"Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how she would get on in the real world, so when she takes on a job in a convenience store while at university, they are delighted for her. For her part, in the convenience store she finds a predictable world mandated by the store manual, which dictates how the workers should act and what they should say, and she copies her coworkers' style of dress and speech...

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...

In The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, a self-absorbed narrator on his deathbed drifts off to the comforting strains of a cantata as he recalls a blistering childhood of militarism, sacrifice, humiliation, and revenge-a tale that is questioned by everyone who knew him. In Prize Stock, winner of the Akutagawa Prize, a black American flier is downed in a Japanese village during World War II, where the local children see him as some rare find-exotic...

Three women expatriates in Tokyo, looking for happiness, love, fulfillment, and a new identity as their lives intertwine with those of other foreigners and the Japanese among whom--and sometimes with whom--they live.

"The Maids is a jewel: an astonishing complement to The Makioka Sisters, set in the same house, in the same turbulent decades, but among the servants as much as the masters. The Maids concerns all the young women who work -- before, during, and after WWII -- in the pampered, elegant household of the famous author Chikura Raikichi, his wife Sanko, and her younger sister. Though quite well-to-do, Raikichi has a small house: the family and the maids...