Best of Murakami (3 Books Box Set)

Three of Murakami’s best-known and best-loved novels, brought together in one beautiful boxset. For nearly half a century Murakami has been delighting readers with his deceptively simple writing. His work is both fantastic and realistic, as gripping as it is beguiling. This boxset contains three of the best novels from Japan’s greatest living novelist. You might start with Norwegian Wood, a story of young love and the book that shot Murakami to literary stardom. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle displays many of Murakami’s distinctive storytelling tropes – mysterious women and missing cats among them. And Kafka on the Shore, the great masterpiece, is the genre-bending tale of a fifteen-year-old runaway. Kafka on the Shore As their parallel odysseys unravel, cats converse with people; fish tumble from the sky; a ghost-like pimp deploys a Hegel-spouting girl of the night; a forest harbours soldiers un-aged since World War II. There is a savage killing, but the identity of both victim and killer is a riddle - one of many that combine to create an elegant and dream like masterpiece. Norwegian Wood When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss, and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera, and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out, and he embarks on a bizarre journey, guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell.