HARUKI MURAKAMI is considered one of the world's leading contemporary writers. He was born in Kyoto in 1949 and got married very early, shortly after turning twenty. Together with his wife, they opened a jazz club in Tokyo named Peter Cat. Murakami attributes his decision to write to a paradoxical moment of sudden inspiration during a baseball game. Alongside his night job, he continued to write and translate major American authors, but turned exclusively to writing only after the enormous success of the novel NORWEGIAN WOOD, which has sold more than 10,000,000 copies worldwide and was made into a film. Since then, Murakami has divided his time between Japan and Hawaii, working on his novels with unprecedented consistency. He particularly loves and once completed, on his own, the route of the classic Athens marathon. He has been honored with the Franz Kafka, Jerusalem, and Hans Christian Andersen awards, as well as Japan's most prestigious literary award, the Yomiuri Prize, and is consistently among the candidates for the Nobel Prize.
Ultimately, is it possible for one person to completely understand another? We may invest endless time and energy in the persistent effort to learn about another person, but in the end, how close can we get to the essence of that person? We convince ourselves that we know this other individual well, but do we ever truly learn something significant about anyone?
Thirty-year-old Toru Okada loses his job, his cat, and soon after, his wife, and he embarks on a quest to find them. The calm routine of his life is overturned, and he begins a strange journey guided (albeit vaguely) by various characters, each of whom has their own story to tell him.
A police mystery, the chronicle of a marriage in disarray, an excavation of buried secrets from World War II: this masterful novel is all of these together, but mainly a testament to Murakami's unclassifiable literary brilliance.
Author Biography
Read an excerpt
When the phone rang, I was in the kitchen boiling some pasta, whistling the overture from Rossini's The Thieving Magpie that was playing on the FM radio and is probably the most suitable soundtrack for preparing a pasta dish. I wanted to ignore the phone, not only because the spaghetti was almost ready, but also because Claudio Abbado was bringing the London Symphony Orchestra to its musical peak. Eventually, I had to give in. Maybe someone was calling about a new job opening. I turned down the heat, went to the living room, and picked up the receiver. "Ten minutes, please," said the woman on the other end of the line. I'm good at recognizing voices, but this one was unfamiliar. "Sorry, who do you want to speak to?" "You, of course. Ten minutes, please. That's how long we need to understand each other." Her voice was low and soft, but somewhat colorless. "To understand each other?" "Each other's feelings." I bent down and looked into the kitchen through the door. The pot with the spaghetti was boiling, and Claudio Abbado continued conducting The Thieving Magpie.
Manufacturer
Product Guides
- Author
- Haruki Murakami
- Publisher
- PSychogios
- Publishers
- Psychogios
- Type
- Classical Literature, Prose
- Cover
- Soft
- Number of Pages
- 832
- Release Date
- 10/2022
- Publication Date
- 2022
- Dimensions
- 14x21 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9786180145168
Important information
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