Author Guide · Japanese Fiction
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Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar when he decided, at a baseball game in Tokyo in April 1978, that he could write a novel. He wrote it at night after closing, over about ten months, and it won the only prize he entered it for. Almost half a century later there are sixteen novels, five story collections and a shelf of nonfiction in fifty languages. What he keeps going back to is smaller and stranger than the fame suggests: a person who has lost something, a hole or a wall or a door that should not be there, and the flat, unhurried voice of someone describing it as though it were ordinary. He has spent forty-seven years refusing to explain it.
By Lisanne Swart · 16 novels in full · Best fiction of all time · 1979–2026 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Haruki Murakami has written 28 books: sixteen novels, published between 1979 and 2026, plus five short story collections, six works of nonfiction and one anthology he edited. The newest, The Tale of Kaho, came out in Japan on 3 July 2026 and has no English translation announced — which is why most lists still say fifteen. All sixteen novels, and what each one is → If you have never read him, start with Norwegian Wood (1987) — or with Kafka on the Shore (2002) if you would rather have the strangeness from page one.
Where to Start with Haruki Murakami
If you want his voice without the strangeness
→ Norwegian Wood (1987). His one fully realist novel, and the one most readers fall for first: love, loss and sex among students in Tokyo at the end of the 1960s. It sold more than ten million copies in Japan alone and turned him into someone who got mobbed in airports.
If you want the strangeness straight away
→ Kafka on the Shore (2002). A fifteen-year-old runaway and an old man who talks to cats, in alternating chapters that slowly bend towards each other. It won the World Fantasy Award.
If you want his masterpiece
→ The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95). A missing cat, then a missing wife, then the bottom of a dry well and the Japanese army in Manchukuo. He has called it the point where he stopped writing about detachment and started writing about commitment.
If you only have an evening
→ After Dark (2004), which runs from midnight to dawn in one Tokyo night and is under two hundred pages. Or the stories in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.
If you want the man rather than the books
→ What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007), then Novelist as a Vocation (2015). The first is the only place he is genuinely unguarded.
If you want more books like his
→ My guide to authors like Haruki Murakami, or the best fiction books of all time.
All 16 Haruki Murakami Novels, in Order
Hear the Wind Sing
His first novel, written at night after closing his jazz bar, over about ten months in very short stretches. It introduces an unnamed narrator and his friend, the Rat. Murakami later called his first two novels immature, and they were not widely available in English until 2015, when they were published together as Wind/Pinball.
Read it for context rather than as a way in. It is slight, and you can already hear the voice he would spend decades refining.
— LisannePinball, 1973
The sequel, a year later. The narrator becomes fixated on tracking down a pinball machine he once played obsessively, while the story of the Rat continues alongside his.
Read it straight after Hear the Wind Sing; they share one English edition. Together they are the warm-up for A Wild Sheep Chase.
— LisanneA Wild Sheep Chase
The last book of the Trilogy of the Rat and his first real critical success. A man who works in advertising is forced to hunt for a sheep with a star-shaped mark on its back, and the search leads him to Hokkaido and back to the Rat. Murakami has said it was the first book in which he felt the joy of telling a story.
The book where Murakami becomes Murakami. Start here if you like mysteries that stop making sense in the best possible way.
— LisanneHard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Two stories in alternating chapters: a man caught up in an information war in a near-future Tokyo, and a man in a walled town who reads old dreams in its library after his shadow has been taken from him. The walled town comes from a 1980 novella Murakami was never satisfied with, and he returned to it once more in The City and Its Uncertain Walls.
His most inventive early novel. Read it before The City and Its Uncertain Walls and you can watch him answer himself forty years later.
— LisanneNorwegian Wood
A nostalgic, realist story of love, loss and sexuality among students in Tokyo at the end of the 1960s, named after the Beatles song. It passed ten million copies in Japan and turned the barely known Murakami into a public figure who was mobbed in airports. Tran Anh Hung filmed it in 2010.
Start here if you want his voice without the strangeness. It is his one fully realist novel, and the one most readers fall for first.
— LisanneDance Dance Dance
A sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, though it is not usually counted as part of the Trilogy of the Rat. The narrator returns to the Dolphin Hotel in Sapporo, looking for a woman who has disappeared from his life. Its title comes from a 1957 song by the Dells.
