When a celebrated actress dies under shocking circumstances, she leaves behind an older sister, Sakumi, who suffers from memory loss in the wake of an accident. Struggling to remember whom she loves and what she lost, Sakumi embarks on a unique emotional journey, accompanied by her dead sister's lover and her clairvoyant kid brother.

A hopeless stutterer, taunted by his schoolmates, Mizoguchi feels utterly alone until he becomes an acolyte at a famous temple in Kyoto. But he quickly becomes obsessed with the temple's beauty, and cannot live in peace as long as it exists.

The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.

A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver's enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 - "Q" is for "question mark". A world that bears a question....

In "Newlywed", an unhappily married young man deliberately misses his stop on the train, only to be questioned by a shape-shifting homeless man about the trials of his marriage. In "Blood and Water", a woman recalls how she left the village she grew up in - which was run by a New Age cult - in order to lead a fulfilling life, even against her parents' wishes. And in the title story, "Lizard", a woman who has never before felt truly secure in her life admits a deep secret to her lover.

Yunjae was born with a brain condition called alexithymia that makes it hard for him to feel emotions like fear or anger. He does not have friends - the two almond-shaped neurons located deep in his brain have seen to that - but his devoted mother and grandmother aren’t fazed by his condition. Their little home above his mother’s used bookstore is decorated with colorful Post-it notes that remind him when to smile, when to say "thank you", and when to laugh. Yunjae grows up content, even happy, with his small family in this quiet, peaceful space.

The subject of Kokoro, which can be translated as 'the heart of things' or as 'feeling,' is the delicate matter of the contrast between the meanings the various parties of a relationship attach to it. In the course of this exploration, Soseki brilliantly describes different levels of friendship, family relationships, and the devices by which men attempt to escape from their fundamental loneliness. The novel sustains throughout its length something approaching poetry, and it is rich in understanding and insight.

As a child, Natsuki doesn’t fit into her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut who has explained to her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth.  

This stunning and elegiac novel by the author of the internationally acclaimed Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has sold over four million copies in Japan and is now available to American audiences for the first time. It is sure to be a literary event.

In the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed. The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho's best friend who meets his own fateful end; to an editor struggling against censorship; to a prisoner and a factory worker, each suffering from traumatic memories; and to Dong-ho's own grief-stricken mother.

With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come.

A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: It’s close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and, ideally, very little thinking. Her first gig - watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods - turns out to be inconvenient. Her next gives way to the supernatural: announcing advertisements for shops that mysteriously disappear. As she moves from job to job, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all but something altogether more meaningful.

On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses - until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards.

In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat - and then for his wife as well - in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists.  

'All the men I did get to know, every single one of them, has filled me with but one desire: to lift my hand and bring it smashing down on his face. But because I am a woman, I have never had the courage to lift my hand. And because I am a prostitute, I hid my fear under layers of make-up.' So begins Firdaus' story, leading to her grimy Cairo prison cell, where she welcomes her death sentence as a relief from her pain and suffering.

Oe's most important novel, A Personal Matter, has been called by The New York Times "close to a perfect novel". In A Personal Matter, Oe has chosen a difficult, complex though universal subject: how does one face and react to the birth of an abnormal child?