Haruki Murakami is the New York Times Book Review’s featured author, on the occasion of the arrival of Sputnik Sweetheart. Although the reviewer finds it “less ambitious than The Wind-Up Bird

Chronicle (which folds a devastating account of Japan’s occupation of

Manchuria into its paranormal plot), (it) offers an elegant distillation of

Murakami’s cool surrealism.” Links to reviews of his other books; an interview in which he discusses what Japan is reading with Jay McInerney; and first chapters of Sputnik Sweetheart and his new nonfiction piece on the Aum Shinrikyo nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway, Underground, about which I’ve previously written. While we’re on the topic, Francie Lin wonders exactly what’s so compelling about him, in Threepenny Review: “Haruki Murakami writes the most bizarre novels—dark, cool, eminently

rational in tone, they are nevertheless populated with psychics and

monsters, and frequently cut with intermittent dreams, or dreamlike

facts, or memories of dreams that only achieve a measure of reality by

forming the basis of his characters’ uneasy lives. His stories have plots

that in summary make no sense, and yet while reading, you are

propelled along by a suspense so great that even the most fantastic

elements of Murakami’s underworlds appear to be merely the logical

pieces of a broader, more coherent intent. The sensation is not entirely

pleasant; a friend of mine once complained that Murakami novels were

laced with heroin, and this seems remarkably apt, for the books have a

kind of drugged, heady fascination about them that quickly becomes

addictive.”