Murakami is a modern Japanese writer; the genre involves detailed descriptions of everyday life, almost a celebration of the ordinary. This kind of writing creates a comfy mood, even when the tale is tense. Well, you'll see. Anyway, his books are all offbeat and slightly pleasant.

Murakami's work is blessed by translation which is simply outstanding.

Murakami is inventive and covers a wide array of themes in this large work. We cover personal relationships (of course), personal responsibility for one's place in life, Japanese postwar angst (not done well), and of course various aspects of pop culture and urban life, among other things.

Sometimes the ride feels a bit bumpy, but given the breadth, I am impressed by the flow. Anyway, Murakami is quite talented, the story itself is interesting enough, so we get a fairly compelling read. On the negative side, immersion via suspension of disbelief is very hard, thanks to a superabundance of supernatural events, capabilities, and situations. Oh, well.

Jay Rubin has replaced Alfred Birnbaum as Murakami's English translator. While Rubin deserves pretty good marks, Birnbaum is clearly superior at this particular kind of work. Sadly, the translation is occasionally noticeable in the reading.

Good stuff, but not up to Murakami's ability. This is a nicely written tale of a young man and how he's dealt with relationships through his years, but there really isn't much there there. It's a nice mood book, and has some revealing passages, but.... Also, I prefer his old translator; doubtless I deserve censure for saying so.

This is a sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, and better. Our hero is called back to Sapporo and more times of bizarreness. There's a good dose of mystery, plenty of strangeness, and plenty of intrigue to keep you interested. However, what makes this great is the extremely effective way Murakami creates a mood. Reading this is simultaneously exciting and peaceful, busy and calm. Nice.

This is a collection of short stories. They're nice, well written of course, and full of the Murakami mood, but short stories don't allow for the wackiness of his novels. There's a couple of stories here I didn't care for, but most of them are very good, and the book is getting.

Update: Murakami has released a new translation by Jay Rubin, which is easily available in the US. I haven't read it. This fuss was all about his hating the original (Birnbaum) translation. It wasn't Birnbaum's best, but it was good, so I'm a bit curious what the big deal was. If Murakami is right, the new edition must be very very good.

This unavailable-outside-Japan edition is an earlier, less-supernatural, and superior prototype for The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Like much of Murakami's work, we have people struggling with relationships and loneliness and fitting in (or not), along with a mild dose of philosophising. My favorite Murakami so far.

If you find this (pair of small volumes) in a used bookshop, or if you visit Japan, grab them and extras - there's plenty of demand here.

This is a funny quirky modern tale where a young Japanese guy gets swept up in a vision of a sheep - a particular sheep that is, and next thing there's bad guys telling him to back off. This is a well-written story, and is very pleasant in its differences from normal western fare. Consider it quirky, offbeat, interesting, and decidedly a change of pace.

A wacky one. Here we have touches of scifi to show how a man manages to eliminate emotional troughs at the expense of the peaks, and the age-old question of the advisability of this. Well done and quite original, the book uses two parallel stories with chapters interleaved - and of course they're the same story.