Collection of twenty-four stories that generously expresses Murakami’s mastery of the form. From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit his ability to transform the full range of human experience in ways that are instructive, surprising, and relentlessly entertaining.

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire – to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists.

The Elephant Vanishes is a collection of 17 short stories by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. The stories were written between 1980 and 1991. The stories mesh normality with surrealism, and focus on painful issues involving loss, destruction, confusion and loneliness.

South of the Border, West of the Sun portrays the story of Hajime, a youth born in post-war Japan to parents of average middle-class standing, his interactions and relationships with people through life and his struggles, in later years, to shake off a listless existence.