The epic new novel from the internationally acclaimed and best-selling author of 1Q84. In Killing Commendatore, a thirty-something portrait painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When he discovers a strange painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the valley, a precocious thirteen-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt during World War II in Vienna, a pit in the woods behind the artist's home, and an underworld haunted by Double Metaphors. A tour de force of love and loneliness, war and art - as well as a loving homage to The Great Gatsby - Killing Commendatore is a stunning work of imagination from one of our greatest writers.
Ali Volkan Erdemir Books
This author has deeply immersed herself in the study of Japanese culture and literature, enabling her to craft works that explore the intricate connections between East and West. Her academic research, which delves into the formation of the Turkish image in Japan and analyzes influential figures, highlights her commitment to cross-cultural studies. Through her literary contributions, including poetry and translations, she offers a unique perspective on Japanese aesthetics and literary traditions. Her work demonstrates a profound understanding and a passionate dedication to conveying the nuances of Japanese culture to a broader audience.
After dark
- 201 pages
- 8 hours of reading
A short, sleek novel of encounters set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn, and every bit as gripping as Haruki Murakami’s masterworks The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. At its center are two sisters—Eri, a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion, and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny’s toward people whose lives are radically alien to her own: a jazz trombonist who claims they’ve met before, a burly female “love hotel” manager and her maid staff, and a Chinese prostitute savagely brutalized by a businessman. These “night people” are haunted by secrets and needs that draw them together more powerfully than the differing circumstances that might keep them apart, and it soon becomes clear that Eri’s slumber—mysteriously tied to the businessman plagued by the mark of his crime—will either restore or annihilate her. After Dark moves from mesmerizing drama to metaphysical speculation, interweaving time and space as well as memory and perspective into a seamless exploration of human agency—the interplay between self-expression and empathy, between the power of observation and the scope of compassion and love. Murakami’s trademark humor, psychological insight, and grasp of spirit and morality are here distilled with an extraordinary, harmonious mastery.
Hear the Wind Sing is Murakami's first novel, available for the first time in English outside Japan. In Hear the Wind Sing the narrator is home from college on his summer break. He spends his time drinking beer and smoking in Jâe(tm)s Bar with the Rat, listening to the radio, thinking about writing and the women he has slept with, and pursuing a relationship with a girl with nine fingers. The story of the narrator, the Rat and J continues in Pinball, 1973.