Haruki Murakami Books, Where to Start: 13 Picks Behind Two Doors

A bored copywriter in Tokyo prints a photograph of a meadow in a company newsletter. A man in a black suit arrives, working for somebody very powerful, and sets a deadline: find the sheep in that photograph, the one with a star-shaped mark on its back, or lose everything you have. So the narrator and his girlfriend, who has the most beautiful ears in Japan, go north to Hokkaido to look for a sheep. It is a hardboiled detective novel where the case is absurd and the sadness under it is not.

Toru Watanabe hears a Beatles song on a plane and falls back into his twenties. His closest friend killed himself at seventeen, and afterwards Toru and the dead boy's girlfriend Naoko circle each other through a Tokyo of student protests and cheap rented rooms. Naoko goes away to a retreat in the hills to get better. Meanwhile Midori, loud and alive and thoroughly unimpressed by his self-pity, walks into his life at university. Nothing supernatural happens anywhere in this book. It is a straight, sad, very physical novel about being twenty while people you love slip out of reach.

Odd chapters follow a man who encrypts data inside his own subconscious for a living, takes a job from a scientist living under Tokyo, and finds that his head has become the site of a much larger fight. Even chapters sit in a walled town where new arrivals give up their shadow at the gate, golden beasts wander the streets, and the narrator's work is to read dreams out of old skulls in the library. You know the halves will meet. Working out how they meet is the pleasure, and the last fifty pages are the finest ending he has written.

Toru Okada is unemployed and cooking spaghetti in a quiet suburb when the cat disappears. Then his wife does. Looking for both, he meets a teenage neighbour who treats death as a hobby, two sisters with unexplained gifts, and a veteran who tells him what he saw in Manchuria in 1939. The war chapters are the heart of it and they are as hard and clear as anything he has written. The rest circles a dry well in an empty garden, where sitting in the dark turns out to be a way of getting somewhere.

Hajime is an only child in a country full of siblings, which he has decided shaped him. He grows up, marries well, runs two jazz bars in Tokyo, has two daughters and no complaint he can say out loud. Then Shimamoto, the girl he used to listen to records with when they were twelve, walks into his bar in the rain and will not say where she has been for twenty-five years. The book is short, controlled and much crueller than its surface, and it is mostly about what a comfortable man will risk for an old feeling.

Kafka Tamura leaves home at fifteen to get away from a prophecy his father laid on him, and ends up living in a small private library in Takamatsu. In alternating chapters, Nakata, an old man who lost his memory and his literacy in a wartime incident and can hold conversations with cats, sets off across Japan without knowing why. Fish fall from the sky. A character shaped like a whisky mascot turns up and starts giving orders. The two stories never quite touch, and most of the questions the book raises are handed to you to carry out of it.

Tsukuru Tazaki had four close friends in Nagoya, all of whom carried a colour in their surnames while he carried none. In his second year at university they told him never to contact any of them again and refused to say why. He barely survived that year. He is thirty-six now, builds railway stations for a living, and a woman he is seeing tells him plainly that he cannot love anybody properly until he goes and asks each of them what happened. So he does, one at a time, across Japan and then in Finland.

Sumire wants to be a novelist and has never wanted a person, until she falls hard for Miu, a married woman seventeen years older who hires her as an assistant. K, the schoolteacher quietly in love with Sumire, tells the story from outside it and gets a phone call from Greece: Sumire has disappeared from a small island, leaving her clothes folded. Something that happened to Miu years earlier on a Ferris wheel in Switzerland explains part of it. The rest is left standing open, and the whole thing is short enough for one sitting.

Mari sits in a Denny's at midnight with a book, avoiding home. Her sister Eri has been asleep for two months, and something is watching her through a television set that is not plugged in. In between there is a trombone player, a former wrestler who now manages a love hotel, and a Chinese sex worker who has been beaten by a client. The narration is deliberately odd, a plural we that hovers overhead and admits it can only look. The book covers about seven hours and reads like a film shot in one long take.

Our narrator writes filler for magazines and calls it shovelling cultural snow, which remains the best description of content work anybody has managed. He goes back to Sapporo looking for a woman he lost, finds the shabby Dolphin Hotel replaced by a glass tower, and discovers that one floor of it still belongs to the old building and to the Sheep Man, who tells him to keep dancing. A teenager with a difficult mother, a film-star schoolfriend and a police investigation follow. Underneath it is late-eighties Japan, money, and what money hollows out.

An ageing stage actor hires a young woman as his driver and slowly tells her about his dead wife and the man she slept with. A plastic surgeon with a carefully arranged bachelor life comes apart in a way he cannot explain to himself. A bartender listens to a friend confess about a woman they both knew. Seven stories, sharing a theme rather than a world, all circling men who have been left. The first of them was later filmed as Drive My Car. Two translators split the collection and you can feel the handover if you look for it.

Aomame is a fitness instructor with a second job nobody should have. Tengo teaches maths and is quietly rewriting a strange manuscript by a seventeen-year-old girl for a publisher's scam. Their chapters alternate, they have not spoken since they were ten, and the world they are both standing in has acquired a second moon that only some people can see. Behind all of it sit a religious cult, a set of beings called the Little People, and a love story stretched over roughly a thousand pages that takes its own sweet time getting anywhere.

Murakami ran a jazz bar in Tokyo, sold it in his early thirties to write full time, took up running at about the same point, and has done both ever since. This is a short, plain book about that: marathon training, an ultramarathon that nearly finished him, and what he thinks about while running, which is largely nothing. Underneath sits the clearest description of professional discipline I have read from any writer. He is honest about ageing, about his times getting slower, and about talent being worth very little without the boring part.