The loneliest of his early books. Read it once the trilogy has you hooked.
— LisanneSouth of the Border, West of the Sun
A short novel he wrote while living in the United States. A married man who runs a jazz bar in Tokyo is knocked off course when Shimamoto, the girl he was closest to as a child, walks back into his life. The title comes from the song “South of the Border”.
The one to read if you want to feel what his jazz-bar years were like. Quiet, grown-up and quietly devastating.
— LisanneThe Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Toru Okada’s cat goes missing, then his wife, and his search leads him to the bottom of a dry well and into Japan’s wartime atrocities in Manchukuo. Its three books are named after music by Rossini, Schumann and Mozart. Murakami has called it the turning point at which he moved from detachment to commitment.
His masterpiece. Read it when you are ready for all of him at once — it is long, it does not resolve neatly, and it is the one people never stop thinking about.
— LisanneSputnik Sweetheart
A young teacher known as K is in love with his friend Sumire, an aspiring novelist who falls for an older woman, Miu. When Sumire vanishes on a Greek island, K flies out to look for her.
Short and sad. Read it in one sitting, on a hot afternoon.
— LisanneKafka on the Shore
Two stories in alternating chapters: fifteen-year-old Kafka Tamura runs away from home, and Nakata, an old man who can talk to cats, sets out on a journey of his own, until their paths draw together.
Start here instead of Norwegian Wood if you want the full strangeness from the first page. It is the most generous of his long novels to a new reader.
— LisanneAfter Dark
A short novel set over a single night in Tokyo, between midnight and dawn, following a young woman reading in an all-night restaurant, her sister asleep at home, and the people who cross their paths.
The shortest way into his Tokyo. Read it at night; it is under two hundred pages and it is built for one sitting.
— Lisanne1Q84
Aomame, a fitness instructor with a secret second job, and Tengo, a maths teacher and aspiring novelist, find themselves in a version of 1984 with two moons. The title is pronounced the same as 1984 in Japanese. In a survey of 120 literary experts by the Asahi Shimbun it was ranked the best work of fiction of Japan’s Heisei era. In Japan it appeared in three volumes.
Save it until you are sure you love him. It is enormous, the third volume divides people, and it rewards the commitment.
— LisanneColorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Years after it happened, Tsukuru Tazaki sets out to learn why the four close friends of his school days cut him off without a word. It became an international bestseller, although reviews were mixed.
The most direct of his later novels, and the least supernatural. Read it if a friendship of yours once ended without an explanation.
— LisanneKilling Commendatore
An unnamed portrait painter, adrift after his marriage breaks down, moves into the former mountain home of a famous artist and finds a hidden painting called Killing Commendatore, which sets strange events in motion.
For readers who loved The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and want more of it: a hole in the ground, a painting and a marriage coming apart.
— LisanneThe City and Its Uncertain Walls
A man reads old dreams in the library of a town surrounded by a wall, where people are separated from their shadows. Murakami began it in March 2020 as a complete rewrite of his 1980 novella — the only work of his he had never allowed to be reprinted, which he has called raw and immature — and has said the walled town can be read as a metaphor for lockdown. In Japan more than half of the first print run of 300,000 copies sold in the first week. Philip Gabriel’s English translation followed on 19 November 2024.
Read it after Hard-Boiled Wonderland. It is a novelist in his seventies finishing a conversation with his younger self, and it is stranger for knowing that.
— LisanneThe Tale of Kaho
No English edition · available in Japanese
His sixteenth novel and his first in three years. Kaho is a twenty-six-year-old picture-book author of ordinary looks and ordinary intelligence; a jet-black anteater urges her to move to Musashi-Sakai, and from there the bizarre keeps arriving in an otherwise unremarkable life. Her relationship with her mother runs underneath all of it. It is the first of his full-length novels carried by a woman as the sole protagonist, and it draws together four linked stories published in the magazine Shinchō between June 2024 and March 2026. Murakami has said he is not writing fantasy but exploring the interplay between the real and the unreal.
Not in English yet, and no date has been announced. Until then, read “Kaho” in The New Yorker — see the section below — and wait with the rest of us.
— LisanneThe Tale of Kaho: What Murakami’s Newest Novel Actually Is
Published in Japan on 3 July 2026 and not yet translated, so most English bibliographies still stop at fifteen novels. Here is what is in it, and what you can read now.
- It is one novel built from four stories. All four ran in the magazine Shinchō between June 2024 and March 2026, and Shinchōsha published them as a single 352-page novel, about 650 manuscript pages.
- “Kaho” — Shinchō, June 2024. The opening: a matchmaking date at which the man tells Kaho she is the least good-looking woman he has ever met. Murakami read it aloud at Waseda in March 2024. This is the one you can read in English, translated by Philip Gabriel, in The New Yorker of 8 & 15 July 2024.
- “The Anteater of Musashi-Sakai” — May 2025. A jet-black anteater tells her to move; there are anteaters living under the house.
- “Kaho and the Termite Queen” — November 2025.
- “Kaho and the Motorcycle Man, and Scarlett Johansson” — March 2026.
- No English edition has been announced. Not by Knopf, not by Harvill Secker, and not on his own site. Anything giving you a date for it is guessing. Read the full entry →
Everything Else He Has Written: The Full List
The novels are only half of him. These are the story collections, the nonfiction from Underground to the running memoir, and the anthology he edited. Dates are first publication in Japanese; where the English edition came later, the year is given in the note. One title here you cannot buy yet.
Open a form to see the titles.
Short story collections
5
The Elephant Vanishes 1993
Seventeen stories written between 1980 and 1991, collected for English readers.
Amazon, Bookshop.org and more
after the quake 2000
Six stories written in the aftermath of the 1995 Kobe earthquake. English 2002.
Amazon, Bookshop.org and more
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman 2006
Twenty-four stories from 1980 to 2005; winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, 2006.
Amazon, Bookshop.org and more
Men Without Women 2014
Including “Drive My Car”, filmed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi in 2021. English 2017.
Amazon, Bookshop.org and more
First Person Singular 2020
Eight stories. English 2021.
Amazon, Bookshop.org and more
Nonfiction and essays
6
Underground 1997
An oral history of the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack, built from interviews with the people caught up in it. The English edition folds in the follow-up interviews with Aum members.
Amazon, Bookshop.org and more
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running 2007
A memoir about running and writing. English 2008.
Amazon, Bookshop.org and more
Absolutely on Music 2011
Six conversations with the conductor Seiji Ozawa, recorded in 2010 and 2011. English by Jay Rubin, 2016.
Amazon, Bookshop.org and more
Novelist as a Vocation 2015
Essays on his life and work as a novelist. English 2022.
Amazon, Bookshop.org and more
Murakami T: The T-Shirts I Love 2020
His T-shirt collection, with short essays. English 2021.
Amazon, Bookshop.org and more
Abandoning a Cat 2019
An essay about his father and the war, first published in Bungeishunjū in June 2019 and as a Japanese book in April 2020. The English book edition, Abandoning a Cat: A Personal Story, is announced by Knopf for 20 October 2026 and is not out yet.
As editor
1
Birthday Stories 2002
An anthology of stories about birthdays by writers including Raymond Carver, William Trevor and Claire Keegan, with one of his own.
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The years · 1949–2026
Quick facts about Haruki Murakami
- Known for
- Haruki Murakami is known for novels about a person who has lost something, stranger and smaller than his fame suggests, with Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore the usual ways in.
- 1949
- Born in Kyoto, Japan
- 1979
- First novel, Hear the Wind Sing
- 1987
- Norwegian Wood
- 2026
- The Tale of Kaho
- Born
- 12 January 1949, Kyoto, Japan
- Grew up
- Nishinomiya, Ashiya and Kobe
- Education
- Waseda University, Tokyo, where he studied drama
- Before writing
- Ran Peter Cat, a coffee house and jazz bar in Kokubunji, Tokyo, 1974–1981
- The decision
- At a Yakult Swallows game at Meiji Jingu Stadium, April 1978
- Novels
- Sixteen, from Hear the Wind Sing (1979) to The Tale of Kaho (2026)
- Newest
- The Tale of Kaho, Japan, 3 July 2026 — no English translation announced
- Translated into
- Fifty languages, by his own publisher’s count
- Awards
- Gunzo Prize (1979), Noma New Face Prize (1982), Tanizaki Prize (1985), Yomiuri Prize, World Fantasy Award and Franz Kafka Prize (2006), Jerusalem Prize (2009), Princess of Asturias Award for Literature (2023)
- Nobel Prize
- No. Frequently named as a possible recipient; he has not received it
- Also a translator
- Of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, Truman Capote, J. D. Salinger and John Irving into Japanese
- Running
- Started at thirty-three; ran a 100-kilometre ultramarathon around Lake Saroma, Hokkaido, on 23 June 1996
- First reader
- His wife, Yoko
- Library
- The Waseda International House of Literature, known as the Haruki Murakami Library, opened 1 October 2021
- Lives
- Oiso, Kanagawa, with an office in Tokyo
The red mark is 1987: Norwegian Wood, the novel this guide suggests starting with if you have never read him.
