Elephant Vanishes

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, First Person Singular and The City and Its Uncertain Walls Murakami's distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

"How does Murakami manage to make poetry while writing of contemporary life and emotions? I am weak-kneed with admiration" Independent on Sunday "Enchanting...intriguing... All of these tales have a wonderfully surreal quality and a hip, witty tone" Wall Street Journal "All the stories take place in parallel worlds not so much remote from ordinary life as hidden within its surfaces: secret alleys that afford unexpected - and unsettling - views" New York Times "Like the best thriller fiction, it nags you with the sensation that Something Nasty is about to happen" Sunday Times "Most collections of short stories work by the interplay of different voices. This one offers the more satisfying rewards of a novel: unity of tone and a richness of recurring detail that creates its own texture: spaghetti, lawns, hamburgers, beer-drinking, kid sisters, Sunday afternoons, a man's name" Independent