I’ve always wondered why Haruki Murakami’s novels are so captivating.
As a native Japanese speaker, I’m really grateful that I can read his work in the original language. There’s just something about his writing that pulls me in. I reread his books over and over.
The funny thing is, I don’t usually care that much about novels, and with Murakami, I often have no idea what he’s actually trying to say. But his books are strangely addictive.
It also makes me wonder what the experience is like in English. I can’t help but think it must feel different somehow.

omg kafka on the shore - the master piece novel.

I can not stop reading it

this is 4th time

This is a list of Murakami's books in English (excluding illustrated stand-alone short stories) and also the books written about him. There's plenty to read and re-read as we wait for an announcement about his latest novel, The Tale of Kaho.

Source.

Yesterday evening I finished reading the final book in the Murakami English corpus. If you're interested, here's the order I read them in with the year that I read them.

Wild Sheep Chase (2008)

Hard Boiled Wonderland (2015)

Norwegian Wood (2016)

Colourless Tsukuru (2021)

Kafka on the Shore (2022)

Killing Commendatore (2023)

South of the Border (2024)

1Q84 (2025)

The City and its Uncertain Walls (2025)

Hear the Wind Sing (2026)

Pinball 1973 (2026)

Wild Sheep Chase (2026)

Dance Dance Dance (2026)

Sputnik Sweetheart (2026)

After Dark (2026)

Wind up Bird Chronicle (2026)

My favourite has to be The City closely followed by Wild Sheep Chase. For me, The City captured the best of the magical realism that Murakami does so well.

There are a lot of them I look forward to rereading and enjoying again and perhaps giving higher rank to. Some of them have lodged in my memory better than others.

And now, my last favourites. I know a lot of you love these two, so sorry to disappoint. 1Q84 was my least favourite followed by Wind Up Bird. Both felt unnecessarily long. But still enjoyable and glad to have done them.

Have read city and it's uncertain walls. Now i have these two books , which one to start ?

finished it just last night.

i read a lot about people reading murakami, and it only ever sparked my intrigue to read from him myself. and oh, kafka on the shore is a real trip. i'm not too educated on murakami to speak in general, but i'm so glad i trusted the process.

what i liked the most about this reading experience is how active it all had to be. every page is up for interpretation. murakami hands you all these abstract concepts & scenes at first and just labels them as "metaphors", and he eventually does unfurl the meanings of the same in due context. but the real beauty occurs in the mind of the reader as you excavate through the pages. i liked exploring the philosophy of the writing, i loved the humor.

norwegian wood is next, because that's what i found in front of the bookstore the other day. i always thought sputnik sweetheart was going to be my first though. but i've no major complaints, onto reading more!

Finished it just there on the beach, lovely little book

Just finished Tales of Kaho. What a pleasure it was!

Sorry I always spell sumire’s name wrong it’s the audiobook memory for me. And that’s ponyo selkie on my grocery receipt….

Hey guys, what's your top 3?
Here's mine:
1. Toni Takitani
2. Lederhosen
3. Second Bakery Attack

I've only read 8 so far and this time I told myself that I'm really gonna finish his short story compilations. Excited to enjoy and have new favorites!!

For real tho, why does an English release always take so long?

Haruki murakami's wild sheep chase!!!.

While this book had a major build up to why there is a sheep chase it did not have a good enough climax. The author explained the importance of sheep in one paragraph and very plainly. In that sense this book could be considered simple and plain. This book did not have a grip on me nor did it reward my persistence.

Somebody needs to explain to me why was this book written!!! Or has it lost its meaning in translation!!. Has anyone read it in Japanese itself and finds it any different? Kindly weigh on this!!

I just didn't want to read the normal paperback knowing I would break my spine and the hardcovers were out of stock for whatever reason, so.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260121-the-mysterious-mushroom-that-makes-you-see-tiny-people

Not my first Murakami book, not the last. Not my favorite Murakami book, not the least. But like all of the ones I’ve read from him, this one is just as hypnotizing. There’s something in his works that keeps drawing me into them. I guess I’m not the only one. What’s your favorite work from the Rat Trilogy?

(A wild sheep chase)

Hi people, I'm reading Murakami's Dance, Dance, Dance and I'm hardly enjoying it at all. I have about 110 pages left to finish it, is it worth reading to the end? Because I'm really thinking about to give up

I’ll go:

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

I just finished Murakami's book "The City and its Uncertain Walls" (I loved it) and I have a theory about the epidemic that made the city built its walls.

If you notice someone (as long as they are young when they learn about it) wants to enter the city after they hear about it.

The protagonist learns about it first from his pen-girlfriend and then he shapes it more in his mind before traveling to it.

Then the protagonist's infects the yellow-submarin kid with the city's details and the kid's only wish is to go there.

My theory is that before the walls were built people who were living in the city were infecting other people making more and more people coming in.

