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› Find signed collectible books: 'After the Quake'
Haruki Murakami, a writer both mystical and hip, is the West's favorite Japanese novelist. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Murakami lived abroad until 1995. That year, two disasters struck Japan: the lethal earthquake in Kobe and the deadly poison gas attacks in the Tokyo subway. Spurred by these tragic events, Murakami returned home. The stories in After the Quake are set in the months that fell between the earthquake and the subway attack, presenting a world marked by despair, hope, and a kind of human instinct for transformation. A teenage girl and a middle-aged man share a hobby of making beach bonfires; a businesswoman travels to Thailand and, quietly, confronts her own death; three friends act out a modern-day Tokyo version of Jules and Jim. There's a surreal element running through the collection in the form of unlikely frogs turning up in unlikely places. News of the earthquake hums throughout. The book opens with the dull buzz of disaster-watching: "Five straight days she spent in front of the television, staring at the crumbled banks and hospitals, whole blocks of stores in flames, severed rail lines and expressways." With language that's never self-consciously lyrical or show-offy, Murakami constructs stories as tight and beautiful as poems. There's no turning back for his people; there's only before and after the quake. --Claire Dederer [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: Library Edition'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Chip Kidd:Book One: Work 1986-2006'
Described as "the closest thing to a rock star" in graphic design today (USA Today), Chip Kidd is universally recognized as an American master of contemporary book design. At the forefront of a revolution in publishing, Kidd's iconic covers, with their inventive marriage of type and found images, have influenced an entire generation of design practitioners in many fields.Chip Kidd: Book One collects all of his book covers and designs for the first time, as well as hundreds of developmental sketches and concepts-annotated by Kidd and by many of the best-selling authors he's worked with over the years. The result is an important contribution to the design canon today as well as a visually dazzling (and often hilarious) insider's look at the design and publishing process.The book also showcases Kidd's work with comics and graphic novels, including his collaborations with leading artists and writers in the field. Featured are projects for DC Comics, including Batman and Superman, as well as Kidd's award-winning exploration of the art of Charles M. Schulz. Chip Kidd: Book One is sure to enthrall design aficionados, book lovers, pop-culture fanatics, comics fans, and design students. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Chip Kidd: Work 1986-2006'
Described as "the closest thing to a rock star" in graphic design today (USA Today), Chip Kidd is universally recognized as an American master of contemporary book design. At the forefront of a revolution in publishing, Kidd's iconic covers, with their inventive marriage of type and found images, have influenced an entire generation of design practitioners in many fields.Chip Kidd: Book One collects all of his book covers and designs for the first time, as well as hundreds of developmental sketches and concepts-annotated by Kidd and by many of the best-selling authors he's worked with over the years. The result is an important contribution to the design canon today as well as a visually dazzling (and often hilarious) insider's look at the design and publishing process.The book also showcases Kidd's work with comics and graphic novels, including his collaborations with leading artists and writers in the field. Featured are projects for DC Comics, including Batman and Superman, as well as Kidd's award-winning exploration of the art of Charles M. Schulz. Chip Kidd: Book One is sure to enthrall design aficionados, book lovers, pop-culture fanatics, comics fans, and design students. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cronica Del Pajaro/bird Chronicles'
Tooru Okada, un joven japonés que acaba de dejar voluntariamente su trabajo en un bufete de abogados, recibe un buen día la llamada anónima de una mujer. A partir de ese momento la vida de Tooru, que había transcurrido por los cauces de la más absoluta normalidad, empieza a sufrir una extraña transformación. A su alrededor van apareciendo personajes cada vez más extraños, y la realidad, o lo real, va degradándose hasta convertirse en algo fantasmagórico.
The masterpiece of Japanese cult writer Haruki Murakami, the story of Tooru Okada, a young lawyer whose life begins to undergo a bizarre transformation. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle presents a collection of characters as surprising as they are real. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dance, Dance, Dance'
In this propulsive novel by the author of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and The Elephant Vanishes, one of the most idiosyncratically brilliant writers at work in any language fuses science fiction, the hard-boiled thriller, and white-hot satire into a new element of the literary periodic table.
