Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into thirty-four languages, and the most recent of his many honors is the Yomiuri Literary Prize, whose previous recipients include Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe, and Kobo Abe.

Haruki Murakami's After the Quake, Dance Dance Dance, The Ellephant Vanishes, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Norwegian Wood, South of the Border, West of the Sun, Sputnik Sweetheart, Underground, A Wild Sheep Chase, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle are available in Vintage paperback, as is Vintage Murakami, a selection of his finest work.

Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel - on the jacket of Kafka on the Shore

"Kafka on the Shore" is a real page-turner,
as well as an insistently metaphysical mind-bender."
- John Updike, The New Yorker  

"Mesmerizing...Murakami's most ambitious attempt yet to stuff all of modern Japan into a single fictional edifice."

- Washington Post Book World