Forty-Seven Years of Refusing to Explain It
Murakami wrote nothing until he was twenty-nine. He had spent his twenties running a bar, and he has credited music with shaping his writing more than the books he read. It shows in the rhythm of his sentences and in how often the novels take their titles from songs: Norwegian Wood, Dance Dance Dance, South of the Border, West of the Sun. The first novel was written in short stretches at night, after work, over about ten months, and it won the Gunzo Prize for New Writers. He has never quite stopped writing like someone doing it after hours.
Readers call the result magical realism or surrealism. He does not. He has said he simply writes the stories he wants to write, in a style that suits him, and that the story moves forward on its own, like water following the lay of the land. Asked about The Tale of Kaho in 2026, he put it slightly differently: he is not writing fantasy, he is writing the interplay between the real and the unreal. That is a distinction worth taking seriously, because it explains the flatness of the prose. The anteater is not presented as a marvel. It is presented as a Tuesday.
Most of the books are narrated in the first person by men who are, as he told NPR, not the real him but perhaps the him that might have been. That held for forty-seven years and sixteen novels, which is what makes the newest one a genuine departure rather than a marketing line: The Tale of Kaho is the first of his full-length novels carried by a woman as the sole protagonist. Whether that changes anything else about the books, English readers cannot yet judge.
The other constant is the returning. Hard-Boiled Wonderland (1985) and The City and Its Uncertain Walls (2023) both grow out of a 1980 novella he was never satisfied with and never allowed to be reprinted; he rewrote it from scratch during the first months of 2020 and has said the walled town can be read as lockdown. Dance Dance Dance goes back to the Rat books. The Tale of Kaho gathers up four stories he had already published. Very little in this bibliography is finished the first time.
And then there is the life he built around the writing, which he describes far more plainly than the writing itself. He started running at thirty-three and completed a hundred-kilometre ultramarathon around Lake Saroma in 1996. He has spent decades translating American fiction into Japanese, from Carver to The Great Gatsby. Yoko, whom he met in Tokyo and married straight out of university, ran the bar with him and reads everything first. He is asked about the Nobel Prize every October and says almost nothing about it. For someone whose novels are famous for not explaining themselves, the daily facts are unusually easy to get hold of.
Watch
Haruki Murakami in Conversation at Berkeley, 2008
Murakami on stage at Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, on 11 October 2008, the day after he received the inaugural Berkeley Japan Prize. He reads from his stories and then talks with the writer Roland Kelts about running, writing and his readers, followed by questions from the audience. Recorded by the university’s Center for Japanese Studies.
Frequently asked questions about Haruki Murakami’s books
How many books has Haruki Murakami written?
Haruki Murakami has written 28 books: sixteen novels, the most recent being The Tale of Kaho, published in Japan on 3 July 2026, five short story collections — The Elephant Vanishes, after the quake, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Men Without Women and First Person Singular — six works of nonfiction, including Underground, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Absolutely on Music and Novelist as a Vocation, and one anthology he edited. Lists that say fifteen novels were written before July 2026.
Is Haruki Murakami still alive?
Yes, Haruki Murakami is alive. He was born on 12 January 1949 in Kyoto, and published his sixteenth novel in July 2026.
What are Haruki Murakami’s novels in order?
In order of first publication in Japan: Hear the Wind Sing (1979), Pinball, 1973 (1980), A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), Norwegian Wood (1987), Dance Dance Dance (1988), South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95), Sputnik Sweetheart (1999), Kafka on the Shore (2002), After Dark (2004), 1Q84 (2009–10), Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013), Killing Commendatore (2017), The City and Its Uncertain Walls (2023) and The Tale of Kaho (2026).
What is Haruki Murakami’s newest book?
