Where to Start with Haruki Murakami

Reading Haruki Murakami for the first time is a little like waking up inside someone else's dream and deciding, against all reason, to stay a while. A lonely man cooks himself a plate of spaghetti and takes a phone call that quietly changes everything; a beloved wife vanishes without warning or explanation; a house cat goes missing, and the search for it somehow leads down a dry well and out into another world entirely. His novels run on a logic that is far more emotional than rational, following the loose, associative drift of a dream rather than the tidy cause and effect of ordinary fiction. Readers tend to split cleanly into two camps: those who fall completely and permanently under the spell, and those who close the book wondering what on earth just happened to them.

The difference between those two camps, more often than not, comes down to a single early decision: where you chose to start. Murakami has written slim, almost entirely realistic love stories, and he has also written vast, sprawling, surreal epics crowded with parallel worlds and quiet menace, and beginning with the wrong one for you can leave you cold and confused right there at the front door. This guide points you firmly to the right first entrance, then sketches out a rough map of the strange and beautiful rooms that lie beyond it, so that you meet Murakami at his most bewitching rather than his most baffling. Get the sequence right and the dream simply opens up gently around you.

Start with the love story, not the labyrinth

The best entry point for the great majority of new readers is Norwegian Wood, which happens to be the most atypical book Murakami ever wrote. It is an almost entirely realistic, aching love story set among university students in the Tokyo of the late 1960s, with the era's student protests rumbling faintly in the background. There are no talking cats here, no second moons hanging in the sky, no parallel worlds, only grief, first love, mental fragility, and the raw, disorienting ache of growing up and losing the people you cannot bear to lose. It is the novel that turned Murakami into a genuine superstar in Japan, selling in the millions, and it gently, patiently tunes your ear to his melancholy, jazz-soaked, quietly hypnotic voice before any of the real strangeness begins. Think of it as a doorway, not a detour. It also happens to be the Murakami novel most often loved by people who are quite sure they do not like Murakami, which makes it the ideal book to press gently on a skeptical friend. Start there together, a few chapters a week, and you may both find yourselves converted by the final chapter.

A Murakami reading path

• Norwegian Wood: a realistic, heartbreaking love story of grief and first love among Tokyo students. The gentlest and by far the best place to begin, with none of the surreal elements that sometimes overwhelm newcomers.
• Kafka on the Shore: talking cats, a sky that rains fish, an ancient curse, and a fifteen-year-old runaway. His most beloved surreal novel, and a dazzling, dreamlike introduction to his stranger and wilder side.
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: a missing cat leads an unemployed man down a dry well and deep into buried wartime memory. Many devoted fans consider it his richest, darkest, and most rewarding masterpiece.
• Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: two dreamlike stories, one hard-boiled and one hushed and strange, braided together toward a quietly shattering convergence. Endlessly, playfully inventive.
• 1Q84: a sprawling, immersive epic of parallel worlds, a mysterious cult, and two lovers searching for each other across a subtly altered Tokyo. Wonderful, but genuinely best saved until you are already a convert.
• Sputnik Sweetheart: a short, wistful, aching novel about longing, writing, and sudden disappearance. A lovely and manageable second or third read once his voice has properly taken hold of you.
• The Elephant Vanishes: a collection of short stories that offers Murakami in bite-size portions, perfect for sampling his peculiar style without committing to six hundred pages up front.
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: his clear-eyed memoir on the strange parallel disciplines of writing and long-distance running, for when you discover you want the man himself, not only his dreams.

Learn to love the loose ends

Here is the single thing new readers most need to hear before they begin, because it heads off almost all the usual frustration: Murakami very rarely ties everything up, and he never once intended to. Wells, cats, disappearing women, and a second moon hanging low in the sky appear, shimmer with obvious hidden meaning, and are then simply never fully explained. If you read him the way you would read a detective novel, hunting impatiently for the solution and the tidy final reveal, you will end up feeling annoyed and quietly cheated. Read him instead for mood, for the hypnotic calm of his plain, precise sentences, for the uncanny way he makes deep loneliness feel almost beautiful and almost bearable. His books are atmospheres to move slowly through and inhabit for a while, not puzzles waiting to be solved and set aside. Readers who make peace with this early on tend to reread him happily for years; readers who cannot usually give up somewhere in the middle of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, still waiting for an explanation that was never once coming. Decide which kind of reader you want to be before you begin, and most of the frustration simply evaporates.

The recurring Murakami weather

Once you have read two or three of his novels, you will start to recognize his unmistakable signature world, the recurring weather of his imagination. There will be jazz and classical records turning on the stereo, meals cooked slowly and described with loving, almost meditative care, cats, deep wells and darker tunnels, women who vanish without trace, and quiet, passive men who feel themselves gently coming adrift from their own lives. Some critics like to tease him for endlessly reusing the same handful of motifs, as though it were a failure of invention. For his devoted readers, though, the repetition is precisely the point and the deep pleasure, like slipping back into a recurring dream or a piece of music you love. Part of the comfort of a new Murakami is simply stepping back into weather you already know by heart.

“Murakami does not write stories you finish. He writes atmospheres you visit, and keep quietly returning to.”

Then go deep

Once Norwegian Wood has thoroughly won you over and taught you his voice, move on to Kafka on the Shore for the full surreal experience, with its talking cats and its two destinies drawing slowly together. From there, graduate to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which many longtime readers consider his true masterpiece, dense with history, dream, and slow-burning dread. Save the enormous three-volume 1Q84 for the point when you are a thoroughly converted believer and genuinely want to disappear inside a single book for the better part of a month. By then, something will have quietly shifted in you as a reader; you will no longer want tidy explanations at all. You will simply want more of the dream, and Murakami, generously, has a great deal of it left to give you.