Jay Rubin

An ode to George Orwell's "1984" told in alternating male and female voices relates the stories of Aomame, an assassin for a secret organization who discovers that she has been transported to an alternate reality, and Tengo, a mathematics lecturer and novice writer.

Two sisters--Eri, a fashion model sleeping her way to oblivion, and Mari, a young student--form the center of a novel that documents a series of encounters--with a jazz trombonist, the manager of a "love hotel" and her maid staff, and a Chinese prostitute brutalized by a businessman client--in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn.

"Following the best-selling triumph of Kafka on the Shore-"daringly original," wrote Steven Moore in The Washington Post Book World, "and compulsively readable"--Comes a collection that generously expresses Murakami's mastery. 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"--Page 2 of cover.

An intimate conversation about music and writing illuminates the perspectives and shared interests of the internationally acclaimed author of "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage" and his close friend, the former conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Internationally acclaimed, best-selling author Haruki Murakami sits down with his friend Seiji Ozawa, the former conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, for a series of conversations...