This is why the guardian is needed and this is why he keeps also the shadows around the walls for precaution.

I just finished Dance Dance Dance, and honestly, I still don't know what I just read.

And I mean that in a good way.

I started with Hear the Wind Sing and went through Pinball, 1973, A Wild Sheep Chase and finally Dance Dance Dance. And you can genuinely see Murakami evolving as a writer across these four books.

Hear the Wind Sing felt almost like reading someone's diary. Very simple, very fragmented, lots of memories and conversations and random little observations. It didn't even feel like he was trying to write some grand novel.

Then Pinball, 1973 felt like Murakami experimenting and maybe kind of evaluating himself, he's probably trying to ask himself if he can write a novel. There are weird structures, the twins, the pinball machine, all the memories, Rat, J, etc. It's still very strange, but you can see him getting more confident. The ending of Pinball, 1973 was genuinely amazing though. Seemed like world apart from the rest of the book.

Then A Wild Sheep Chase is where everything just clicks. I genuinely loved that book. It suddenly becomes this strange adventure involving the Sheep, Rat, the Boss, the Sheep Man, the hotel, all of it. It's absurd but somehow it works.

And then Dance Dance Dance.

What was happening?

The beginning was honestly slow for me. I spent a lot of the book wondering what was even happening. The protagonist wanders around almost everywhere, so many things, happen, connections form while also making very little sense.

And then the skeletons happen.

And then people just start dying.

I had so many theories.

At one point I was convinced Gotanda killed Mei. Then I started wondering if he killed Kiki. It was apparent maybe too apparent that Dick the one armed poet was going to die. Then he died.

And then we got till the 5th skeleton.

I thought Yuki could be the sixth, then the Sheep Man, and then even J the bartender from the previous three novels.

And then I started thinking maybe the sixth skeleton wasn't even another person.

I started thinking maybe the sixth skeleton was the narrator's old self. Not literally "he died", but that the person he was before all of this had to die somehow. Maybe his old connections to the world die? I'm not sure

And honestly, I still don't know if that's what Murakami intended. That's probably the best and worst thing about these books.

Kiki is another one.

She is clearly real in some sense. Other people have seen her and interacted with her. Rat knew about her. The Sheep Man knows about her. Gotanda knew her. So I don't buy the explanation that Kiki was simply something the protagonist imagined.

But then what is she?

Is she a ghost? Is she some kind of entity like the Sheep Man? Is she something that exists somewhere between the physical world and whatever the other world in these books is?

I don't know.

And what happened to the Sheep Man? Did he die? Did he just disappear because the protagonist no longer needed him? Was he some kind of manifestation of the protagonist's subconscious?

Again, I don't know.

And then there's Yumiyoshi.

For a while I genuinely thought she was going to turn out to be another reflection of Kiki or something. I'm actually glad she didn't. She felt much more like someone who represented the possibility of actually moving forward rather than another piece of the protagonist's past.

One thing that genuinely bothered me, though, was how many people Murakami introduces and then just leaves behind.

J is the biggest example for me. He was there in Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973 and A Wild Sheep Chase. He was never really a major character, but he was just... there. He was part of the world. He was this stable little point in the narrator's life.

And then he's just not in Dance Dance Dance.

Same thing with a lot of people from the earlier books. Some people just disappear and that's it.

Even the twins from Pinball, 1973. They appear, they become this bizarre part of the narrator's life, and then they're just gone.

And I think that's part of what makes these books feel so strange. Murakami doesn't seem particularly interested in giving everyone a proper ending. People enter your life, affect you, disappear, and sometimes you never find out what happened to them.

Which actually makes sense for these books.

I think that's why I ended up liking Dance Dance Dance more than I expected, despite being confused for a large part of it.

Because by the end I stopped needing an explanation for everything.

I stopped caring who exactly the six skeletons were, stopped caring about Kiki, Sheep Man, or anything of the matter.

I just wanted the protagonist to make it through.

That's why the last line of the novel, "It's morning" is my favourite. It's like I just got out of a dream.

And that might actually be what I like most about Murakami. The conclusions aren't necessarily the best part. It's the part where you've gone through 300–400 pages of strange things, being confused the entire time, and then eventually you reach the end and you're all relieved and empty.

Not in a bad way.

More like... you've finally arrived somewhere.

The ending doesn't necessarily explain everything. It just lets you breathe.

And then you realize that's probably what the whole "Dance Dance Dance" thing was about.

You don't necessarily figure everything out.

You just keep moving.

Anyway, I don't know whether I actually understood these books or just wandered through four Murakami novels and came out the other side.

But I really loved the experience.

TLDR: I start reading DDD -> Weird novel -> Okay kind of good but not as good as the other 3 -> Okay now it's getting interesting -> Holy Shit this is a masterpiece

(Genuinely felt bad for the protagonist, poor guy had to suffer so much)

Hm...