Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, an ice man, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things we wish for. Whether during a chance reunion in Italy, a romantic exile in Greece, a holiday in Hawaii or in the grip of everyday life, Murakami's characters confront loss, or sexuality, or the glow of a firefly, or the impossible distance between those who ought to be closest of all.

More insights into life, death, memories, love and kangaroos that one has a right to expect in any single volume - Daily Express

An intimate pleasure - The Times

Literature's answer to David Lynch - Times Literary Supplement

These stories are rich in Murakami magic... a collection that all readers will enjoy - Independent

Sharp but humane observation...as unforgettable as it is untypical - New Statesman

Although Murakami's style and deadpan humour are wonderfully distinctive, his emotional territory is more familiar - remorse, unresolved confusion, sudden epiphanies - though heightened by the surreal... For all its peculiarity, Planet Murakami offers a recognisable landscape of our fears - Observer

Disarming, amusing and reveals his lightness of touch - Scotland on Sunday

A beguiling collection that shows off Murakami's bold inventiveness and deep compassion - Metro

Murakami is excellent at creating an intense mood in a swift few lines... always provocative and never less than engaging - Daily Telegraph

By turns disturbing and delightful, funny strange and funny ha-ha...Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a handsome volume of prose, every bit as substantial as a novel...They show him at his very best; not as a cult novelist but as a really first-rate writer of short fiction - Guardian

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was 29 and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers’ award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami’s unique and addictive fictional universe. Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring Murakami’s place as one of the world’s most acclaimed and well-loved writers.