Haruki Murakami began his writing career much later than most authors; he finished his first novel when he was 29. Since then, as if to catch up, he has proved to be very prolific and penned a lot of fiction and non-fiction works. Some of them are available now in Kindle edition.
Kafka on the Shore (published in 2002) is a complex novel with two different, yet interrelated plots about a run-away schoolboy and an elderly finder of lost cats. After the novel had been released, the readers asked thousands of questions concerning its meaning on the official website, and Murakami personally answered many of them. He emphasized that “Kafka on the Shore contains several riddles, but there aren’t any solutions provided. Instead, several of these riddles combine, and through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes shape. And the form this solution takes will be different for each reader.” For the novel, Murakami received Franz Kafka Prize and World Fantasy Award.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a collection of short stories written between 1981 and 2005; it gives the reader a great opportunity to follow the evolution of Murakami’s style, often allegoric and surreal. As Murakami himself noted, “I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.”
After Dark (published in 2004) is a classic Haruki Murakami novel with extensive attention to detail both in characters and settings, themes of loneliness and fate, and vivid pictures of Japanese urban life. “Murakami’s trademark humor, psychological insight, and grasp of spirit and morality are here distilled with an extraordinary, harmonious mastery.”
