Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle: A Novel (1998) traces the story of Toru Okada, an ordinary Japanese man who experiences a strange, unsettling journey when his cat and his wife disappear and he goes searching for them. Murakami is one of Japan's most highly regarded contemporary fiction writers, known for his imaginative stories.

Cynthia Kadohata's novel The Floating World (1989) tells the story of a Japanese American family traveling around the United States during the 1950s in search of work and a home. Narrated by the twelve-year-old Olivia, the novel depicts family dynamics against a backdrop of the "floating world" of menial jobs and shifting locales that the family inhabits.

In Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (2001), Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami gives a riveting non-fiction account of the tragic events that took place in Tokyo on March 20, 1995, when...