The Tale of Kaho, published by Shinchōsha in Japan on 3 July 2026 — 352 pages, his first novel in three years and his sixteenth. Kaho is a twenty-six-year-old picture-book author who is told by a jet-black anteater to move to Musashi-Sakai. It is the first of his full-length novels with a woman as the sole protagonist. No English translation has been announced.
Is The Tale of Kaho available in English?
Not yet, and no publication date has been announced by any publisher. One part of it is available: the first of the four stories it grew from, “Kaho”, appeared in The New Yorker of 8 and 15 July 2024, translated by Philip Gabriel. Treat any date you see for a full English edition as unconfirmed.
Which Haruki Murakami book should I read first?
Norwegian Wood (1987) if you want his voice in a realist story, or Kafka on the Shore (2002) if you want the full dreamlike Murakami from the start. Both stand alone.
Do you need to read Haruki Murakami’s books in order?
No. Most of his novels stand alone. The exceptions are the Trilogy of the Rat — Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973 and A Wild Sheep Chase — and its later sequel Dance Dance Dance, and the pairing of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World with The City and Its Uncertain Walls, which grow out of the same 1980 novella.
What is the Trilogy of the Rat?
Murakami’s first three novels, Hear the Wind Sing (1979), Pinball, 1973 (1980) and A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), which share an unnamed narrator and his friend, known as the Rat. Dance Dance Dance (1988) is a later sequel. The first two were published together in English as Wind/Pinball in 2015.
Has Haruki Murakami won the Nobel Prize?
No. He is named as a possible recipient most years, but he has not received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He has won the Tanizaki Prize (1985), the Yomiuri Prize, the World Fantasy Award and the Franz Kafka Prize (2006), the Jerusalem Prize (2009) and the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature (2023), among others.
Does Haruki Murakami write in English?
No. He writes in Japanese, and his novels reach English readers through translators including Alfred Birnbaum, Jay Rubin, Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen. He is himself a translator of American fiction into Japanese, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Carver.
Is Haruki Murakami’s writing magical realism?
It is often described that way, but he does not see it as such. He has said he simply writes the stories he wants to write and lets them move forward naturally, and in 2026 he put it as writing the interplay between the real and the unreal rather than fantasy.
Is Haruki Murakami married?
Yes. He married Yoko Takahashi, whom he met in Tokyo, straight out of university. She ran the Peter Cat jazz bar with him and is always the first reader of his work. The couple decided not to have children.
Which Haruki Murakami books have been made into films?
Norwegian Wood was filmed by Tran Anh Hung in 2010. His short stories inspired Tony Takitani (2004), Lee Chang-dong’s Burning (2018, from “Barn Burning”), Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021), which won the Academy Award for Best International Feature, and Pierre Földes’s animated Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2022).
Where should I not start?
Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973, which he has called immature himself, and 1Q84, which is three volumes long and divides even his admirers. Start with a novel that was written by the writer he became.
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Footnotes
- Shinchōsha press release for The Tale of Kaho, 2026
- The four Shinchō stories behind The Tale of Kaho
- Murakami Haruki takes on anteaters and mother-daughter relationships — Nippon.com
- No English date announced for The Tale of Kaho — Literary Hub
- Haruki Murakami — Wikipedia
- Haruki Murakami bibliography — Wikipedia
- Murakami on finishing The City and Its Uncertain Walls — NPR
- The City and Its Uncertain Walls — Wikipedia
- Abandoning a Cat, announced for 20 October 2026 — Knopf
- Absolutely on Music — Wikipedia
- Princess of Asturias Award for Literature 2023
- The Murakami library at Waseda — The Japan Times
- Haruki Murakami: A Conversation, 11 October 2008 — Center for Japanese Studies, UC Berkeley
Bibliography last verified 5 October 2026. Every plot description on this page was checked against a publisher page or a primary report. Two things are deliberately stated as unknown: no English translation of The Tale of Kaho has been announced, and the English edition of Abandoning a Cat is scheduled by Knopf for 20 October 2026 and is therefore not yet available, which is why it carries no shop links. Novel years are first publication in Japan; English editions often follow by one to three years and are noted where it matters. His publisher gives fifty languages while the Princess of Asturias Foundation said more than forty in 2023.
Nothing here was suggested by a machine.
I read these myself,
and the reasons are on the page.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
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