As he searches for a mysteriously vanished girlfriend, Haruki Murakami's protagonist plunges into a wind tunnel of sexual violence and metaphysical dread in which he collides with call girls; plays chaperone to a lovely teenaged psychic; and receives cryptic instructions from a shabby but oracular Sheep Man. Dance Dance Dance is a tense, poignant, and often hilarious ride through the cultural Cuisinart that is contemporary Japan, a place where everything that is not up for sale is up for grabs. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dance, Dance, Dance'
He burst upon the international scene with the wildly acclaimed A Wild Sheep Chase. He quickly came to represent the quirky voice of a new generation of Japanese writers. Now Haruki Murakami gives us his wittiest, boldest, most daring work to date. Dance dance dance continues the extraordinary adventure of an ordinary man. At thirty something, Murakami's nameless hero lives in a hi-tech, high-rise world where old virtues die fast and success is all that matters. He has shared in the glittering city's spoils, and while he has not sold his soul, he knows that something is lacking in his life. Now, in dreams, a mysterious woman weeps softly - for him. Yet, even as he tries to understand why, the voice that beckons is not hers. And still he dreams. Bizarre dreams that propel him down byways of his life in search of ... ? His is a strange odyssey: en route, a thirteen-year-old girl, distressingly beautiful and clairvoyant, is his constant companion; a classmate, now oozing charm on TV soaps, grapples with murder; a lady of the night becomes his guardian angel; and an eccentric Sheep Man materializes to counsel and cajole. What's a fellow to do? Dance. You gotta dance as long as the music plays. And dance is what our hero does ... in the most unexpected ways! [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dances With Sheep: The Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Elephant Vanishes'
With the same deadpan mania and genius for dislocation that he brought to his internationally acclaimed novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami makes this collection of stories a determined assault on the normal. A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald's in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard.
By turns haunting and hilarious, The Elephant Vanishes is further proof of Murakami's ability to cross the border between separate realities -- and to come back bearing treasure.
From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'First Snow on Fuji'
Although he was the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize, Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) remains much more obscure in the West than his high-profile protégé Yukio Mishima. Yet he's a writer of formidable talents. For one thing, Kawabata recognized early on the affinity between Japanese poetry--with its abrupt transition from image to image--and the jump-cut flavor of modernist prose. He also explored erotic life at a truly microcosmic level. Some may find a novel like The Mole--which revolves around a woman's habit of fiddling with her eponymous birthmark--a little too molecular in its approach. But sex, like God, is in the details, and throughout his career Kawabata has unearthed some surprising truths about our most urgent appetites.
First Snow on Fuji, a collection of stories originally published in 1958, is a fairly representative slice of the author's oeuvre. In "Her Husband Didn't" (a classic Kawabata title, by the way), a woman's earlobe becomes the discreet object of desire:
The earlobe was just as round and plump as an earlobe ought to be--it was small enough that Junji could squeeze it between the tips of his thumb and forefinger, no bigger than that--yet it filled him with a sense of the beauty of life. The smooth skin, the gentle swelling--the woman's earlobe was like a mysterious jewel.... He had never known anything with a texture like this. It was like touching the lovely girl's soul.For Kawabata's characters, the physical usually leads straight to the metaphysical, which is what prevents him from deteriorating into a soft-core thrill merchant. And in several of the other stories here, he proceeds directly to the weightier issues. "Silence," for example, is at once a study in failing inspiration and a gloss on Kawabata's own career (the latter argument is made very effectively by translator Michael Emmerich in his introduction). And the title story offers an intriguing take on memory, which Kawabata seems to regard as a distinctly feminine operation: it's "the docility of women that makes it possible for them to return to the past."
What we love most in a writer--the idiosyncratic music of his or her prose--is the hardest thing for a translator to capture. There are times, alas, when Emmerich's ear seems inadequate to the task. His rendering never falls beneath a certain literate level--but for a writer of Kawabata's minimalistic delicacy, a clunky transition or flatfooted phrase can sink the whole enterprise. Readers might prefer to start, then, with Thousand Cranes or Snow Country. But for all its linguistic flaws, First Snow on Fuji reminds us that in literature most of all, less can be more--much more. --James Marcus [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World'
By the author of "A Wild Sheep Chase", which won the Noma Literary Award for New Writers, this novel combines science-fiction, satire and a warning of the dangerous powers of corporations. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Haruki Murakami's the Wind Up Bird Chronicle: A Reader's Guide'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kafka on the Shore'
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.
This magnificent new novel has a similarly extraordinary scope and the same capacity to amaze, entertain, and bewitch the reader. A tour de force of metaphysical reality, it is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddleyet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.
Extravagant in its accomplishment, Kafka on the Shore displays one of the worlds truly great storytellers at the height of his powers. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Monkey Brain Sushi'
Cyberpunk, sci-fi and erotica all meld together in this collection of cutting-edge short stories. The authors tend towards near-zero emotional chill, stunned urbanity and a shiny kind of violence. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Noruwei No Mori'
Noruwei no mori, Vol. 2 (Japanese Edition) by Murakami, Haruki [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Norwegian Wood'
In 1987, when Norwegian Wood was first published in Japan, it promptly sold more than 4 million copies and transformed Haruki Murakami into a pop-culture icon. The horrified author fled his native land for Europe and the United States, returning only in 1995, by which time the celebrity spotlight had found some fresher targets. And now he's finally authorized a translation for the English-speaking audience, turning to the estimable Jay Rubin, who did a fine job with his big-canvas production The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Readers of Murakami's later work will discover an affecting if atypical novel, and while the author himself has denied the book's autobiographical import--"If I had simply written the literal truth of my own life, the novel would have been no more than fifteen pages long"--it's hard not to read as at least a partial portrait of the artist as a young man.
Norwegian Wood is a simple coming-of-age tale, primarily set in 1969-70, when the author was attending university. The political upheavals and student strikes of the period form the novel's backdrop. But the focus here is the young Watanabe's love affairs, and the pain and pleasure and attendant losses of growing up. The collapse of a romance (and this is one among many!) leaves him in a metaphysical shambles:
I read Naoko's letter again and again, and each time I read it I would be filled with the same unbearable sadness I used to feel whenever Naoko stared into my eyes. I had no way to deal with it, no place I could take it to or hide it away. Like the wind passing over my body, it had neither shape nor weight, nor could I wrap myself in it.This account of a young man's sentimental education sometimes reads like a cross between Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Stephen Vizinczey's In Praise of Older Women. It is less complex and perhaps ultimately less satisfying than Murakami's other, more allegorical work. Still, Norwegian Wood captures the huge expectation of youth--and of this particular time in history--for the future and for the place of love in it. It is also a work saturated with sadness, an emotion that can sometimes cripple a novel but which here merely underscores its youthful poignancy. --Mark Thwaite [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Number 9 Dream'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Number9dream'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'South of the Border, West of the Sun'
In South of the Border, West of the Sun, the arc of an average man's life from childhood to middle age, with its attendant rhythms of success and disappointment, becomes the kind of exquisite literary conundrum that is Haruki Murakami's trademark. The plot is simple: Hajime meets and falls in love with a girl in elementary school, but he loses touch with her when his family moves to another town. He drifts through high school, college, and his 20s, before marrying and settling into a career as a successful bar owner. Then his childhood sweetheart returns, weighed down with secrets:
When I went back into the bar, a glass and ashtray remained where she had been. A couple of lightly crushed cigarette butts were lined up in the ashtray, a faint trace of lipstick on each. I sat down and closed my eyes. Echoes of music faded away, leaving me alone. In that gentle darkness, the rain continued to fall without a sound.Murakami eschews the fantastic elements that appear in many of his other novels and stories, and readers hoping for a glimpse of the Sheep Man will be disappointed. Yet South of the Border, West of the Sun is as rich and mysterious as anything he has written. It is above all a complex, moving, and honest meditation on the nature of love, distilled into a work with the crystal clarity of a short story. A Nat "King" Cole song, a figure on a crowded street, a face pressed against a car window, a handful of ashes drifting down a river to the sea are woven together into a story that refuses to arrive at a simple conclusion. The classic love triangle may seem like a hackneyed theme for a writer as talented as Murakami, but in his quietly dazzling way, he bends us to his own unique geometry. --Simon Leake [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sputnik Sweetheart'
Sputnik Sweetheart finds Haruki Murakami in his minimalist mode. Shorter than the sweeping Wind-up Bird Chronicle, less playfully bizarre than A Wild Sheep Chase, the author's seventh novel distills his signature themes into a powerful story about the loneliness of the human condition. "There was nothing solid we could depend on," the reader is told. "We were nearly boundless zeros, just pitiful little beings swept from one kind of oblivion to another."
