Toru Okada's cat has disappeared and this has unsettled his wife, who is herself growing more distant every day. Then, there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has started receiving. As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, are turned inside out.

Kafka Tamura runs away from home at fifteen, under the shadow of his father's dark prophesy. The aging Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simplified life suddenly turned upside down. This book follows the fortunes of two remarkable characters.

Toru Watanabe is looking back on the love and passions of his life and trying to make sense of it all. As his first love Naoko sinks deeper into mental despair, he is inexorably pushed to find a new meaning and a new love in order to survive.

Zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan, unicorn skulls and voracious librarians, John Coltrane and Lord Jim. This title seeks to serve as an inventive fantasy and a meditation on the many uses of the mind.

The story of a man, a girl, her ears and a very special sheep. It is a world where people sweat about their careers, drink too much, and drift through broken marriages. The protagonist is an advertising executive who finds himself drawn into an elaborate quest for a mysterious sheep.

Twenty two year old, Sumire is in love for the first time with a woman seventeen years her senior, Miu. Surprised that she might, after all, be a lesbian, Sumire spends hours on the phone talking to her best friend, K, a primary school teacher, who is used to answering questions, but what he most wants to say to Sumire is I love you.

Combining an offbeat cast of characters with Murakami's idiosyncratic prose, this novel is an assault on all the senses, a murder mystery that is also philosophical speculation, and a dark fable of advanced capitalism.

Juxtaposes two tales about mothers, trans-sexuality, kitchens, love, tragedy, and the terms they all come to in the minds of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan.

Growing up in the suburbs in post-war Japan, Hajime and Shimamoto had been childhood sweethearts. The two eventually lost touch but now, in their thirties, they meet up again. Hajime, now a father and husband, finds himself catapulted into the past, risking all that he has in the present.

A course for 'busy' students who want to learn natural spoken Japanese. This series is prepared by a working group of experienced Japanese language instructors who reviewed and tested the material in a classroom environment.

In these haunting, hilarious stories Murakami once again makes a determined assault on the normal. A man's favourite elephant simply vanishes; a couple suffering midnight hunger pangs hold up a McDonalds; and a woman finds she is irresistible to a green monster that burrows through her garden.

This is the prose masterpiece of the Heian era of the 10th and 11th centuries, which is recognized as a great period in Japanese literature. It is an account of the intricate, exquisite, highly ordered court culture which made such a masterpiece possible.

Summoning up more than 20 years of Japan's most dramatic history, the geisha's story uncovers a hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation. It moves from a small fishing village in 1929 to the glamorous and decadent Kyoto of the 30s and on to postwar New York.

This guide provides the information needed to master the basic characters and the syllybaries of Japanaese. A list of 284 extra kanji used in names is also included.

The economy was booming. People had more money than they knew what to do with. And then, the earthquake struck. Satsuki has spent 30 years hating one man: a lover who destroyed her chances of having children, and who now lives in Kobe. Did her desire for revenge cause the earthquake?

Mari sips her coffee and glances up from a book as a young man, intrudes on her solitude. Both have missed the last train home. Shortly afterwards Mari will be interrupted a second time by a girl from the Alphaville Hotel; a Chinese prostitute has been hurt by a client, the girl has heard Mari speaks fluent Chinese and requests her help.

Top of the class now has a whole new meaning ...

A young man accompanies his cousin to the hospital to check an unusual hearing complaint and recalls a story of a woman put to sleep by tiny flies crawling inside her ear; a mirror appears out of nowhere and a nightwatchman is unnerved as his reflection tries to take control of him; and more. This work presents a collection of stories.

The first book of Mishima's landmark The Sea of Fertility sequence, this novel is set in Tokyo in 1912, when the hermetic world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders.

In a remote seaside village, Niki Jumpei, a teacher and amateur entomologist, is held captive with a young woman at the bottom of a vast sand pit where they are pressed into shovelling off the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten the village.