Murakami Haruki is an important figure in contemporary Japanese letters for his extensive translations from American fiction, and the enormous popularity of his own fiction has drawn attention to his work as a translator. His translation work has also...

AFTER DARKBy Haruki Murakami Alfred A. Knopf, 191 pages, $22.95 Haruki Murakami works wonders with daytime. In the Japanese novelist’s very best books—Dance Dance Dance (1988) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994)—un- or semi-employed protagonists discover that, when the rest of us are stuck at...

Gentle and enchanted, the 24 stories of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s latest collection, are frequently brief, unassuming and understated—but never flat or vacant. Mr. Murakami presents new variations on familiar preoccupations: brooding mid-20’s or -30’s male narrators, adulterous lovers, and a...

Gentle and enchanted, the 24 stories of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s latest collection, are frequently brief, unassuming and understated—but never flat or vacant. Mr. Murakami presents new variations on familiar preoccupations: brooding mid-20’s or -30’s male narrators, adulterous lovers, and a...

Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel. Alfred A. Knopf, 436 pages, $25.95.This is the way these things happen, don't ask why. Nakata has a mind that works simply, even if he's not exactly a simpleton. He forgets...

Strecher is an assistant professor of Japanese Language, Literature, and Culture at the University of Montana. In the following essay, he discusses Murakami's narrative strategies and styles in A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Norwegian Wood, speculating on the novelist's achievement in relation to both the traditions of jun-bungaku and postmodernism.

In the following essay, Loughman analyzes the characterization, particularly of the narrators, in Murakami's stories.

In the following review, Sage relates the common themes of South of the Border, West of the Sun and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle to Murakami's general concern with defining a postmodern Japanese consciousness.