The narrator is a teacher whose only close friend is Sumire, an aspiring young novelist with chronic writer's block. Sumire is suddenly smitten with a sophisticated businesswoman and accompanies her love object to Europe where, on a tiny Greek island, she disappears "like smoke." The schoolteacher hastens to the island in search of his friend. And there he discovers two documents on her computer, one of which reveals a chilling secret about Sumire's lover.
Sputnik Sweetheart is a melancholy love story, and its deceptively simple prose is saturated with sadness. Characters struggle to connect with one another but never quite succeed. Like the satellite of the title they are essentially alone. And by toning down the pyrotechnics of his earlier work, Murakami has created a world that is simultaneously mundane and disturbing--where doppelgängers and vanishing cats produce a pervasive atmosphere of alienation, and identity itself seems like a terribly fragile thing. --Simon Leake [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Underground'
From Haruki Murakami, internationally acclaimed author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Norwegian Wood, a work of literary journalism that is as fascinating as it is necessary, as provocative as it is profound.
In March of 1995, agents of a Japanese religious cult attacked the Tokyo subway system with sarin, a gas twenty-six times as deadly as cyanide. Attempting to discover why, Murakami conducted hundreds of interviews with the people involved, from the survivors to the perpetrators to the relatives of those who died, and Underground is their story in their own voices. Concerned with the fundamental issues that led to the attack as well as these personal accounts, Underground is a document of what happened in Tokyo as well as a warning of what could happen anywhere. This is an enthralling and unique work of nonfiction that is timely and vital and as wonderfully executed as Murakamis brilliant novels. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vintage Murakami'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Wild Sheep Chase'
Murakami has crafted a taut and suspenseful novel that is equal parts detective story, fantasy, and Kafkaesque allegory. In a Japan of the imagination, an advertising executive is sent on a harrowing journey in pursuit of a mythical sheep reported to embody an irresistible will to absolute power. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Wild Sheep Chase: Library Edition'
A marvelous hybrid of mythology and mystery, A Wild Sheep Chase is the extraordinary literary thriller that launched Haruki Murakamis international reputation.
It begins simply enough: A twenty-something advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend, and casually appropriates the image for an insurance companys advertisement. What he doesnt realize is that included in the pastoral scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Thus begins a surreal and elaborate quest that takes our hero from the urban haunts of Tokyo to the remote and snowy mountains of northern Japan, where he confronts not only the mythological sheep, but the confines of tradition and the demons deep within himself. Quirky and utterly captivating, A Wild Sheep Chase is Murakami at his astounding best. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'
Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.
Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.
If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight. --Simon Leake [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Al Sur De La Frontera, Al Oeste Del Sol / South of the Border, West of the Sun'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sputnik, Mi Amor / Sputnik, Sweetheart'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tokio Blues'
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