogy of the Rat"
  • Hear the Wind Sing
  • Pinball, 1973
  • A Wild Sheep Chase
• Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of The World
• Norwegian Wood
• Dance Dance Dance
• South of the Border, West of the Sun
• The Wind Up Bird Chronicle
• Sputnik Sweetheart
• Kafka on the Shore
• After Dark
• One Q Eighty Four

Short story collections:

• The Elephant Vanishes
• After the Quake
• Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
• Let's Meet in a Dream (in collaboration with Shigesato Itoi)

Non-Fiction:

• Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Haruki Murakami provides examples of the following tropes:

• Amnesiac Lover: The narrator imagines that he and his dream girl are actually both examples of this in "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning".
• Author Appeal:
  • Murakami seems bizarrely fixated on ears, for some reason.
  • He's also a huge jazz fan. In a 2007 essay for the New York Times Book Review, he discussed his his prior career as a jazz club proprietor in Tokyo, and the influence and inspiration that his writing has drawn from jazz music.
  • He also loves reading--basically all of his main characters are avid readers.
  • Wells and cats also appear in much of his work.
• Badass Bookworm: The author himself, who is a triathlete and marathon runner (which is the main subject of his memoir).
• Dream Sequence: In almost every book.
• Erotic Dream
• Food Porn
• Kindhearted Cat Lover: Just about every protagonist, thanks to Author Appeal.
• Literary Allusion Title: Pinball, 1973's title is an allusion to Kenzaburo Oe's The Silent Cry (Japanese title Football, Man'en 1).
• Love Hurts
• Magical Realism: And how!
• Mind Screw: In almost every single book.
• Nameless Narrative: A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of The World.
• No Export for You: Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 have never been published outside of Japan (with the odd exception of Thailand), as Murakami is not anxious for a wider audience to find his earliest work. Translations into English have been published for students of English in Japan, and can be found here and there on the internet..
• Old Shame: Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973.
• Trilogy Creep: Dance Dance Dance to the "Trilogy of the Rat".
• Two Lines, No Waiting: Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of The World, Kafka on the Shore, One Q Eighty Four.
• What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic