New to Haruki Murakami? Here are 5 Titles to Get You Started
Few writers achieve such a celebrated status in the zeitgeist that they have a cultural effect named after them.
But few writers are as talented as Haruki Murakami.
You may have encountered your fair share of , but you’ve likely never encountered a writer as truly prolific and popular as this one.
People line up outside of bookstores for hours in advance of his midnight launches, eagerly anticipating his next big release. In much the same way past generations lined up outside of record stores for new Beatles releases, the release of a new Murakami novel is a cultural event. In fact, the press has dubbed this “.”
Very few writers are as acclaimed and loved as Murakami, which explains why his name is whispered every year around the time the Nobel Prize in Literature is announced.
His style is as enigmatic as it is beautiful, playfully pivoting from the mundane to the hauntingly poetic. But surprisingly, many people in North America have yet to discover his work.
If you’ve ever wanted to dive in and discover Japan’s most famous author, we have compiled a list of five perfect titles to get you started.
Within a week of its release in 2013, this novel sold over 1 million copies in Japan alone. And within the next six months, it became a global best seller.
Both a Washington Post and New York Times notable book, this title was named the best book of the year by the Financial Times, Slate, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Daily Beast and BookPage.
The story follows the titular Tsukuru Tazaki, called “colourless” because his best friends (Miss Black, Miss White, Mr. Blue, Mr. Red) all represent a colour, while he sees himself as pale and bland by comparison.
When all his friends suddenly stop speaking to him after he heads off to college, he must look back to the past to figure out what went wrong.
In many ways, this is the perfect introduction to Murakami’s work. It contains several of what we might call Murakami-isms, a subtle weaving of the real and the magical or dream-like, a protagonist who must journey into a haunted past to mend the present and an exploration of what we lose during the passage to adulthood — as well as what we find along the way.
This listen could also be considered a fictional travelogue. We follow a hero who trots not only the globe but also time, revisiting the past with such evocative clarity that we feel every twinge of heartbreak alongside Tazaki on his pilgrimage of self-discovery.
