The last surviving victim of an experiment that implanted the subjects' heads with electrodes that decipher coded messages is the unnamed narrator. Half the chapters are set in Tokyo, where the narrator negotiates underground worlds populated by INKlings, dodges opponents of both sides of a raging high-tech infowar, and engages in an affair with a beautiful librarian with a gargantuan appetite. In alternating chapters he tries to reunite with his...

When his novel A Wild Sheep Chase was published in 1989, Haruki Murakami was hailed in The New York Times as "a mythmaker for the millennium, a wiseacre wise man." With Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World--his second novel to appear in English-- his reputation as one of Japan's boldest writers at work today was firmly secured. Now, with The Elephant Vanishes, we have his first collection of short stories. Murakami renders a world in which...

A giant talking frog and an elusive cat help a listless bank employee, his traumatized wife, and a lonely accountant seek meaning in their lives and possibly save Tokyo from catastrophe in this animated feature based on stories by acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami. The feature debut of composer Pierre Foldes, the film won the Jury Special Mention at the renowned Annecy Animation Film Festival and the Grand Prize at the Anima Festival in Brussels....

An ode to Orwell's "1984" told in alternating male and female voices relates the stories of Aomame, an assassin for a secret organization who finds she is in an alternate reality, and Tengo, a mathematics lecturer and novice writer.