Where to Start with Haruki Murakami: A Reading Order from a Tokyo Bookseller

Tsukuru Tazaki, a 36-year-old engineer who designs train stations, was abruptly cut off by his four closest friends when he was in college — and never learned why. Sixteen years later, he finally sets out to find each of them, a journey that takes him from Nagoya all the way to Finland.

My notesAt the very end he goes to Finland for just a little while, and I remember protesting out loud: “That’s hardly a pilgrimage!” But the book made me think a lot about people: how hard it is to keep a friendship going, and how ties can simply fade without anything happening and without it being your fault. And after all that, the trip to Finland held everything that’s good about travel. I love that kind of catharsis. For Murakami, the story has an unusually clear beginning, middle and end, so I think it’s easy to read. Each meeting with an old friend also reads almost like its own short story, which is part of the fun. This is the one I’d recommend to beginners.

Just before midnight, a young woman named Mari sits reading alone in a Denny’s in Tokyo. Over a single night, until dawn, she meets a trombonist, the manager of a love hotel, and the edges of a crime, while her sister sleeps a strange, deep sleep across the city.

My notes“Walk slowly; drink lots of water” — it’s the motto of Takahashi, the young trombonist. I loved that line so much that in my twenties I made it the theme of my life. The contrast between the fluorescent light of a Denny’s at night and Murakami’s dreamlike prose is almost too beautiful. Family restaurants — famiresu — are a uniquely Japanese culture, so if you come to Japan, please go to one, Denny’s or otherwise. It’s also one of his shortest novels, so it’s a good test of whether his style is for you.

Murakami’s first two short novels, published together in English for the first time in 2015. A young man home for the summer drinks beer with his friend “the Rat” at J’s Bar, and later becomes obsessed with finding a particular pinball machine.

Why read itBefore he became a novelist, Murakami ran a jazz bar in Tokyo with his wife. The story goes that he was watching a baseball game at Jingu Stadium when the idea of writing a novel suddenly came to him — and this is the book that came out of it. He was about 30. Chivas Regal, “Moonlight Serenade,” Brooks Brothers: his world is full of the names of drinks, music and clothes, and they all feel more alluring than they do in real life. Reading the debut is like listening to a radio that keeps cutting in and out, or flipping through a foreign magazine. Those of us who can read him in the original Japanese may be luckier than we realize.

Two stories alternate chapter by chapter: in one, a data processor in a near-future Tokyo is caught up in a scientist’s secret experiment; in the other, a man arrives at a walled town where people have given up their shadows. Slowly, you realize the two are connected.

My notesI read it in a rush, completely absorbed (it’s two volumes in Japanese). I kept wondering what the girl in the pink suit really looked like — how, with words alone, he could make me picture someone who seemed so happy, as if she had everything. For me, more than the story itself, she is what made this book unforgettable.

Tokyo, 1984. A fitness instructor with a secret second job and a math teacher who ghostwrites a strange novel slip into a world that is almost, but not quite, the same as ours — a world with two moons, and a religious cult at its center.

My notesIt came out while I was studying in London, so whenever I think of this book, London comes back to me with it. Plenty of sex, a cult, religion — it made no sense, and I still couldn’t stop reading. At twenty, it taught me that maybe this is what literature is: not understanding, and measuring yourself by whatever you managed to grasp. In English, all three books come in one very thick volume, so save it for when you’re already hooked.

When a Beatles song plays as his plane lands in Hamburg, 37-year-old Toru Watanabe is carried back to his student days in late-1960s Tokyo — and to two very different young women, the fragile Naoko and the lively, outspoken Midori.

Why read itIt was Murakami’s breakthrough bestseller in Japan, and it’s still the book many Japanese readers start with. If the surreal side of Murakami isn’t for you, this is the one to try.